James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

When we get elected to this chamber, yes, different people support us here and different interests get behind different candidates. But when we are sworn in as members of parliament it is our responsibility to put the people of this nation first, not to make decisions that are related to payback and rewarding those who helped you get elected. And I take my hat off to the union movement and congratulate them, because in exchange for the tens of millions of dollars they donated to the Labor Party at the recent election they have achieved a spectacular return on that investment.

This bill before us, the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill 2022, is exactly what the union movement would want. It is not about workers, it is not about employers; it is about rewarding the union movement for their financial support of the Labor Party. In some ways we should not be surprised that one of the first things they would do upon being elected would be to repay the union movement for the financial support given to the Labor Party at the recent election and many elections before.

I also express my deep regrets to Paul Keating. Paul Keating thought he'd changed the Labor Party and he thought the Labor Party had learned from him and his leadership on these issues. This shows, to Paul Keating and others who thought the Labor Party had learned how a modern industrial relations system needed to work, that that is not in fact the case. Poor Paul Keating, who did so much hard work to bring the Labor Party's attitudes on industrial relations into a modern era, through these reforms is seeing that hard work evaporate before his eyes. We're seeing this Labor government go back to the attitudes of the 1970s.

We've heard members of the government attacking the industrial relations system in this country, and you would think it was a system created by the Liberal Party. The government are attacking the Fair Work Commission and the Fair Work Act legislated by the Rudd-Gillard government. But it's their system. It's the Labor Party's system that they legislated and created that they're now attacking and blaming for the apparent poor outcomes when it comes to wages and other things for workers. But this is a Labor Party regime, put in place by the Rudd-Gillard government, that they're now suggesting, through crocodile tears, is leading to all these terrible for workers.

Well, they could therefore start by apologising for the framework that they themselves have legislated and that they're now attacking and tearing apart and stop trying to suggest that it's in any way the fault of the previous Liberal government. We basically left that regime untouched. We attempted during COVID to make sensible changes to the Fair Work Act, and the Labor Party absolutely refused to have any discussion about sensible industrial relations reform whatsoever. So, the system we have is absolutely one the Labor Party created, and for them to now suggest that it's a broken Liberal Party system is rank hypocrisy and is absolutely laughable. Of course, union membership in this country has collapsed in the past two decades. I think the most recent data from the ABS showed that membership was down around 14 per cent.

You would think that if the logic of those opposite held true, that workers in this country were so poorly treated and hard done by, then union membership would go up. Employees who, according to the arguments of those opposite, thought they were being dealt such a poor hand, would naturally join unions, not leave unions. If they were unhappy with their conditions, their wages, their representation and their employers, they would be joining unions, not leaving unions. It's completely ludicrous—absolutely ludicrous—to suggest that the situation in our nation right now is one of workers believing that they are fundamentally hard done by, and that the system that operates now is one in which they can't achieve good outcomes between them and their employers.

This is ultimately what this bill is about: turning Australians against each other. In an atmosphere of harmony that we have, compared to decades gone by, what this government wants to do is turn Australian against Australian. It wants to say to employees: 'Your enemy is your employer. They are out to screw you over. They hate you, they don't want to look after you. They don't value you. The only way for you to improve your circumstances is to go to war with your employer.' I have not ever dealt with an employer or met an employer that doesn't value their employees as the greatest asset in their business. To suggest that we need to create a regime in our industrial relations systems that turns harmony into warfare, that says, 'We want employees to be turned against their employers,' is absolutely disgraceful.

We need to fight against this and stand up against it, particularly the suggestion that the last few decades of relative harmony that we have had in the workplaces and on the shop floors of the businesses of this country is something that we need to fight to cling onto. I acknowledge Paul Keating and his government, and the reforms with Bill Kelty, a great union leader who understood the value of productivity being central to industrial relations reform. He understood that enterprise bargaining at the business level was a way of letting employees and employers come together, talk about the specifics of the business and come up with changes and improvements to the award structure that were better for employees and employers. Compared to the 1970s in particular, we have had relative harmony in the way in which employees and employers negotiate their pay and conditions in this country.

I'm not going to say that the Fair Work Act brought on by the Gillard-Rudd government is anything fantastic, because it took us pre-Keating 1991, 1992, and 1993—pre-Keating and Kelty. That, through Paul Keating's own words, is exactly why we have had such a reduction in enterprise bargaining agreements in our economy—it's because of the stringency that was put in place, the theoretical 'person worse off under the boot' test that meant so many agreements were not worth negotiating. So we could go back to that Keating-era enterprise bargaining regime, and the coalition would support that, but that's not what the government is proposing whatsoever. The government is repaying their union movement for millions of dollars of donations to their political campaign. They are trying to help the union movement rehabilitate their relevance. Employees of this nation have turned their backs on the union movement, evidenced through the collapse in membership, because they don't need them anymore—they're very happy with the harmonious workplace environment and negotiating environment that they have under the systems that we've had for the past few decades.

This is not about workers. This is not about gender pay equity or anything like that. This is about giving back relevance to the union movement and helping the union movement rehabilitate their membership by triggering a new war in workplaces between employees and employers—which neither want. The only people that want that are the union movement, and we saw in the seventies what the economic outcomes are of that. And they are not good for employees. They are not good for employers. They are not good for our economy. But they are good for the union bosses. And we in this chamber need to do a lot better than pass laws that are not about the people of this country but are about a vested interest like them, and that is why I implore the House to defeat this bill.

Debate interrupted.

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