Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Warringah for the issues that have been raised. Some of them go to issues that were raised in other amendments, so I won't go into that in a lot of detail now, but I've given the reasons in terms of the definition of a 'small business'. The government is not seeking to have amendments on that during this debate today.

There are three issues that were raised by the member for Warringah and I want to go through them and explain why the government will oppose the amendment. First of all, the issue about someone being joined to an existing agreement simply by virtue of a decision of a union is not how it operates. It could only happen with there then being a vote of the workforce. Once again, going to that situation I was describing before, things have to be initiated either by a majority of the workforce or by the employer. Either can make the decision on opting in to the processes here.

In terms of productivity, I have no in-principle objection to what the member has said, but I would say that productivity already has to be considered. Productivity is specifically in the objects of the act. Productivity is also then brought in again when we deal with the objects of the bargaining section of the act. Therefore, in applying the public interest test and in making any decisions here, the Fair Work Commission is expected to be taking account of productivity. There's a reason why we have tried to keep some of these tests general and to fall back on the objects of the different parts of the act, rather than have a new list of extra conditions. The reason is that, 10 years ago or a bit more than that, this House in good faith established a low-paid bargaining stream with a whole lot of extra conditions that came out of this sort of debate. The result, when it came to practical application, was that we ended up with a stream which everybody had accepted should exist and everyone accepted should be a pathway for multi-employer bargaining for people on low wages, but which, effectively, no-one was able to access, to the point where people stopped applying.

So the view on the productivity proposal that's there is not that it shouldn't be taken into account but that the government's view is that it is already taken into account and we don't want to make the same mistakes that were made with the low-paid stream and end up putting so many conditions in place that we end up with a stream that of itself becomes overly complex and unusable. If, out of this, we end up establishing something that the very people we have been talking about are unable to access, then the problem that we're seeking to address won't have been addressed.

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