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

I thank the member for Mackellar both for the contribution in the debate and the conversations that have happened back and forth between my office and her own in the lead-up to this debate.

I want to deal in some detail with one of the issues that has been raised. The government won't be supporting the amendment. I've referred a few times now to the 'small business' definition issue and how we're wanting to handle that. And we've had many opportunities for debate where I think I've probably made clear the government's views on the ABCC, but am very mindful of what the member for Mackellar said there about the statistics in terms of the impact on her electorate of the construction industry. I can completely respect why the issue is being raised through this amendment.

I want to deal in some detail with an issue that has come up a lot in the media, but I think this is the first time it's been raised in the House. The issue is whether or not we ought to have detailed criteria for the common interest test. In particular, the issue is often raised—and it's part of the amendment—as to whether we should include a concept that businesses must be operating collaboratively, not competitively, because it's here that there is a policy decision that the government is taking quite deliberately and I want to be able to explain it. There are circumstances where businesses are in competition where we do want multi-employer bargaining to apply, and that is different to how the single interest stream or common interest stream runs at the moment.

I'll give a simple example. When the race to the bottom on wages is, effectively, the nature of the competition, that's not a form of competition that we want to encourage, even though those businesses might be operating competitively. The simplest example I can give would be the example of cleaning companies. It has been the case that a good enterprise agreement is negotiated with a good employer. They get their rates of pay for their workforce improved on the award, and they get some flexibility in return. Then they simply get undercut only on wages—not on quality of service or anything else. As a result, they lose their contract and we end up back where we started. The people who had better wages don't have a job, and the same work is being done with similar equipment in a similar way, and we failed to get wages off the floor of the award.

So in those circumstances, we do want it to be possible for good employers to make sure that, on everything else, competition still happens—in terms of the quality of the service, the quality of the equipment, and the ingenuity of the different businesses and of the different brands and the ways that businesses put themselves out to the public. But there are circumstances where the nature of the competition is a race to the bottom on wages, and that is one of the things we want to directly address.

This amendment would reflect language that's currently in the act, but we're quite deliberately wanting to change that. I thank the member for Mackellar not only for bringing the issue forward but also for giving me the opportunity to provide that further explanation to the House.

See this speech in context