Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a great honour to get up and speak to this legislation, but I just want to talk a bit about Labor's incredibly unfair legislative approach and the procedure that's happened here. This bill was introduced after 3 pm on Monday, and the debate on the second reading was less than 24 hours later. This bill is hundreds of pages in detail. If someone bothers to one day pen the biography of the minister for IR, it won't be as thick as the detail in this legislation, or as complex.

This is a place of debate, and democracy is best served when that debate is informed and reasoned. While the government maintains that the raft of changes follow months of consultation, there was no consultation with the coalition. The first speakers on this side have had less than 24 hours to prepare for this debate on a very complex piece of legislation. I'll note that the minister for IR, in his role as Leader of the House, is very quick to approach the dispatch box on matters of workplace safety. You don't need much of an imagination to understand that only having from 3 pm one afternoon until noon the next day to examine a 287-page bill and a 521-page explanatory memorandum would quickly erode any notion of a healthy workplace. I'd like to put on the record right now my appreciation for the incredible work of Senator Cash and her team in circumstances that they shouldn't have been put under.

Even with more time, the businesses in my electorate who employ people and create wealth have had no opportunity to consider the contents in the detail or the impacts on their businesses. That's what we should be doing.

We should be examining legislation, working through it, going out to the business community and their employees and saying, 'How do you think this will affect you?' That's how you get to good legislation. That's not the process that's happened here. It's very disappointing. We're once again being asked to debate and progress a bill that has had no exposure draft and no consultation and is so complex that it verges on being undemocratic. Perhaps the minister will be happy to have that in his eventual biography, but the businesses I represent, who face having these industrial relations laws foisted upon them without any real say, will not be pleased, and I'm not pleased.

I represent a constituency where entrepreneurship is the hallmark of what we do: we have manufacturing businesses; we grow fruit; we make milk; and we manufacture products that get exported around the world. We do that profitably. But can we do it profitably in future, with the actions of this government? I reckon there's a level of disrespect with the way these reforms have been dealt with. I'll share one comment from a longstanding business owner, a very fair minded business owner in my electorate. He watched the minister on 7.30 on the ABC TV, and I'm not going to use the piece of unparliamentary language that he used, but he said, 'This looks to me like a patronising person with not a scintilla of understanding of how private industry works.' There's a level of expectation that whoever are in government consult with business and try and understand what will make them more productive and what will lead them to being more profitable and therefore employing more people. That is not what's happening here.

There are a number of reasons this bill is a bad bill. It is impossibly complex and creates uncertainty. It adds additional costs for businesses, especially small businesses, right at the time when their other costs are going up. Therefore, that makes Australians pay more, in a cost-of-living crisis. This does nothing to increase productivity, and the decreases in productivity are the demon we need to slay. It does nothing to enhance competition. It risks jobs. It only rewards Labor's union paymasters, and it institutionalises conflict in workplaces. The government purports to have made concessions for business, but it hasn't. This weakens our economy, and we need a strong economy for everyone to thrive.

I'm concerned about the fact that this bill gives unions unprecedented rights of entry into businesses. That's a risk to many businesses in my electorate that are farm businesses, where the employers are in fact the people who live on the farm. They have the office in their home and therefore could be visited at any time, with no prior organisation, by unions. That's not a desirable situation for, for example, dairy farms. There are also biosecurity risks with unions turning up without any notice.

The other issues with this bill are about eroding the choice and flexibility of individuals who want to work in their own time and on their own terms. It's about putting significant constraints on businesses and employers wanting to expand, construct new projects and infrastructure, or simply manage their operations in a way that is flexible and works for their productivity. It demonises the wealth creators, and that's the last thing we should be doing in this economy. When I listened to the speech by the minister and listened to his comments, he seemed to justify these IR laws by creating demons, bad actors, who are exploiting workers, stealing their wages and undermining their status as employees. They exist, but this government continues to frame legislation to rein in the few that creates huge burden, complexity, cost and erosion of rights for the many, and the overwhelming number of businesses are doing the right thing.

My electorate, as I said before, is an entrepreneurial region. People have come there to get ahead. Businesses across my electorate are established for the purpose of profit. Employees are valued; they're not exploited. Labour is increasingly difficult to attract and keep, adding to the imperative that you have to look after those that you have, and that's what happens across my electorate. The same applies to casual workers, commonly employed in agriculture in my electorate, especially at peak periods of activity. There are times when apples are ripe and ready to be picked, and there are times when they're not—a bit of an agriculture lesson for some of those opposite!

At harvest time there is intense competition for labour and workers are valued. Harvest workers frequently return to work on the same farms year after year. They are clearly out of the loop on the loopholes this legislation seeks to close. I know of Pacific island workers returning not only to work but to sing, beautifully, at the funeral of a prominent orchardist out of respect for what that orchardist had done for them and what those workers and that business owner had created together.

What these businesses want is a fair system. The job creators of Australia are telling the minister it will be harder to keep people in jobs under these changes. The complexity and associated costs will be impossible for small businesses to deal with. The government has failed to demonstrate how these new laws will make it easier for businesses to employ people, increase productivity, create a highly skilled workforce or raise living standards, perhaps because it can't, perhaps because this bill is anathema to all of those things. This will only add to Australia's cost-of-living crisis. Millions of Australians are already suffering under the crippling cost-of-living crisis, which is of this government's own making, and the costs incurred by businesses will be passed on. Consumers will pay. The economy will reflect the pain being felt by working families. How does that help workers? How does that make them feel more secure?

We can reform the industrial relations system. Industrial relations reform is, without a doubt, one of the most important of all the economic reforms required to make Australia more productive and competitive, but productivity has fallen off a cliff under the Albanese government. The focus should be on lifting productivity, not suppressing it further. This morning's Murray-Darling Basin Plan bill is one of the most anti-productivity pieces of legislation I've ever seen brought into this place. It's going to make it incredibly difficult for people to grow fruit, milk, food—not only for domestic consumption but for sending overseas. As I said in this place not long ago, do we want our kids eating Chinese apples? We don't want them eating Chinese apples; we want them eating healthy, clean, Australian apples from the Murray-Darling Basin. That legislation, which takes water away from farmers, is appalling. Combine that with these IR changes and it's getting really hard to try and run a business in this country, and it shouldn't be. Enterprise bargaining should be the cornerstone of our workplace relations system if we are to grow our pay packets, improve job security, bolster the flexibility that employees demand and boost productivity. Australia needs a modern workplace relations system that delivers a safety net for workers, recognises the shared interests of managers and workers in an enterprise's success and gives all enterprises the agility they need to compete and succeed.

I went to the Minerals Council dinner the other night, and CEO Tania Constable said, 'These proposed IR laws are nothing short of an act of economic self-harm.' We've had economic self-harm this morning with the Murray-Darling Basin legislation, which is going to rip irrigation water away from people who are trying to grow healthy food for Australians, and now we've got an act of economic self-harm with these IR changes. Why are we doing this to ourselves? Why can't we focus on productivity? Why can't we have successful businesses and happy workers that are being paid well? That can't happen if it's too hard to do business in this country. I really believe that this is one of the more anti-business governments in the history of this nation. There have been some good Labor governments, in my view. The Hawke Labor government was an excellent government, because it understood the importance of business to the economy and it understood that productivity is good for workers. If businesses fail, people don't have a job. I don't think this government understands that. I wish that those opposite would go back and look at some of the things that the Hawke government did in the eighties. It'd be a better government if they did. Business groups and employers say the proposed IR changes will smash productivity, investment and job creation. That's not good for business, it's not good for workers and it's not good for Australia.

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