Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This bad bill is bad policy and bad economics and it's bad for our country. It demonstrates that this government is not here for the national interest; it's here for the vested interests of big unions and big super. It's a world away from the ethos of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments, which undertook serious economic reform. Those governments had as their legacy an opened economy, businesses unleashed, increased workforce participation and economic growth. It's a situation that continued and was expanded under the Howard government, where 2.2 million new jobs were created thanks to that government's record of economic reform, particularly around tax reform, cutting red tape, industrial reform and Corporations Law reform.

The transformation of Australian business started the transformation of Australia that we saw over the past decades. There was a bipartisan understanding that the engine room of this country is not Canberra, nor is it found in the Public Service or in the parliamentary offices, whether here in this building or dotted around the country. It's found in the productivity of our businesses, and that productivity growth is a quest. John Howard used to describe economic reform as like running a race that has an ever-retreating finish line. In other words, the process of economic reform is never done, and it's such an important process for the future of our country. Productivity has always been the watchword of people on this side of the House. It's productivity that will grow our national pie. It's productivity that is the pathway to a higher wage economy—a higher wage economy that is sustainable.

Recently, the Treasury introduced the latest intergenerational report. The report highlighted the challenges of our aging population, with ongoing low fertility rates and the number of Australians aged between 65 and 85 tripling. That's a wonderful thing, but it's a challenge for any modern economy and it's a challenge for our society. It's a challenge that means ongoing increases in funded welfare payments. Also, with the deteriorating global security environment and the very much more complex geostrategic environment in which Australia finds itself, there is now a much greater need for spending on national security and defence, which will put pressures on the budget into the future. As well, Treasury projections are for productivity to slow and GDP growth to slow. The long-term financial prospects are sobering reading.

The importance of productivity as a watchword and as a focus of economic policy in order to grow the bigger pie is fundamental. If we have a more productive economy, we have more jobs and we have a greater tax take, which can help pay for all the important services that Australians want, whether it is a stronger Defence Force, whether it is better national security, to keep the challenges that Australia faces at bay, or whether it is the important social services that we need—things like health, education, aged care and, particularly, disability. We can only do this with greater productivity and a more strongly growing economy.

Sadly, in this setting, where there are more demands on the federal budget and where productivity is declining, the government has introduced these industrial relations changes. At a time when businesses large and small are lamenting the complexity of the Fair Work system, this legislation makes things worse. This legislation is so complex it needs over 700 pages of explanatory notes. At about 1,000 pages, when you put the bill and the explanatory memorandum together, it's as dry, wordy and inexplicable as some of those monthly essays from Dr Rudd and Dr Chalmers.

The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations says that this is a modest change. I've heard the word 'modest' elsewhere, on a proposal he and I agree on. That proposal is a 100-word proposed change to the Australian Constitution being voted on next month. One hundred words is modest, but I can't agree that this legislation, which weighs a ton, with roughly 1,000 pages of law and explanatory text, is modest; in fact, it's a PhD in red tape. The only modesty related to this bill is the false modesty of the government in saying that this is a simple bill about closing loopholes. This bill is about more red tape, more costs and more complexity for Australians during a decade in which it is predicted that Australians will need to become so much more competitive.

According to the government's own estimates, these challenges will add an extra $9 billion of costs to the economy more broadly. Those costs, as the minister has acknowledged, will feed themselves into the cost structures of goods and services produced and purchased by Australians every day. This is a new pressure on costs at a time when cost-of-living pressures are hitting Australians at their hardest and when people are feeling the squeeze. This bill makes a complex system even more complex. It will increase compliance instead of increasing productivity. It points Australia back to the 1950s, towards centralised wage fixing. It constrains choice and it puts new compliance pressures on businesses right across this country.

I believe in the importance of enterprise bargaining. I believe it delivers for businesses and it delivers for their workers. We're living in an era of profound skills shortage and of low unemployment. We're at rates of unemployment now that we used to describe as full employment. This is the best time for enterprise agreement-making. The benefit is flexibility for both parties. Enterprise bargaining grows pay packets, improves job security and creates the right mix of incentives and agility, but this bill walks away from all of that.

My first concern is the expansion of the union right-of-entry powers. Most businesses and most workplaces have never seen a union, but this right of entry in any circumstances is a serious legal power which will see unions back again like in the bad old days. This is a power to legally trespass on someone else's property. This bill will enable unions right of entry without notice wherever it relates to wage underpayment. To gain immediate entry, the union only needs to assert to the Fair Work Commission that it suspects a case of underpayment. It needs no evidence, just suspicion. As the National Farmers Federation has said, this is a right to enter farms, which, for many people, are also their homes. We've seen in the past how this power of right of entry can be abused and how regular visits can become a form of bullying.

My second concern relates to casual workers, gig economy workers and independent contractors. These are men and women who want to work in their own time on their own terms: a self-funded retiree who does an afternoon of driving to supplement an income, a student who fits their work around their university timetable or a contractor who wants to be their own boss. The minister has called the gig economy a cancer. Uber drivers getting money to get through uni or retirement is a cancer? Really? Amazon delivery drivers are a cancer? Really? What a posh view of the world. Gig workers are not enemies of the economy; they're the people who help grow our economy. They're people who have given us more choice and have filled skills gaps across so many fields. Unions don't like such workers because mostly they don't join unions. They don't join because the value offering just isn't there. Supporting the lifestyles of union bosses from the Health Services Union to the CFMMEU is not on the list of their life priorities. The changes to gig workers and independent contractors will increase costs, and those costs will be passed on to consumers.

My third concern comes to the same job, same pay issue. When it comes to that issue, this legislation is cumbersome and clunky and goes further than the government's stated intention. The government's unworkable and open ended concepts, like the same job and the same pay, do not compare like with like, and this bill goes much further than the government's original claim that it will just cover labour hire companies. This legislation goes beyond labour hire companies and covers service contractors as well. Service contractors are often engaged to provide a service, often using their own plant and equipment as well as their own skills in the workforce. This bill captures any business that engages service contractors.

Don't believe me on these matters; believe some of the people who are at the coalface. I want to tell you what some of the key stakeholders in this area think. Tania Constable from the Minerals Council of Australia, that great body that represents industries that generate significant wealth for this country, says:

The Albanese Government's latest industrial relations legislation changes are some of the most extreme, interventionist workplace changes that have ever been proposed in Australia.

The changes will inflict immense harm to the economy, the weight of which will fall on the shoulders of the most vulnerable Australians who will pay more for groceries, housing, and energy.

The chief executive of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Andrew McKellar, says:

The only winners in this are union chiefs. The only loophole this bad legislation is looking to close is that of plummeting union membership.

This is a continuation of a radical industrial relations agenda, and we are again bracing ourselves for further risky changes to our workplace system.

I am proud, in the electorate of Berowra, to represent over 15,000 small businesses. They are the engine room of our economy—everyone from sole practitioner businesses to local takeaway shops to some of the small industrial plants that are engaged in places like Hornsby, Mount Ku-ring-gai and Dural in the business parks, and in Thornleigh as well. They're represented by the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia, whose chair Matthew Addison had this to say about the bill:

At a time when small businesses are managing increased costs of supply, of rent, of power, of wages; we don't need changes that detract businesses from their sales and service delivery. Small businesses seek to employ and properly reward their workers. They seek to innovate and adopt new technology. We seek IR changes that enhance productivity and opportunity, not broad impacting confusion about what they are and aren't allowed to do.

That's from someone at the coalface of small business, like so many people in my own community of Berowra. And I worry about the job-destroying nature of this bill for many of the families in Berowra. I worry about the effect that this will have on small businesses, with the increased compliance for many of the hardworking small-business people in Berowra, who are just people trying to have a go and who want to do the right thing. But the compliance burden and the idea of unions walking into their business unannounced, on a mere suspicion, frighten the living daylights out of people. This is a terrible, backward-looking bill.

I do want to acknowledge one of the aspects of the bill that the opposition does agree with, and that relates to the changes regarding post-traumatic stress disorder in first responders. Police officers, firefighters, ambulance officers, paramedics and emergency services personnel, of which we have so many in our community, should not need to jump through so many hoops to prove the relationship between PTSD and their employment. This change will mean that, unless proved otherwise, it will be presumed that their employment as a first responder is likely to have contributed to the PTSD they suffer. We agree with this change, as it's common sense. As someone with 27 Rural Fire Service brigades, two SES units, the wonderful St John Ambulance, Fire and Rescue New South Wales and New South Wales Ambulance in their electorate, I see this is a reasonable proposition.

But, more broadly, we on this side of the House oppose the bill because it's impossibly complex. It creates far too much uncertainty. It adds additional costs to business at a time when we shouldn't be adding costs, and it particularly targets small business. It makes Australians pay more at a time of cost-of-living crisis, when the cost of everything is going up. It does nothing to increase productivity, and, as I said earlier, it is an increase in productivity that will provide this country with the ability to deal with the health, welfare, defence and security challenges that face us in the coming decade. It does nothing to enhance competition. Competition helps drive productivity right across our economy. It risks jobs, and that, I think, is the real fruit of this bill. It only rewards the union paymasters of the Labor Party. The Labor Party is the party that is there not to represent working people but to represent the interests of unions, and that is what this bill is really all about. It institutionalises conflict in our workplaces—conflict where there is none today. It is the government saying it's making concessions for business when it hasn't. This bill weakens our economy and makes a bad situation worse at the very time that our economy needs the hit of important productivity improvements.

This is a vital time for Australia. With the cost of living and payments rising, productivity falling and the population ageing, now is not the time to turn back towards the failed approach of the past. This legislation is a 1,000-page dead weight on Australian business. This is not the solution for our times, and that is the reason that we oppose it.

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