Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. A lot has been said. We have three precedents for this. So I want to go through a couple of points that the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations has made in relation to when we've done this three times prior. He has made points about practices in this chamber, process and procedure in this chamber and standing orders in this chamber. He may or may not be correct about some of the points he's made, but I take the point that this could've been dealt with in different ways. There are different processes and procedures. There are lots of different ways that these bills that have been sent back as private members' bills from the Senate may well have been dealt with. I hear that. I'm sure that's true. When we got into the detail of what the bills were dealing with, he said, 'If you were so passionate about this, why didn't you do it when you were in government?' On the bill relating to people in the Pacific islands that we're looking at, the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Small Business Redundancy Exemption) Bill 2023, he said, 'I think those people want the whole omnibus bill passed, not just sections one at a time.' He may or may not be right about that.

Putting all that to one side—forgetting how the different procedures, practices and standing orders of this chamber could have dealt with this, forgetting about what previous governments have or haven't done in relation to this legislation and putting aside whether people who are affected by these four bills that have come back today do or don't want the whole legislation to go through—the one thing that is factual, the one thing we can agree on right now, is that if the government were to support these four individual bills to go through this chamber today they could. That's the bottom line. All the rest, in some ways, is semantics. We could talk about how the chamber dealt with this and what the processes, procedures and standing orders say and what the Manager of Opposition Business should have done. That is all by the by. What previous governments did is by the by. Right now, we have four private members' bills that have come back from the Senate. The government could support those and they could be implemented all but immediately. Those four elements of the larger closing the loopholes omnibus bill could happen right now.

The minister's also previously mentioned that this has been presumptuous because when IR legislation goes to the Senate there are always amendments and references to committees. Do you know what? That chamber has said—as we have in this chamber today—they could move through those four parts of the omnibus bill today with no amendments but exactly how the minister first wrote them up and wanted to legislate them.

Let's put all the processes, procedures and standing orders aside. Yes, there are different ways that this could be treated. But, at the end of the day, the issue is this. The opposition today came into this chamber saying, 'We are willing to debate and to support these four bills and pass them in this chamber today.' These four bills were all drafted by the minister. They have all passed as private members' bills through the Senate. That's happened there. So the minister has four elements of a larger bill that he could take through this chamber today. I've said this before, but I would again say to the minister on this one about a redundancy exemption that ensures that employees do not miss out on redundancy payments merely because of their employer that the people who are affected by this would like the government to pass this today. They don't care how the Manager of Opposition Business introduced it or what's happened with the processes of the parliament. They would like this to pass today.

The people who are affected by the asbestos issue in that particular bill would like it to pass today. Those people who may well be discriminated against in the workplace because of domestic violence would like that specific amendment bill to pass through today. For those who are first responders, that particular bill affects their lives. They are not into what 90 per cent of this debate has been about. They are not into the parliamentary processes, the standing orders or the procedures we are debating here. They are not into that. They are into: 'Okay. Great! The opposition and some crossbenchers have said they're prepared to support four elements of the government's bill, and some of them affect me. That's great. That's going to save six or seven or eight months, and that bill will change my life quicker than it otherwise would be.' And that's why I'm seconding this motion.

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