Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Government Services and the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"the bill be considered immediately".

For the benefit of the House, I'll explain what is occurring. The minister has just moved that the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Small Business Redundancy Exemption) Bill 2023 be made an order of the day for the next sitting. As a consequence, I've moved an amendment to this motion such that debate on this bill can proceed immediately. As Practice makes clear, the debate the House is now conducting is not, in and of itself, about the content of the bill that has just been read a first time. Rather, it's about the programming of debate and therefore about what this House judges to be most important to consider at any point in time. The purpose of the motion that I have moved would be to bring this bill on for debate in this House immediately.

Let me explain why the opposition has moved this motion. As those on this side of the chamber strongly believe, small businesses and, indeed, their employees are the very backbone of the Australian economy. This private senator's bill, which passed the Senate last week and has now been transmitted to this House, has the effect of ensuring that employees do not miss out on redundancy payments merely because their employer became a small business by reason of an insolvency.

This will support equitable outcomes for claimants under the Fair Entitlements Guarantee. That's to say this bill addresses an anomaly which causes some employees to miss out on a National Employment Standards entitlement to redundancy pay, which would otherwise have been payable at the end of their employment. This can occur when an employer downsizes, due to insolvency, to fewer than 15 staff, thereby becoming a small business employer and therefore exempt, in the law as it presently stands, from providing redundancy pay to employees under the National Employment Standards.

This private senator's bill, which the opposition is advocating ought to be considered by this chamber immediately, would not make any change to how the small-business redundancy exemption currently applies to viable small businesses, including those that have restructured from being a larger employer and are continuing to trade. It would only change how the small-business redundancy exemption applies to employers that are bankrupt or in liquidation.

It's important to note that all business groups support this change. This is now an opportunity for the chamber, including the government, the opposition and crossbenchers, to express their support for this important change. It is, I think, uncontroversial to say that small business plays a very important role in our economy. That is a view that's expressed across the chamber. I want to acknowledge, for example, that the recently arrived member for Aston recently had this to say about the need to support and protect employees of small businesses:

We understand very well the pressures faced by small businesses, and they will not be punished for honest mistakes … I will continue to fight for the small businesses in my electorate.

This is a matter, therefore, of considerable importance. That was the view of the Senate, which passed this bill last week. The government in the other place did not vote against this bill, which has now been transmitted to this House. Indeed the government did not even call for a division on this bill.

As I've outlined, the provisions in this bill would ensure that employees are compensated accordingly when a small business becomes insolvent. It goes some way toward fairly shielding employees. You would think that, in a cost-of-living crisis, this would be precisely the sort of measure that the government would be minded to move rapidly to support. We may well hear a range of arguments about why the procedural motion that the opposition is moving at this time ought not to be supported. I want to, therefore, make some points for the information of members.

It's entirely open to the House to determine how and when it considers business. The government's agenda is an input, but it's not determinative. The very fact that the House is even giving consideration to this is evidence of that proposition. There is nothing wrong, in procedural terms nor in principle, with this House choosing to move rapidly to deal with a matter which has been dealt with in the other place. That's a decision for this House to make on the merits of the bill. We may well hear that it is somehow problematic in process terms for this private senator's bill that's passed the Senate to now be debated and voted upon immediately by this House. We may also hear arguments that this creates procedural difficulties because there is an identical provision in the government's so-called closing loopholes legislation, which is making its way through the various parliamentary processes. The simple fact is that, if this bill were to pass this House, it would be an entirely routine matter for the government—at the consideration and detail stage of debate—to omit from its closing loopholes bill the provision which would have already taken legal effect under this bill, should it pass this House.

It may be argued that debating this and considering this right now is in some way distracting the attention of the House from matters which are of greater urgency. That argument would have a lot more credibility if it were not for the actions that this government took to minimise the amount of work being done by this House only a few weeks ago. The government cancelled a week of sittings on the basis that the Prime Minister had some international travel and the government was not keen for that to be interfered with. Any argument that might be made that this is in some way distracting or diverting the House from other urgent matters which need to be dealt with is not an argument which ought to be given very serious consideration.

I might make the point that when those opposite were in opposition, from time to time they offered procedural motions of exactly this kind, again argued on the basis that the substance of the bill that a minister had just sought to effectively kick into the long grass—which is, let's have no doubt, exactly what the Leader of the House has just sought to do—was a matter of priority and that the House should consider it. I'm not going to get into the merits of what was argued there, because it was clearly misconceived. What is very different here is the urgency of the matter which this bill, moved and passed by the Senate, would give effect to. It is a set of changes that deal with the circumstances of employees who are facing redundancy. It deals with the particular issue where, the employer having moved from being a larger business to being a small business by reason of having gone into insolvency, the employee, through no fault of their own, is therefore suddenly excluded from being able to access support that would otherwise be available.

It's clear that the government also considers this to be an important matter because the government itself has included such a provision in its broader so-called closing loopholes bill. But the fact is that this House now has an opportunity to consider, vote upon and pass this bill, the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Small Business Redundancy Exemption) Bill 2023, immediately. I think that most fair-minded Australians would, frankly, be mystified at the government's proposition about a bill embodying a provision which the government itself has brought forward and about which the government itself has necessarily said to the parliament and to the people of Australia, 'This is a sensible provision. This is a necessary provision.'

Here on the opposition side of the chamber we are simply providing the government and, indeed, the parliament with the opportunity to vote upon this provision immediately and to bring it into law very quickly. This is as opposed to the approach that the minister is putting to the House, which is that this matter should not be dealt with now but should be deferred indefinitely. This is an important matter; the government has been telling us for some months that it's an important matter. The opposition agrees that it's an important matter, businesses agree that it's an important matter and I understand unions agree that it's an important matter. The House has a chance to deal with it now, and that is the basis for the amendment that I've moved, so I commend the motion to the House.

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