Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to rise for the very first time to speak on this bill—

An honourable member: Are you sure?

I'm positive! The focus of any workplace relations change should be to add more certainty for workers, to streamline processes, to be easily understood by business owners and employees alike, and, ultimately, to create more jobs and higher productivity. In my view, the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill 2023, in its current form, places additional cost and complexity on small business and it will only add to the cost of living. In fact, it doesn't reward—it devalues—tenure and experienced workers in many jobs in my electorate. It doesn't foster productivity. It doesn't enhance competitiveness or agility in the market. And it risks the very jobs that this government claims to be protecting.

I should note, however, that there are portions of the bill that we generally agree on. We saw that on Monday, when those four bills came before the House. Those four bills related to supporting first responders with PTSD, the application of charges related to silica diseases, discrimination against people suffering from family and domestic violence and ensuring that employees do not miss out on redundancy payments. I'm reminded of the words of the former New South Wales Premier Mike Baird, who asked, 'What does a good day in parliament look like?' Is it cheap political pointscoring over your opposition, or is it getting something done? What happened in this place on Monday, in terms of those four bills returned from the Senate, was simply this government getting cheap political pointscores. What they could have done with elements of their own bill which were unchanged was to pass them through this parliament. Instead, they decided to oppose their own words. That delayed these important measures in an attempt to get cheap political points. So when they sit across there and say, 'We care about the workers,' why didn't they pass that on Monday? Why didn't they do that?

I can imagine speaking to a taxpayer in my part of the world, in my electorate, and if he or she asks what happened on Monday I'll say: 'The government had a bill that had some really good parts in there. And it had some bad parts, so the coalition opposed it. But it went to the Senate and a couple of senators managed to extract the good parts from the government's bill and sent them back down to the House of Representatives. But the government, in an attempt to somehow embarrass us or get cheap political points, decided to vote against them and therefore delay their own bill.' I can assure everyone that the taxpayer would be scratching his or her head and wondering exactly what we're doing. In any event, we're still here and we're still talking about this bill.

I've been—at least, I was—in business for almost two decades, so I feel that I can adequately represent people from my electorate as an employer and manager of a team of professionals. I feel justified in being able to do that through my own lived experience. In my electorate of Cowper, small businesses are quite literally the backbone of our local economy. Locally owned and locally run enterprises make up the majority of employers in my region, from tourism to tax consultants, farmers to fashion retailers, health services and construction companies. Similarly, that's where the majority of the employment opportunities are for those of working age. Small businesses in my electorate are often family run, with many being handed down through generations of hardworking business owners. They work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, managing staff levels, stock, pricing, BAS, insurance updates—you name it. Currently—and both sides of the floor know this—they're walking a tightrope of increasing outgoing costs which are forcing them to drive up prices to consumers, who are also doing it tough. It's a very thin rope. Push prices up too far and you lose sales. Keep them as they are and your margins erode to the point of being unable to pay yourself a wage or keep people employed.

As the parliament, we should be making things easier for these businesses, and yet this legislation seeks to add a mind-bending amount of complexity to an already-changing system. Just take the definition of a casual worker. The definition alone is three pages long and includes 15 factors to determine whether an employee is a casual. The permanent casual loophole has already been closed. This is nothing new. All casuals currently have the right to change to permanent after a 12-month period if they work regularly rostered hours. Those across the floor are patting themselves on the back for this when, in reality, casual workers already have the choice, and many of them would rather stay at the higher hourly rate in order to make ends meet, which, in the current cost-of-living crisis, is increasingly understandable. So why is it necessary to add a new right after six months and a three-page definition? Why does the six months conversion require a test with 11 factors and four proposed sections and seven proposed subsections of legislation? In fact, this bill is discouraging small businesses from hiring casuals at all. I can tell you with some certainty that there are hundreds, probably thousands, of casual workers in my electorate who would not be able to afford rent and food on the table if that occurred.

Small businesses will need to contend with the unfettered expansion of union powers, opening the door to union action that many are simply not equipped to contend with. The fact that to gain entry to any workplace a union only need to assert to the Fair Work Commission that they 'suspect' a case of underpayment is unfathomable. Even a police officer has to have 'reasonable suspicion'. There is no reasonable suspicion needed here for the unions to go to the Fair Work Commission. They just have to suspect. So these small-business owners will have to open their doors. They don't have a room full of lawyers. They don't have time to fight these union Goliaths and, rather than providing an easy-to-navigate road map to industrial relations law to help them to avoid inadvertent underpayment or misrepresentation, we are handing them reams and reams of documents and expecting them to go through that whilst running a business.

Everybody here would have heard of Akubra in Kempsey. I recently attended a leaders forum at Akubra. That was attended by business and industry leaders with the predominant purpose of discussing this very bill. I can tell you that they were terrified. They were terrified of the effect it is going to have on their businesses. One of the main issues that employers took up was same job, same pay.

Steve Keir, the owner of Akubra, fourth generation, simply said: 'Why am I paying somebody who has been with me for six months the same amount as somebody who has been a loyal, hardworking part of the family for 20 years? Why is the government making me do this?' I can tell you that he pays all his workers well. He treats his workers like family, as most Australian business owners do. But the last thing they want is for government to tell them how they should run their businesses and what they should do in terms of the treatment of their employees when they are treating them well in the first place.

In conclusion, I can't express strongly enough my disappointment in the government's underhanded tactics to push this legislation through. In addition, the way it was dealt with, with the political pointscoring on Monday, I think will be reflected on by the Australian people. They will see what's happening. They will understand what's happening. Rather than focusing on meaningful policies to address the cost-of-living crisis, this government continues to place priority on areas that appease their major donors—the unions—to the detriment of every Australian family's budget. They're out of touch, but, as it's genuinely hard to find a member on that side of the floor who has ever owned or run a business, it's not surprising.

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