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

I say to anybody who is listening to this parliamentary debate that you should be put on notice that whenever the minister at the table, the member for Watson, uses his reasonable tone, something very, very dodgy is happening. And I'll tell you what is happening that is very, very dodgy. At approximately midday today 36 pages of amendments were introduced by this government. They had not been made available to the opposition or to the crossbench prior to that time—36 pages of detailed amendments, yet we are conducting this debate under a set of changes to the standing orders moved by this minister and rammed through this House saying that the total time available for discussion on these 36 pages of detailed amendments is 20 minutes. Twenty minutes of debate is all the government sees fit to make available for any attempt to consider these very detailed matters.

We know that just about nothing this minister says on these matters can be trusted. When you look at the dodginess of the process he is using and the government is using, it is clear that he is showing contempt for this House and contempt for the Australian people.

For example, we were told by the minister in the public domain on a number of occasions over the past few months that service contractors were already clearly excluded under the wording of his draft bill. Yet we now know, from the fact that the minister has, he tells us, moved amendments that deal with service contractors, that that claim was completely incorrect. I want to go specifically to the question of casuals, because one of the most problematic aspects of this bill is that there is an extremely complex definition of casual employment. There are 15 steps that you need to work through to determine whether an employee is a casual or not a casual.

I have some questions for the minister, and I'd like to ask him the following: can the minister explain to the House the 15 steps that need to be considered in determining whether an employee is casual or not? Can a casual employee work a wholly regular pattern of hours? Can the minister confirm that, under the provisions proposed, even if a person wants to be a casual employee, has sought out to be a casual employee and has agreed in writing that he or she is a casual employee, on the terms of the definition, the Fair Work Commission can determine that the person is not in fact a casual employee? Can the minister explain the definition of 'deliberate misrepresentation' and when it applies so that somebody who is understood by himself or herself and by that person's employer to be a casual could retrospectively be determined not to be a casual?

Another question I have for the minister is about the tension between the legislative note that he's holding out as the solution to this problem and proposed section 15A(3)(c), which states that a pattern of work is regular for the purposes of subparagraph (2)(c)(iv) even if it is not absolutely uniform and includes some fluctuation or variation over time. I ask the question of the minister: how will the Fair work Commission determine the status of an employee given the contradiction between proposed section 15A(3)(c) and the wording of his legislative note? I further ask the minister how he seriously puts forward the proposition that this definition adds clarity when we know that it's a three-page, 15-part definition and that during Senate estimates just last month we had the opportunity to see some 20 to 30 minutes taken by three industrial relations experts from the government's own department to explain this definition. I further ask the minister whether he truly believes that a business owner who is dealing with a continually rising cost of business inputs, with ever-increasing regulation and with more hoops to jump through, can be expected to read through this three-page definition of a casual employee and work out what he or she needs to do to be compliant in just 15 minutes. Can the minister confirm that, in fact, even if a contract says that somebody is a casual, that is not definitive of that person's status? I have plenty more questions to ask, but because I've arrived at my time limit I'll defer to colleagues.

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