Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Wentworth and also acknowledge that I was here for the speech given by the member for Warringah as well. I acknowledge that there are many issues we agree on within my Arts portfolio, but we are regularly in disagreement with Workplace Relations. There are often different views, but the engagement has always been constructive and, certainly, in the interest of their electorates.

The right to disconnect had first been proposed through two parliamentary inquiries. For the work and care Senate inquiry, in terms of their consultation, not everybody would have made submissions on the right to disconnect but there were 125 submissions. It then came up again in the inquiry into the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill 2023, where there were 130 submissions; obviously there only would have been a small number that dealt directly with closing loopholes, although I understand it came up directly during some of the evidence taken in the hearings that they held.

Those were the formal parliamentary processes that caused some crossbench members, notably the Greens Party, to make clear last year that their support for the bill would ultimately be contingent on a right to disconnect being legislated. They made that clear publicly. At that point, we as a party adopted it as policy but as a government had not yet declared it at that point. Because it was coming up as a crossbench amendment, I made a point of making some comments about it publicly. Then there was a meeting on 2 February with employer groups, and that meeting has been made public. Not all of the employer groups but some of them had disengaged for some months from direct contact, which I respect—it's their right to do so. They did so very publicly. On 2 February, that was the moment they started to re-engage again. We worked through a lot of issues in the meeting; the right to disconnect was one of them. It would be disingenuous for me to claim that there was a whole meeting about it, but it was certainly an issue that was raised at that meeting with the business groups.

There were conversations back and forth with a number of the groups that were present at that meeting. At that meeting we had ACCI, the BCA, AIG, the Minerals Council of Australia, the Master Builders Association, COSBOA, the Australian Retailers Association and the RCSA there—a series of groups. Subsequent to that, some of them, not all of them, had direct conversations back and forth with my office about different issues of concern they had with a series of aspects of the bill. One of those was the right to disconnect.

Ultimately, the consultation continued between the government, the Greens Party and Senator David Pocock. I'm not sure of the extent to which Senator Jacqui Lambie was involved at that point, but ultimately we ended up at a point where, across Senator David Pocock, the Greens Party and the government, there was a form of words on which all could agree.

There was consultation happening with business in terms of what they viewed as the worst possible ways to legislate if you were going to. I don't want to pretend the business groups were asking for this to be legislated at all, but, in terms of the views that the business groups put about if this were to be done and how they believed it would be more workable than other options, that consultation was certainly very much reflected in the amendment that ultimately went through.

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