Chris Hayes (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It seems as though the business community may not be as supportive of the government’s extreme industrial relations changes as the Prime Minister may have first thought. Sure, there are going to be a number of big business operators from around the country who will go along to Liberal Party celebrations commemorating the 10th year of the Howard government—no doubt a long continuation of fundraising—but, when it comes to small businesses, people who make the economy tick, there seem to be some serious doubts emerging. Not surprisingly, businesses are not waiting to see the detailed regulation under the Work Choices scheme but rather are making sure that their businesses at least have certainty locked in now. In the December quarter alone, some 2,083 union negotiated agreements were registered in the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. This is up from 1,308 union agreements registered in the September quarter, which is nearly three times the 776 agreements registered in the June quarter. Essentially, employers are not waiting around to see the detail.

It is not just the larger organisations with unionised workforces that are starting to speak out against these extreme changes. I will take a little time to read a letter that appeared in one of the local Campbelltown newspapers, the Macarthur Chronicle, in November last year. It was written by Sarah Ditton, who is a small business proprietor in the area. She says:

Work Choices? One choice, I must abandon the State Award and negotiate AWAs with my staff.

Simpler? One award covered all seven of my employees. Now seven individually negotiated contracts need to be drafted, signed and lodged, and legal advice sought.

Fairer? My competitor down the road is a more ruthless negotiator so will now have staff working around the clock, seven days a week, at no extra cost.

Small business, take a closer look. There is no Choice and this is going to hurt worse than the GST.

This is the view of just one small business operator working in the south-west of Sydney, but I assure you that it is not a unique view.

Recently I had the opportunity to participate in the Labor Caucus Industrial Relations Taskforce when we met in Tasmania. We assembled to allow people to express their concerns about the government’s extreme industrial relations agenda. Among them were people who had been denied the opportunity to present evidence before the Senate inquiry into these changes, and there was a local businessman who went into great detail to indicate that, at his own personal expense, he had taken out a newspaper advertisement against the changes. This small business operator was worried that these changes in the industrial relations laws would impact on people, certainly would impact on wages and would change the values within our society.

Let me tell you about one other person who appeared, a young woman who happened to work in a cafe. She came along with her mother. The cafe proprietor decided at some stage, with a view to cutting costs, to engage a labour hire provider to provide a workforce. All he did was to transfer all his existing employees to the labour hire contract and then renegotiate the contract with the labour hire provider. This girl, who was working her way through school and using the money for music lessons—and I have to say that that is a credit to the young woman—was offered fewer hours and a reduction of $2 an hour. Because she did not sign the contract, she was not allocated any further time with that employer. Effectively, whilst not sacked, she just disappeared from that proprietor’s business—from the cafe.

It is not a case of saying that people will not act abusively when it comes to these laws; we know that people will, and what we have done is remove the checks and balances that applied within the system to stop people from exploiting people such as the young woman that I just spoke about.

Last week I accompanied the Leader of the Opposition to a meeting with the Police Federation of Australia, to discuss various aspects of their concern about what they see as possibly unintended consequences of these industrial relations changes. Put simply, the industrial relations changes under the Work Choices provisions could have a very deleterious impact on the way that police carry out their work, particularly in the AFP. Individual contracts do not fit well with a police force that needs some consistency between its officers. Individual contracts do not recognise that these officers have independence in discharging their office of constable. They take an oath of office which compels them to discharge their duties, as opposed to being directed to discharge their duties. An individual contract would not recognise that. It would be something like putting magistrates on individual contracts. I am sure that would lead to slightly less impartiality, particularly when it came to contract renewal.

This government is likely to put considerable pressure on the states to implement individual contracts in the next public sector round of wage adjustments. We have already seen it in relation to the higher education sector. We have seen it in relation to TAFE colleges. If you want to access Commonwealth funding, you will offer your employees individual contracts—or you need not apply. That is the way this government has sought to induce parties to put into effect the finer touches of its industrial relations regime.

To return to policing: the underlying premise of the normal activities of police and police disciplinary procedures is that similar tasks and decision making will be carried out by people of particular ranks. If these were reduced to individual contracts, I am not sure what that would do for the line of command within the police force. There is no doubt that having individual police on contracts would erode the situation, and without doubt it would have an impact on the way police go about their duties, as well as threatening the very independence of their office, as I said.

Any situation whereby the way police go about conducting their front-line activities is threatened simply because of the introduction of an ideologically driven agenda not only makes no sense but is abhorrent to anyone who has a view about social conduct in this country.

These are extreme industrial relations laws. They can impact on police, as I have indicated. Evidence is mounting that this industrial relations system is not welcomed, not even by elements in the business community. Despite this, I know that employers will continue to push the envelope. The only logical reason for doing that is that workers are a cost and costs have to be minimised—and if that means sacrificing the social and financial wellbeing of workers in Australia, then so be it; if that is what produces a better financial balance sheet for a company, then so be it.

It is this sort of attitude that seemed to colour the ACCI’s submission to the recent award review task force, in which it proposed to slash the number of awards in our award system to just four. This proposal would see up to 800,000 skilled workers on lower wages, denying them access to wages and rates of pay that properly reflect their skills and experience. The Work Choices legislation puts us at serious risk of being the first generation in Australia’s history to leave to future generations a set of conditions and way of life that are worse than what we inherited from our parents. (Time expired)