David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have received a letter from the honourable member for Perth proposing that a definite matter of public importance be submitted to the House for discussion, namely:

The failure of the Government to ensure Australia’s industrial relations system will generate the productivity gains necessary to increase our nation’s international competitiveness.

I call upon those members who approve of the proposed discussion to rise in their places.

More than the number of members required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

Stephen Smith (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry, Infrastructure and Industrial Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The government’s industrial relations changes are bad for our economy. The government’s extreme and unfair and divisive industrial changes are bad for our economy. They are bad for our workforce, but they are bad for our economy. They are bad for our economy because they are no more, no less than an attack upon wages. An attack upon wages will see nothing more, nothing less than low productivity. This is a straightforward shift from the wages section of the total factor income of the economy to the profit section of the total factor income of the economy. It is all about lowering wages. It is the easy way to a profit, relying upon lower wages and low productivity. There is no requirement, no incentive and no demand to say to the business community: ‘We want good management. We want investment in productive things.’

It is another example of the complacency of the Howard government, its massive economic complacency given the benefit of 15 years of continuous economic growth set up largely by the structural reforms of the Hawke-Keating governments, including the introduction of enterprise bargaining and a resources boom to China. The last election was front and centre all about the economy but we heard nothing about these proposals during the last election. The first time we heard about these proposals was when the government realised it had all power in the Senate and pushed through proposals that John Howard has had floating around not just since the nineties but since the eighties and seventies. This is no more or no less than an easy way to move part of the economy from wages to profit with no corresponding productivity or competitiveness gain.

Where does that attack come? That attack comes on the minimum wage and that attack comes on conditions and entitlements through the introduction of AWAs under the government’s reduced minimum standards taking away the no disadvantage test. Two of the culprits are at the table. The Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources let the cat out of the bag a few months ago when he said, ‘Wouldn’t it be terrific if we could have New Zealand wages next week!’—as if somehow you could survive on New Zealand wages in Sydney. Take the logical extension of that view, which is proselytised by the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, who is at the table—and I will apologise in advance: I cannot stay for any or all of his contribution but I will read the Hansard carefully. The logical extension of the two ministers’ views and the policy approach of the government is this: if it is New Zealand wages tomorrow then it is Indonesian, Indian and Chinese wages next week. It is a view which says we can only be internationally competitive if we pull down labour input costs; that is the only way that we can be internationally competitive and that is the only way we can be competitive in the Asia-Pacific region against India and China. There is nothing about going to the next level of productivity improvements and investing in infrastructure, skills, research and development—all of the things which have traditionally made us a great trading nation and an attractive place for capital investment.

Let us see how the attack on wages goes, firstly through the minimum wage. What do we know? We know that the minimum wage is currently $25,188. We know that, if the government had had its way with its submissions to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission over the last 10 years, the minimum wage would be $60 a week lower, or $2,600 a year worse off. In other words, the minimum wage would not be $25,188; it would be $22,588. If the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry had had its way over the last 10 years through its submissions to the Industrial Relations Commission, the minimum wage would be $95 a week lower, or $4,940 a year worse off. In other words, it would be $20,248. That is the way the minimum wage goes under the government’s and the ACCI’s submissions. It is a straightforward attempt, which the government is now seeking to make through the back door of the low pay commission, to reduce the minimum wage in real terms. Why is that? Because the government says, ‘If we reduce the minimum wage and reduce wages at the lower end of the spectrum, a couple of things will magically occur. We will become more competitive internationally, we will become more productive and we will create more employment.’

The Leader of the Opposition asked a question precisely on that point in question time today. We have in Canberra cleaners who work in the hotel industry who are on the minimum wage. This point was put perfectly clearly by the Leader of the Opposition: if you are a cleaner on the minimum wage cleaning a hotel, the logical extension of the government’s approach is that if they reduce the minimum wage that you are on from $25,188 per year to $22,588 a year—$2,600 less—a number of things will magically occur. Firstly, the cleaner will become more efficient; secondly, our economy will become more productive; and, thirdly, somehow magically we will have two cleaners to clean the same number of hotel rooms. It is an economic nonsense.

The shadow Treasurer made the point that the most recent OECD report, its 2006 Employment Outlook, released overnight, says:

No significant direct impact of the level of the minimum wage on unemployment is identified.

And that the:

... minimum wage could encourage higher participation by helping to make work pay for the low skilled.

There goes your OECD-IMF argument, and I note that the director-general of the IMF, who was here during the week, spoke in glowing terms of the fair and flexible industrial relations system—and I was happy for that endorsement of our approach.

The second area of attack on wages comes of course with AWAs and the attack upon conditions and entitlements—the penalty rates, the shift allowances and the leave loadings. We have drawn the parliament’s attention to a couple of examples. We have had the Spotlight example. Under the government’s minimum standards, the Spotlight AWA knocks off penalty rates, shift allowances, leave loadings and the like for the princely sum of a 2c an hour increase in your pay rates. By the average rule of thumb, you are 90 bucks a week worse off. I just happen to have one of my 2c coins here.

Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As they’re not unemployed, here it is—$338 better off, Mate!

Stephen Smith (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry, Infrastructure and Industrial Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will match your Liberal Party fistful of dollars any day of the week, Sunshine! So we have drawn attention to that, and today in question time we drew attention to the Esselte AWA, where for $1.25 extra per hour you lose all those things and you end up being, on the examples that we gave, $60 or $65 a week worse off and there is no wage increase in that AWA for a three-year period. So it effectively means that, if you are a full-time employee and you work a Saturday shift, you lose 65 bucks a week, or $10,140 over three years, for the princely sum of $1.25 an hour—and I might just happen to have $1.25 here. If you work overtime for two hours and a Saturday shift, you will be 60 bucks a week worse off, or $9,360 worse off over a three-year period—double the amount that the ACCI would see the minimum wage reduced by and nearly four times the amount that the government would see the minimum wage reduced by. That is all for the princely sum of $1.25 an hour—and I will not table that money because Mr Liberal Fistful of Dollars might just reach across the table. Knowing the Liberal Party, as I do, if they had the chance they would round the 2c and the $1.25 down.

The Prime Minister was presented with not just the Spotlight AWA but the Esselte AWA and he had his attention drawn to the fact that his own government man, the Employment Advocate, said that we had had about 6,200 AWAs signed since the introduction of the government’s legislation. We drew attention, as a result of good work in Senate estimates, to the fact that, of the AWAs sampled, 100 per cent excluded at least one protected award condition, 64 per cent removed leave loadings, 63 per cent removed penalty rates, 52 per cent removed shiftwork loadings, 41 per cent did not contain gazetted holidays, 22 per cent did not provide for a pay increase over the life of the agreement—like this one I have here—and 16 per cent excluded all award conditions and replaced them with government legislated minimum standards. The Prime Minister said that 78 per cent of them will give ‘very significant wage increases’.

This followed on from the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations who, after the Spotlight AWA was revealed in the parliament a couple of weeks ago, on a Friday morning said that the vast majority of protected award conditions have remained in AWAs since the government’s legislation was changed—and three days and three nights later the OEA blew him out of the water. The Prime Minister has no evidence for the claim that there have been ‘very significant wage increases’. If he has any evidence of that, he should produce it for the parliament and for the community. He is also out there asserting that somehow there are significant increases in wages under AWAs rather than collective bargaining. All the studies by Professor Peetz and by Freehills—the government’s hired gun—show that that is not the case.

As a result of that, the Leader of the Opposition decided that we would adopt a policy of abolishing AWAs, which just happens to be consistent with our election platform and our public policy. I want to make a couple of remarks about the business reaction to that. Let us very clearly understand what AWAs represent. We have the business community out there, we have the BCA, the Business Council of Australia, who say that their employers represent one million employees; we have ACCI, who say their employers employ four million employees; and we have AiG, who say their employers employ two million employees. So seven million employees from those business groups have expressed their views about our commitment to abolish AWAs. How many AWAs do we have? We have 538,000—half a million. So there are half a million AWAs for the seven million employees represented by those organisations. And what do we know from the government’s own stats? About 20 per cent of people are on awards; about 40 per cent of people are on enterprise bargains, where the big productivity boosts have come; about 30 per cent of people are on common law contracts, which have been in existence for a long period of time; and anywhere from 2.5 per cent to five per cent are on AWAs. But, if we abolish AWAs, despite the fact we have committed ourselves to flexibility through variations to collective agreements and to an overall advantage approach so far as common law contracts are concerned—despite the fact that we have promised that flexibility—the economy as we know it will crumble if AWAs are abolished.

In the face of 15 years of continuous economic growth, set up by the last Labor government, a resources boom to China, a current account deficit of six per cent which has the benefit of record high favourable terms of trade and record high commodity prices, 49 consecutive monthly trade deficits, an infrastructure crisis, a half-trillion dollar foreign debt, a collapse in research and development, a collapse in innovation, a collapse in skills, education and training, the single biggest threat to the Western world as we know it is the abolition of a 10-year-old statutory instrument, of which there are about half a million in a workforce of 10.1 million. And guess what? When my friend and state colleague Geoff Gallop said he was going to do the same thing in Western Australia, the business community and the Liberal Party said exactly the same thing. They said: ‘Gallop’s in the hands of the unions. The Western Australian economy as we know it will collapse. This is a regressive approach; it is back to the 18th century of employment relations.’ Last time I looked, off the back of 15 years of continuous economic growth and a resources boom to China, Western Australia had 10 per cent growth. But, if we take away an employment instrument that half a million people out of 10 million have, the Western world as we know it will collapse. It is no longer the reds under the beds; it is not having the AWA under the bed. That is the problem.

My complaint with Mr Chaney is that the Business Council writes a letter, which it describes as a personal letter to the Leader of the Opposition, which journalists get at the same time or in advance, and says: ‘Unless you do AWAs, everything else you do has no credibility.’ I say a couple of things to Mr Chaney publicly and privately. Firstly, Mr Chaney is on record as saying that fairness is not a requirement of industrial relations legislation, that fairness is not a criterion required in the employment relations area—

Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Andrews interjecting

Stephen Smith (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry, Infrastructure and Industrial Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

And you share that view and you endorse that view. The second thing I say to Mr Chaney is that he should say to the Leader of the Opposition what he says in his adverts. When you read the BCA adverts—the ‘four steps’ we need—is there anything in there that says, ‘But if you don’t do these things with AWAs, the Western world, the Western economy and the Australian economy as we know it will crumble’? I say to the business community publicly what I say to them privately: you should focus on this, you should accept our offer of consultation, you should accept our offer of flexibility, you should look at what we are saying—overall advantage and the combination of our approach will ensure ongoing flexibility. And the minister at the table should resolve and resort to having an argument on the facts, not to scurrilous personal slurs against me or the Leader of the Opposition. If he wants to say that we are in the pockets of unions or that we have said this or we have said that, then he is no more and no less than a toady of corporate Australia. If that is the level of debate he wants to have, that is fine, but he should address the facts: the government’s attack on the minimum wage, the government’s attack on conditions and entitlements, no productivity benefits, complacency about a whole range of economic issues, a massive foreign debt, a massive trade deficit and a massive collapse in exports. But the Western world will collapse if we cannot have a 10-year-old statutory independent contract, which half a million people out of 10 million have. It is an economic, a social and a political nonsense. (Time expired)

Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The problem with the argument advanced by the member for Perth is that it contains a major internal flaw and contradiction. The nub of his argument goes to the mining and resources sector in Western Australia. He says—correctly on this point—that the mining and resources sector in Western Australia is booming and, indeed, that it is a major contributor to the economy in Australia. The essence of his argument is that, therefore, any changes that have been put in place in Australian Workplace Agreements are irrelevant to that booming mining and resources sector of the Australian economy, particularly in Western Australia. This is where there is a major internal flaw and contradiction in his argument. The very same sector of the Australian economy has said over and over again—and this is what Mr Chaney said in his letter, and I will come to it shortly, to the Leader of the Opposition—that part of the reason they are able to thrive and to provide more jobs and higher wages to those employed in that sector is the flexibility that this government has brought about through its workplace relations legislation.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot say on one hand, as the opposition wishes to do, that this is a sector which is thriving the way it is, yet say on the other hand that we are going to rip away from that sector one of the very mechanisms which has enabled it to thrive in the way it has. That is the nub of the complaint made not by me but by Mr Chaney, the President of the Business Council of Australia—a body whose members employ some one million Australians. He makes that complaint against the opposition and the foolish decision of the Leader of the Opposition—without consulting, we are told, the member for Perth, the industrial relations spokesman for the opposition; he himself concedes that—to go out to the Labor conference at the weekend and say, ‘I propose, if elected to government, to abolish Australian workplace agreements.’

What does Mr Chaney say? These are not my words. These are the words of a man who was the managing director and CEO of Wesfarmers, one of the biggest companies operating in this country, and a man who is regarded by his peers in the business community in Australia as being of sufficient standing to be the leader of the Business Council of Australia. That body has over the years been critical of this side of government, as it has been critical of the other side of government. What did Mr Chaney say in his letter? Let me quote a little bit of Mr Chaney’s letter:

For the past two years, the BCA has argued for an integrated package of economic reforms that will allow Australia to lock in its current prosperity for the long term. It has consistently argued these reforms cannot be cherry-picked for political purposes, but need to be implemented as a whole.

It is for this reason that the BCA has called for, and supported, the most recent reforms to workplace relations. These reforms continue a 20-year process of making Australia’s workplaces more flexible and responsive, and the economy more competitive. This reform process, started by previous Labor Governments, has delivered improved living standards and low unemployment.

This MPI is about living standards and international competitiveness. Mr Chaney points out that this process of reforming industrial relations, which was, as he alludes to, started by the man that the member for Perth once worked for—namely, Paul Keating, when he was Prime Minister and previously Treasurer of this country—has led to the competitiveness and the prosperity that this country enjoys today. It is obviously of some great offence that the leader of the Business Council of Australia should come out and say this. There was an extraordinary attack on Mr Chaney and the business community in Australia from the member for Perth at his doorstop press conference this morning. Mr Chaney said:

... AWAs have played a significant part in improving productivity, particularly in sectors that are critical to Australia’s current and future growth, notably mining and resources.

Mr Chaney nails the argument that is being advanced by the member for Perth today. As I said, you cannot say on one hand that the Australian economy has been so dependent upon, so boosted by, what has happened in the mining and resource sector, yet say on the other hand that you are going to rip away one of the very processes, one of the very mechanisms, that has enabled that sector of the Australian economy to boom in the way it has. That is what Mr Chaney says in his letter:

... AWAs have played a significant part in improving productivity, particularly in sectors that are critical to Australia’s current and future growth, notably mining and resources.

Mr Chaney goes on:

The fact is that independent research shows that workplace reform—including the introduction of AWAs—has delivered significant opportunities for Australians.

They are the words of a very successful Australian business leader, a man regarded by his peers as being pre-eminent to lead the Business Council of Australia. That is the complaint he makes to the Leader of the Opposition. It is hardly a complaint that deserves the sort of approach we got from the member for Perth this morning, who talked about business being lazy and only looking for an easy way of increasing its profits. That is what he said in his attack in his doorstop this morning. We know why the member for Perth is upset, and that is because he has been repudiated by the Leader of the Opposition. The reality is that, for the last year or so, the member for Perth has been going around the business organisations and the major businesses in Australia trying to rebuild relationships after the disastrous relationship the Labor Party under Mark Latham had with the business community of Australia. That is the reality. The member for Perth has been trying to rebuild that relationship, as have a few others on the other side—knowing the disastrous level it got to under the leadership of Mr Latham, the previous Leader of the Opposition.

This is what happened at the weekend. It was unbeknownst to the member for Perth until he was told that the decision of the Leader of the Opposition was a fait accompli. The Leader of the Opposition, ignoring whatever advice he might have had from the member for Perth, went along to the New South Wales Labor conference and there, to the no-doubt populist cheers of the union bosses—those who have over the last 10 years donated millions of dollars to the ALP—he said, ‘I’m going to rip up AWAs.’ The egg is all over the face of the member for Perth following the announcement made at the weekend by the Leader of the Opposition.

What was the reaction to that? The reaction to that from the business community, not just from almost every editorial writer of almost every major newspaper in Australia, was one of complete astonishment. They were getting the nudge, nudge, wink, wink from the member for Perth, who over the last few months and the last year had said to them effectively, ‘Look, we’ll keep AWAs.’ The Leader of the Opposition said eight months ago: ‘There’ll be a million AWAs in place by the next election; you can’t just rip up a system that involves that.’

So you have the member for Perth, given that sort of lead by the Leader of the Opposition, going around to all the business groups in Australia and then suddenly, out of the blue, last weekend the Leader of the Opposition comes out and says: ‘No, we’re not going to keep these AWAs. We’re going to rip them up. We’re going to remove this system.’ That is the reality, and that is part of the reason why we have seen the negative reaction—contrary, I believe, to what the Leader of the Opposition expected—in the media and from the business community this week.

And it is not just the Business Council of Australia, although they represent companies that employ something like one-tenth of the workforce in Australia—about one million Australians are employed by BCA companies. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry represent companies and employers that employ about four million Australians. Equally, they have come out in condemnation of this policy from the Leader of the Opposition. And the Australian Industry Group, which represent companies employing something like two million Australians, have condemned this policy backflip by the Leader of the Opposition.

The problem with this policy is that it rips away from Australians their entitlements, their wages. It rips away from them the ability to work harder and earn more for their families. Let us take an example: the line workers, the fault workers in Telstra on AWAs. The history of that is there are ordinary, blue-collar Australian workers out there who are earning more on AWAs. Why? Because they have been able to increase their productivity, they get a bonus, which they are paid in return for doing extra work, and the result has been that their take-home pay has considerably increased as a result of being on AWAs. You can multiply these sorts of examples right across the country.

The seafood processing works that I went to in Western Australia a little while ago, where something like 80 per cent of the workforce were part-time and casual employees—

Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What do they pay?

Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They were put onto AWAs, and now the vast majority of those workers have a permanent job. What that means for them and their families—and I believe the member for Lyons will be sympathetic to this—is that they have a permanent job. It means that they can go to the bank and get a loan. It means they can do something about a mortgage on a house that they want to buy. It gives them a degree of security which they did not have in the past.

In the member for Lyons’s own electorate, there is the example of the famous Banjo’s Bakehouse in Strahan where AWAs enable workers to be employed not just for six months of the year when the tourists come and then not have a job for the rest of the year; it enables the smoothing out of their employment with different hours in different seasons and different months. It enables those workers to have a permanent job, although with a variation of hours across a period of time. These sorts of examples of the flexibility which is being offered and which has been grasped eagerly by workers in Australia show why we have people using AWAs.

But the problem with the Leader of the Opposition and member for Perth is that the rhetoric that we have heard today is no different to the mantra and the rhetoric we have heard for the last 10 years in this place. The sky was going to fall in when the workplace relations changes were made in 1996. We have seen 1.8 million extra jobs in Australia, a 16.8 per cent increase in real wages for Australians over the last decade compared to just a 1.2 per cent increase for the previous 13 years of the Labor government. We have seen something like an extra 315,000 Australians in work, because of being able to drive down the unemployment rate. If we had not made these changes, according to Access Economics—the economic modelling firm of choice for the Australian Labor Party—the unemployment rate in Australia would be closer to eight per cent rather than the 4.9 per cent it is today. There are more than 300,000 extra jobs that Australians have today because of these changes.

We have seen the IMF and other international organisations saying that the Australian economy is one of the powerhouse economies of the world. I was at the ILO meeting in Geneva last week and had a series of meetings with employment ministers from around the world. One of the most interesting was the meeting with the German employment minister. Germany, of course, still has an unemployment rate of well over 10 per cent—as has France, for that matter. The German employment minister said to me, ‘If we had the unemployment conditions that you’ve got in Australia, if we had the economy of Australia, it’d be like we’re celebrating the World Cup every month, and not just the World Cup that we’re celebrating at the present time.’ All of this is because of the changes and the economic conditions that this government has overseen over the last 10 years.

This was a serious misjudgment on the part of the Leader of the Opposition, and now we have headlines like the one in the Australian today, ‘Beazley another Latham: business’. And why are businesses saying that? Because we had ‘troops home by Christmas’ from Mr Latham and we have ‘AWAs out by Christmas’ from Mr Beazley. Without consultation with his caucus, without consultation with his shadow minister, without consultation, apparently, with his shadow ministry, he just rolls along to the conference on the weekend and repudiates the policy that had been in place prior to that, and repudiates what he had even said himself prior to this.

This is a foolish policy. The reason for it is that the Leader of the Opposition’s leadership was being destabilised, in particular by Unions New South Wales and Mr Robertson and co, who were sending out quite clear messages that they were unimpressed with the way in which the Leader of the Opposition was conducting himself. They pulled him into line. He buckled under, and he changed this policy, because that is what the paymasters in the unions in Australia, which have paid $50 million to the ALP over the last 10 years, wanted with regard to this.

The question is where this goes from here, because the long list of union demands goes on and on and on. There is no secret about the other things that the unions want. They want to do things like reimpose the unfair dismissal laws that cost jobs, have compulsory union bargaining fees, have a payroll tax added to businesses in Australia, have mandated good-faith bargaining  et cetera. The list goes on and on and on, and the Leader of the Opposition, having buckled under and appeased the unions in the first place, is in a position where they know he is weak, like every other Australian does, and know that he will buckle under to all the other proposals. That will drive Australia backwards.

Tony Blair had the courage to stand up to the unions in Great Britain and say, ‘They may not like it, but the real world would be much warmer than the one which they are proposing, because it would be better for the employment prospects and the prosperity of the men and women of Britain.’ Unfortunately, and quite regrettably for Australia, the Leader of the Opposition in this country, the Labor leader in this country, does not have the courage of Mr Blair to stand up to this sort of nonsense. (Time expired)

Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The fact is that the Work Choices legislation will fundamentally change this society because it seeks to drive down wages and conditions. It will hurt ordinary Australians. That is the reality that the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations decided not to mention. Over the last 15 minutes, he had the opportunity to justify why there have been such fundamental changes to our industrial relations system. So little evidence, so little reason, has been given for such fundamental change to this public policy. The reason the government has failed to give compelling answers to questions about why changes have been made to the industrial relations system is that it knows what we know—this system is about driving wages down and setting up two sets of workers in this country. The lucky ones, unfortunately in the minority, will possibly have good or better wages; but the majority of workers in this country—those without the capacity to bargain individually with their employer and those who do not have a rare set of skills to bargain with in the marketplace and cannot argue that their skills are so scarce as to warrant a sufficient wage increase—will find themselves at the bottom of the heap. That is the situation as a result of these changes.

The shadow minister made it very clear: there is no nexus between the changes to the industrial relations system that have been sought and gained by this government and productivity improvements. There has been no argument set in place by the government to explain the nexus—the cause and effect of Work Choices. Instead, empirical evidence gives example after example of maltreatment of employees by employers. Since the act came into operation on 27 March this year, a series of agreements has been lodged with the Office of the Employment Advocate that will drive down wages of ordinary working Australians. I reiterate the statistics that have been provided by the Office of the Employment Advocate to Senate estimates: 100 per cent exclude at least one protected award condition, 64 per cent remove leave loadings, 63 per cent remove penalty rates, 52 per cent remove shift loadings, 40 per cent remove gazetted public holidays and 19 per cent remove all penalties in awards. This is all by virtue of this new instrument, AWAs.

Why is it a new instrument? Taking the no-disadvantage test out of the Workplace Relations Act effectively removes any safety net for ordinary workers. To expect the ordinary worker to negotiate with his or her boss is a complete and utter nonsense. Every worker in this country knows that they cannot go into their boss’s office and say, ‘I just want a 10 per cent wage increase.’ For that matter, they cannot go into the boss’s office and say, ‘I don’t want a 10 per cent cut to my existing conditions of employment and my wage rate.’ The reason they cannot do that, as we all know in this place and as every employee knows in every workplace in this country, is that the capacity for an employee to individually bargain with his or her employer is nigh on impossible, because the relationship is inherently unequal. Whilst Labor did not accept some of the changes that occurred in the Workplace Relations Act, the reason why the no-disadvantage test was inserted into the legislation was to enable its passage through the Senate in 1996.

You can be assured of this, Mr Deputy Speaker: the government did not want a no-disadvantage test in the Workplace Relations Act 1996. The government had to compromise to get that no-disadvantage test inserted into the Workplace Relations Act 1996. As soon as the government took control of the Senate, they ripped the no-disadvantage test out of the act so that an employee would not have any protection whatsoever in attempting to negotiate an individual agreement with their employer.

It is not surprising that, until the operation of this act, only three per cent of the entire workforce of this country were on AWAs. After 10 years in operation, three per cent of the workforce are in receipt of or party to an Australian workplace agreement. I have said this before in this place: how Orwellian is the title Australian workplace agreements? They are not Australian. They are not intrinsic to the way in which Australia has negotiated industrial arrangements since 1901. The fact is that they are alien to the way in which Australians have gone about setting employment conditions in this country. They are certainly not ‘workplace’, because they rely upon the vulnerability of an individual employee to be put in a position to have to accept and to cede the changes sought by employers. As we know, only in the rarest of circumstances would they be ‘agreements’, because unfortunately they are coercive—so much so that the new act actually expressly says that it is not coercive to force someone to take an AWA if they want a job. It expressly says in a provision of the Work Choices legislation that it is not coercive. It has to expressly say that, because in any other common law understanding of contracts of employment you could not force someone to take an agreement without an offer, without consideration or without acceptance. These things are basic standards of common law that have been taken away by this government because it knows it is putting workers in a situation of duress and it wants to expressly allow that to occur.

As someone said to me recently, this is allowing rogue employers to do legally what they have been doing illegally. This effectively ensures that rogue employers who want to act badly are given that imprimatur to treat their employees badly. The worst of it is that they are forcing good employers to consider doing the same. That is a tragedy. Labor knows that the majority of employers do not want to place their workers in unfair situations. Labor understands that most employers want to ensure that their business is operating properly. They want to have a decent relationship with their workforce. In fact, small businesses have a very close relationship with their employees. It is the nature of the business. They know them and they know their families.

We spoke to many small businesses on the task force that went around the country. We were told by a number of small businesses that they were concerned about the way in which the legislation would force them to push wages down. They were also concerned about the prescription, the complexity and the confusion that the laws enshrined. Michael Fern, the owner of an engineering company in Gladstone in Queensland, said:

Clearly I haven’t read all 400 pages and the 800 pages of how to read the legislation or whatever is available. And this isn’t unusual because we are inundated with legislation and if I read it all I wouldn’t do any work. That does concern me greatly, but I don’t really understand the legislation ... Small businesses like mine are the backbone of ... this economy and clearly we can’t spend that time to understand all this legislation so who is it helping? Who’s gaining out of this? I have no idea ... Every day there’s more and more of it and this Work Choices is just another example.

Another small business operator in Melbourne, a pharmacist from Mitcham in Deakin, George Liarakos, who we met in the member for Deakin’s electorate, said to us about the Work Choices act:

To start off with individual agreements, AWAs—the way [the government] are putting the spin on it, it’s a great thing, it’s about workers’ choice. You can actually get rid of unions and bargain for yourself more effectively against an employer. I think that’s crap.

Do you know why the pharmacist in Mitcham thinks it is utter nonsense? Because he knows that his employees do not have the bargaining capacity to bargain with him fairly. And he told us so. He effectively said that they do not have that capacity. He said:

The way I see it, without legal representation ... our accountants, our lawyers ... if we want to draft up something and take advantage of this we could do so easily.

The pharmacist in Melbourne said that if they wanted to draft something up and provide it to their employees, they could take advantage of this easily. That is the new system this government has enacted. Taking away the no-disadvantage test and forcing AWAs without any protection whatsoever is denying the right for employees in this country to bargain effectively. The statistics of the Office of the Employment Advocate that were provided to the Senate estimates committee showed that many of the award conditions have been stripped already from those AWA instruments—and there are more to come. (Time expired)

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I think I am probably more qualified than anyone in this parliament to talk on this particular MPI. Not one of the people opposite has worked in the areas that I have worked in. I started life as a manual cane cutter and a member of the AWU Queensland. One of the problems we have with those opposite is that they are a single species. You have all the union apparatchiks and the shop stewards; you do not have any breadth of thinking whatsoever on the opposition benches.

A few of us on this side have got our hands dirty. I could certainly name as examples the member for Grey and, I dare say, the member for Hume and others who have worked out there in the workforce and understand what the workforce is all about. We have had the flexibility to go out and get better wages. In those days we were the vanguard of aspirational Australia, because we wanted to succeed. As I said, I have cut cane by hand. I have also picked up potatoes. I have been a contractor, a farmer and a publican. As a farmer and a publican, I employed people. So I think I know, right across the board, what employment, wages and work are about. I have not seen anyone on the other side who comes near that.

The problem is that most of those opposite have never worked in the workforce. They do not know what it is about and they have no understanding of what the workers think. I will give you a particular instance, from my days as a cane cutter. In 1959, we were earning about £100 a fortnight. To put that in perspective, that was five times the award rate. In about 1961 there was a good price in sugar and for some unknown reason the union officials said, ‘We want a productivity loading, because the farmers are making too much money.’ They did not come to the cane cutters and ask, ‘Do you want to apply for an increase in your wages?’ They just decided that they were going to go out on strike. A number of us said, ‘No. We are not going to do that.’ But they took us out anyway for a fortnight for a productivity loading. We lost £100 in that fortnight—one-tenth of the cost of a Holden car in those days.

Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

But you still had to pay your union fees.

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

But I still had to pay my union fees, of course, even though they took us out and we lost money. The fact is that we got £2 a fortnight productivity loading. Just imagine how long we were going to have to work to make up the £100 we lost. The thing about this legislation is that it does not abolish unions. I just do not understand why the unions are so petrified. I imagine they are petrified because they do not want to get off their butts and work; they do not want to get out there and represent the workers. If the unions represented the workers, the workers would support them. But they do not; they go out there and look after themselves. The union bosses do deals with some of the big business people around the place. We have all heard about some union reps who have big houses with swimming pools—some of them in Sydney. If they were representing the workers they would have no problems because the legislation allows the unions to negotiate on behalf of the workers. The unions are not abolished, so they should be able to get out there and do something if they are prepared to get off their backsides and do it. I believe in unions. I was a member of a union. But I think the unions have caused this themselves because they have lost sight of what they were intended to do—and that was to represent the majority opinion of workers.

Let us go through some of these issues. I think some of them need to be talked about. The task force that we just heard about from the member for Gorton went through my electorate. Surprisingly, I had a cockatoo at the meeting. Twelve people turned up—12 people. I also checked up with the member for Richmond to see how many turned up there—11 turned up there. The member for Gorton is here quoting what he heard at the task force. For goodness’ sake! If 12 people is representative of the workers of my electorate then I have to say, ‘Pity help us with the government we are going to get from over there.’

Let us look at the Spotlight issue. The Prime Minister has said quite often that you always want to look behind the detail of the issues that are raised in this parliament. You always want to look behind the questions. On the detail that was raised in this parliament about Spotlight in Coffs Harbour and Mrs Harris being offered an AWA, and the 2c that the member for Perth paraded around with and the 2c that was held up here by the members of the opposition: Mrs Harris did not take up the AWA. It was offered to her. She stayed on the award. She was able to stay on the award, and she stayed on the award. Mrs Harris, of course, is an ex-schoolteacher who works 15 hours a week at Spotlight and is the union rep. We didn’t hear about that, did we? No, we never heard about that in the issues that were brought up.

We also heard today about an issue—raised, I think, by the member for Perth—about warehouse wages. I think it was in Sydney; I might be wrong on that. Just by chance, a fortnight ago, flying home from Sydney to Lismore, I happened to meet the son of a very good friend of mine who happened to be on the plane. I said to him, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said, ‘I’m working in Sydney.’ Now, I have nine per cent unemployment in my electorate, and half of them do not want to work. They have said in the papers that they want to continue to surf. This guy had gone out and got a job in a warehouse in Sydney. He was the foreman of the warehouse. And he said to me, ‘You know, we’re offering $25 to $30 an hour’—in a warehouse in Sydney—‘and we can’t get workers.’ Yet out in the mid-west of Sydney there is 10 per cent unemployment. What is the member for Watson doing about that, about people who are only a few kilometres away? Here is the work. It is available. But I dare say he would be like the member for Richmond. When I raised the issue in the papers up in my area about the fact that I have nine per cent unemployment yet employers cannot get workers, she said, ‘You can’t force them to work.’ That is typical Labor, isn’t it? That is typical Labor; there is no doubt about it.

Let us talk about another issue that keeps on being referred to and raised by the Labor Party, about the government holding down wages. The Prime Minister has told us that in our period of government wages have increased by 16 per cent, compared to three per cent—or I think it might have been two per cent—under the Labor Party. Let us talk about it. They keep on saying, ‘Of course, if the government’s offers’—which I dare say means the employers’ offers—‘in the arbitration commission were accepted, then wages would be much lower.’ They do not refer to the real issue here. The real issue here is the old arbitration commission, which I used to deal with as chairman of the Cane Growers. That is the real issue, because you have these ambit claims put in by the unions that are about 10 or 20 times more than they expect to get. What do you think the bosses are going to do? Do you think they are going to make an offer that is somewhere near it? Of course they are going to put their bid down low, and it is arbitrated in between. That was the way the system worked. And yet they are dishonestly trying to say that this would have been accepted because that was the offer that was made. It was the way the system worked, and that was what was wrong with the system. So let us get rid of that baloney that goes on about that particular issue.

I come from an area on the coast. I do not know where these people come from, because quite frankly they do not understand what goes on in business. How do you think we have shops open on a Thursday night, on a Saturday morning and on a Sunday morning if there is not flexibility in the workforce? The flexibility in the workforce is that the bosses and the workers come to an agreement. Many of the workers like the flexibility, I can tell you. In my area, they like the flexibility, because if they work on a Saturday or Sunday morning then they can take two days off through the week if they want to. I can tell you that many of them like to go fishing, to go surfing or to play golf for two days through the week. They take the flexibility because that offer is available to them.

This morning we saw some television. I found it very interesting. It showed Greg Combet and Premier Iemma. Greg Combet was saying to the nurses of New South Wales, ‘The federal legislation will reduce your wages 20 per cent,’ and Premier Iemma was getting up and supporting him. Who employs the nurses in New South Wales? Premier Iemma. And he is complaining because he is going to cut their wages 20 per cent. That is what they said they were going to do: cut the wages 20 per cent. They are under a state award. (Time expired)

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The discussion is now concluded.