Michael Johnson (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. Would the minister inform the House of any changes to the workplace relations system that protects the conditions and entitlements of working Australians? What types of agreements will be covered by any changes, and are there any alternative policies?

Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Ryan for the question, and I note that the unemployment rate in the Ryan electorate is 1.8 per cent. The Australian government will today introduce reforms to the Workplace Relations Act that will provide a stronger safety net for over 7½ million Australian workers on collective agreements and Australian workplace agreements. The new fairness test will be applied to workers with a base salary of less than $75,000, and therefore it is going to cover more than 90 per cent of workers. The fairness test will ensure that workers who trade off benefits like penalty rates, allowances and loadings will receive fair compensation. The starting point for fair compensation is more money. If non-monetary compensation is agreed between the employer and the employees, it must be of equivalent monetary value or of significant value to the employee. So it is a high hurdle.

The fairness test is very similar to the old no disadvantage test. However, it is technically different in one significant way: under our laws, annual leave and sick leave are not tradable, as they were under the old laws. This fairness test put in place a higher level of protection for workers than the common law agreements which the Labor Party believe are the cornerstone of their industrial relations policy. Under the fairness test, Australian workplace agreements will be individually and independently assessed for fairness to ensure that people are properly compensated for losing penalty rates, leave loadings and so on. Under the Labor Party’s common law contracts, it is left to the employers to undertake the test. When employers undertake such tests, such benchmarks, of course they make mistakes. It is far less likely that you are going to have those sorts of mistakes under an Australian workplace agreement, because we have put in place the mechanism that ensures that the Workplace Authority will test every agreement.

We do not know how the Labor Party are going to vote on this bill. The Labor Party are awaiting the instructions of the trade union bosses. On 2 May this year, on The 7.30 Report, Greg Combet said:

That is within John Howard’s power now. If he is concerned about people losing take-home pay and their penalty rates and their public holiday pay and the like, he controls both houses of Parliament. He could fix that now.

So Greg Combet, who has been notably absent in the last few days, has already instructed the Labor Party to support the fairness test. This fairness test increases and improves the safety net for Australian workers. I would expect that the Labor Party would support that. But, given their history on this, they are hypocrites. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition pretends she did not criticise the Lilac City Motor Inn when she was on the John Laws program. In fact, she rang John Laws to expressly criticise that hardworking family business. The Labor Party are hypocrites when it comes to industrial relations, because all of their policy, all of their work and all of their deeds are written by the trade union bosses.