Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, it is like deja vu all over again. Here we are, again, debating another piece of industrial relations legislation that the government is rushing through this place, drafted at the last minute and debated at short notice. Here we are, again, seeing the government adding to the mound of legislation representing its supposedly simpler industrial relations system, adding to the complexity, confusion and chaos created by this government for Australian employers and employees. Here we are, again, with another example of this government arrogantly thinking it can mislead Australian working families by suggesting it has a quick fix to the overwhelming unfairness in its Work Choices laws. Here we are, again, with another round of multimillion dollar taxpayer funded political advertising and, of course, you guessed it: it is all happening in the run-up to an election.

The only thing of course that we do not ever see from this government—and we will never see—is a real belief in fairness at work. This is a government operating with a simple, arrogant approach to governing this country: pollsters first, advertising second, policy third. That has been the genesis of this bill, the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007. That is what this bill is all about, and that is undeniable on the facts as we know them—pollsters first, advertising second, policy third. The bill is not about the government listening to the Australian people; it is about the government listening to its pollsters. The bill is not about tough decisions, conviction and the national interest; it is about politics first, second and third. The bill is not about the government providing fair compensation to employees; it is about the government hiding the unfairness of its legislation until after the next election.

The government claims that this bill is about fairness. I want to clearly explain the government’s political strategy on this bill and the opposition’s policy response. In this term of office, since the 2004 election, the Prime Minister has changed. The Prime Minister secured control of the Senate. The arrogance that came with that power caused him to betray the Aussie battlers he had always claimed to represent. The Prime Minister faced a choice after he got control of the Senate: a choice between meeting the need for fairness for Aussie battlers in the workplace or making the law of Australia conform to his extreme views on industrial relations. He chose the latter. He deserted the battlers; he embraced the extreme. Having seen the Prime Minister desert hardworking Australians, Aussie battlers have repaid the insult. They have deserted the Prime Minister. The government’s opinion polling—ironically, all paid for by the taxes of hardworking Australians—would have screamed that battlers did not want the Prime Minister’s extreme Work Choices laws.

Today we have seen government ministers at odds on what is the cover story for these extreme Work Choices laws. They cannot even get their lines right. In the debate about the guillotine of this legislation, the former Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations—now the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship—stood at the dispatch box and suggested that this bill was about correcting unintended consequences of the original Work Choices legislation. The government did intend these consequences and it is nonsense to suggest otherwise. Indeed, today the current Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, in responding to data on the time that Australians now spend at work, said, ‘That is a furphy, because the only time you could ever trade away penalty rates without compensation has been in the last 13 months.’ That is too right. The only time in this country when workers have been able to trade away penalty rates without compensation was as a result of the government’s extreme Work Choices legislation. That was not an unintended consequence. That was at the core of what was intended.

Indeed, the government’s advertising at the time made it explicit that this was possible. There was an example of Billy, who got a minimum wage job, no penalty rates and nothing else, and the government stood inside and outside this place and justified that example. At the core of what they wanted to achieve were laws which enabled basic conditions such as penalty rates, overtime, shift loadings, meal breaks et cetera to be stripped away from workers. That has happened in the last 13 months. We now have that verified from the mouth of the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. His words were: ‘The only time you could ever trade away penalty rates without compensation has been in the last 13 months.’ That is what the government wanted and it is what the government still want. The only thing that has changed is that government pollsters have told them loud and clear that it is not what the Australian community wants, and that it is important for the government to pretend, in the period between now and the election, that they will not let that happen. It is important to put up that pretence, it is important to stop saying ‘Work Choices’ and it is important to put government advertising on TV.

But no Australian should make a mistake about this. This is what the government wanted, it is what they designed the laws for, it is what they still want and it is what will be back with full force—probably even more force—if the government is re-elected. The Prime Minister is responding to the politics of this, not with real substance, but with spin. We know that he no longer says the words ‘Work Choices’. Indeed, we have had humorous incidents in question time, where he stood at the dispatch box minute after minute, mumbling and bumbling in a desperate attempt not to say ‘Work Choices’, as the opposition chided him: ‘Say the name, say the name.’ He just will not say ‘Work Choices’.

The Prime Minister no longer says ‘Work Choices’ because he knows that that is the hated name of his hated laws. He is using taxpayers’ funds to try to fix his political problem through advertising and he brings this bill to the House. The Prime Minister is of course desperate for a political fix. To get a political fix, he needs to pretend to fix the extreme and unfair nature of his Work Choices laws. I say ‘pretend’ because he does not want to fix the substance. Work Choices is his creation, it is his political labour of love and he wants it to continue as it is. This bill is his way of pretending to fix Work Choices without really fixing it. It is a way of getting to say the word ‘fairness’ without bringing real fairness.

For a bill that is supposed to be about fairness, it is interesting that the government could only bring themselves to mention the word ‘fair’ five times in 76 pages of new law. We see the word ‘fair’ only five times in 76 pages of new law. We all know that the Prime Minister is a clever politician, but the fact that this is a quick political fix, not a real fix, is made abundantly clear by just stopping for a moment and asking yourself one question: does any Australian really believe this bill would have been brought into this parliament if it were not an election year? We should stop and contemplate that for a moment. Even government members could not manage, surely, to come into this House during this debate and claim the contrary. It would just be so absurd. It would render them open to so much ridicule if they came into this place and tried to pretend that the only reason that this bill is here is not that it is an election year. Every Australian would say yes to that proposition. The only reason this bill is in this parliament is that it is an election year. Australians will judge the Prime Minister’s motives. The task for Labor is to judge the bill.

Any analysis of the bill shows that the so-called fairness test within it is fake. It will not bring Australians the fairness that they have lost because of the extreme nature of Work Choices; the only way to do that is the Labor way. It is getting rid of Work Choices, it is repealing the Work Choices laws and it is ending Australian workplace agreements. That is the only way of fixing the unfairness at the heart of Work Choices. The Labor way is getting rid of the Work Choices laws in their entirety—lock, stock and barrel—and making sure that they are replaced with laws that have fairness at the heart of them for Australian families. The approach Labor have taken to this bill is that it does no harm and that if this bill might make a difference to one worker then we should support it. Theoretically if a low-paid worker is offered an Australian workplace agreement this afternoon and that Australian workplace agreement takes away all 11 of their protected award conditions—like overtime and penalty rates—for no monetary or non-monetary compensation at all then this bill might, and I deliberately say ‘might’, stop that AWA. The reason I say ‘might’ is that the process of judging that Australian workplace agreement is secret and non-reviewable.

We have seen some extreme cases. There was the case of the Darrell Lea Australian workplace agreement, which stripped conditions like penalty rates for not one cent increase per hour for the hours worked by those employees. In those circumstances, where not one cent is offered for the loss of conditions, it is possible that this bill might stop that AWA. Because there is that chance in that one case that the bill might make a difference, on that basis Labor is prepared to support it. Then of course we can get back to the real debate. The real debate is about getting rid of Work Choices entirely, because you cannot bring fairness back into Australian workplaces without getting rid of Work Choices—all of it—and the Australian workplace agreements that come with it.

Let us think about all the other cases of Australian workplace agreements and what this bill would do, or in truth fail to do, for all those other circumstances. In all of those broad cases, apart from that narrow case I have put, this bill has to be judged a failure. Firstly, the hundreds of thousands of workers who have already signed unfair Australian workplace agreements and have received no compensation for losing conditions get nothing from this bill at all. The Prime Minister has acknowledged that. The bill will not produce any fair outcome for Australian workers who lose other important award conditions like rostering protections, redundancy or long service leave entitlements. Under the government’s test, these employees are not entitled to these award conditions or any compensation in lieu of them at all. In fact, if they are offered these basic entitlements, which used to form part of the safety net for workers in this country, this can be considered fair compensation for the loss of other award conditions like penalty rates and overtime.

Let us think about that for a moment. You might be a worker who has historically enjoyed access to redundancy pay. You are worried that if you are made redundant then there would be a transition time. You still have to pay the mortgage and the bills and feed the kids. You would have an entitlement to redundancy pay—probably not very much but an entitlement to redundancy pay—under the industrial norms of this country. Under this bill, giving you that basic entitlement could be weighed as fair compensation for losing your penalty rates—for losing one of the protected award conditions. That is not a protected award condition. Penalty rates are supposedly a protected award condition—though we know of course the words ‘protected by law’ have meant nothing in industrial relations. So your employer could say to you: ‘That basic thing that used to be in the safety net, I’m going to give you that. But in exchange for that, I’m taking away your penalty rates.’ That sort of balance is perfectly possible under this legislation.

Let us think about the importance of those award entitlements that can still be stripped away without compensation. I asked the Prime Minister the other day to think of a mother working in a retail shop in Melbourne under the Victorian shops award. Under the award this working mother would receive, in normal circumstances, at least 14 days notice of a change in her roster. This protection means that this mother has the time, and the certainty, to arrange child care where her shifts change. If there is an emergency, the notice period is 48 hours. That is still presumably—though with great difficulty—enough time to arrange something for the care of the kids. However, if this hardworking mother was today offered an AWA, under this bill that standard award protection could be ripped away from her without any compensation.

This bill does nothing to protect that woman. She could be stripped of her right to 14 days notice of a change of roster, or 48 hours notice in an emergency, and literally be told that her rosters can change with five minutes notice. It does not matter about the childcare arrangements; she could lose her entitlement to that notice and receive nothing for it at all—she will just have it stripped away. If she were to be provided with this notice period, it might be considered fair compensation for the loss of other protected award conditions, particularly as under this bill there is a special weighing of the employee’s personal circumstances. The bill might not be fair to employees generally, but there are other unfairnesses that I want to speak about besides the stripping away of award conditions like notice of roster changes and redundancy.

This bill contains a section that ought to make people worry very grievously about what the bill might mean. It contains a section which enables the personal circumstances of an employee to be weighed in the determination of whether or not the industrial conditions offered to them are fair. This is the first time in this nation’s history that your personal circumstances determine your worth. Does this mean that it will be fair for an employee with children who prefers to work Saturday because their partner is home to not be paid penalty rates but to work side by side with workers who are? And who assesses the impact of these personal circumstances? From the legislation it is solely the Workplace Authority that receives these details, and it receives them from the employer. Do Australians really want details of their personal circumstances—their family arrangements, their childcare arrangements, whether they are married, whether their partner is working, whether they are a single mum; all of these personal issues like whether Gran routinely provides care for the kids, whether she cannot, whether she is sick and whether that means she cannot provide care any longer—to be forwarded by their employer to a bureaucracy in Canberra and weighed by bureaucrats who do not even have to talk to the employee about the basics of their lives?

As we consider more and more examples like this and more and more of the factors that go into this test, the more the process becomes engulfed in darkness and secrecy. This bill sets up a secretive, unwieldy and unreviewable process for this new Workplace Authority to unilaterally determine whether or not an agreement is fair. The authority are not required to give reasons about how they assessed the monetary value of something provided to an employee. They do not have to give reasons about how they assessed the non-monetary value of something provided to an employee. They do not have to give reasons for what they think about an employee’s work situation or personal circumstances, or how these considerations are relevant. The Workplace Authority are not even required to give reasons about how they reached their decision—about why they think an agreement should be judged fair or unfair. There is no requirement that an employee or employer be given the opportunity to give their view, or to give an opposing view, about the value of entitlements or the overall fairness of their workplace agreement.

The process allows an employer to give a unilateral undertaking to make an agreement fair, without giving the employee a chance to agree or not to agree to the terms. There is no time limit for the Workplace Authority to tell employers and employees whether the test is going to be applied, what the designated award might be and whether their agreement even passes the test. That could all just float along. There is no right of appeal for any of these things unless Australian employers and employees want to go to the High Court. How laughable is that? An employee has their employer submit their circumstances, it goes into a bureaucracy in Canberra and it emerges at the other end having weighed things like your personal circumstances without having to have contacted you to discuss what you think are your personal circumstances. It is a new definition of the term ‘personal’ if they can know everything about you but you do not even get to describe it for yourself. It goes into this bureaucracy in Canberra, it emerges at some undefined time later at the other end of the bureaucracy and, if you want to dispute the decision, the only way you can do it is to go to the High Court. Films like The Castle aside, how many Australians are going to be able to take their case to the High Court? Of course no-one is. No-one is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and years reviewing a decision about penalty rates. Of course they will not. In effect you have no rights of review when this secret agency weighs your employment agreement and in the process weighs things about you, your personal life and your personal circumstances. This bill creates a system where employers and employees can be left in a dark wilderness for weeks or months without knowing whether their agreements, which will already be in operation, are lawful. And the bureaucracy that comes with this arrangement is unbelievable. According to the explanatory memorandum, the government has been forced to spend an additional $370.3 million for the implementation of the so-called fairness test.

We did not have the budget that long ago. Of course, this expenditure was not in the budget—$370.3 million of new money. The additional funding is split across the Workplace Authority, formerly known as the Office of the Employment Advocate; the Workplace Ombudsman, formerly known as the Office of Workplace Services; and the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations. The only thing that has not changed its name is the department. We now have the legislation formerly known as Work Choices; the Office of the Employment Advocate having changed its name to the Workplace Authority; and the Workplace Ombudsman, which was formerly known as the Office of Workplace Services. The Workplace Authority gets an additional $303.5 million and the other agency gets $64.1 million, whilst the department gets an additional $2.7 million.

We learned during the estimates hearings of Monday, 28 May 2007, from the current head of the former Office of the Employment Advocate, Mr Peter McIlwain, that hundreds of contractors would be needed to implement the fairness test. New staff would be required to complete training for a month as part of their appointment to assessing agreements against this so-called new test. There is little wonder that this is the case. Mr McIlwain also advised that there are in excess of 21,345 agreements which have been lodged since the date of commencement of these new arrangements and which now have to be looked at.

This funding of $370 million, coupled with the hiring of hundreds of new staff, represents a massive increase in government and in particular a massive increase in the bureaucracy administering our industrial relations system. It increases the size of the Office of the Employment Advocate, now the Workplace Authority, and the former Office of Workplace Services. It increases expenditure across the forward estimates. Mr Deputy Speaker, you will find these figures staggering but, as a total across the forward estimates, the additional funding brings spending on industrial relations to $1.836 billion—$1.8 billion from $1.4 billion; an enormous amount of spending.

Indeed, while this government has talked the talk of small government, it continues to set new standards of big government with its actions and spending. These additional resources are two-thirds the size of the financial implications of the original Work Choices bill. The advertising bill for six days is 10 per cent of the total amount originally budgeted for Work Choices. And the number of new staff will almost double the number of existing staff in the two offices, that of the Employment Advocate and the former Office of Workplace Services, from approximately 536 people to 1,102 people.

Prior to this layer of additional bureaucracy, the firm Harmers Workplace Lawyers released an analysis which estimated the compliance costs associated with the record-keeping requirements of Work Choices. They estimated that the cost to small and medium enterprises was more than $950 million in employee time alone. The compliance costs suggested by Harmers relate only to record-keeping and do not include a range of other costs, such as seeking expert advice from lawyers or workplace consultants, time taken to create AWAs, increased reliance on the court system rather than tribunals for dispute resolution, and the like. This is a new bureaucracy on the shoulders of Australian business.

This bill now deals with two other matters which have been the subject of late amendments which I referred to in the debate about the guillotine earlier today. One deals with enterprise bargaining fees, one deals with a compliance—

Stewart McArthur (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr McArthur interjecting

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Corangamite for his assistance but I do not need it. One deals with enterprise bargaining and one deals with a technical registration problem for federal unions, which has particularly impacted upon those who represent our police. The Labor Party will support both of those amendments and we certainly will vote for the bill overall with those two amendments in there, but I do restate the shambles that this legislative process has been, that those amendments were not in the original bill presented to the House on Monday.

I will conclude by saying: Work Choices has to go. Even as amended by this bill, it is still a gross unfairness for Australian families. The passage of this bill does no harm and, given that the passage of this bill might assist even one worker, Labor will not stand in the way of that worker getting that assistance. We actually care about employees in this country. We care about them every day, not just in the days leading up to an election. That is the difference between this side of politics and the other side. Labor believes in fairness at work each and every day; we believe in that fairness being protected—

Jim Lloyd (Robertson, Liberal Party, Minister for Local Government, Territories and Roads) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

So do we.

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

and that will be at the centre of the system of industrial relations that Labor seeks to bring to this country.

I will now move a second reading amendment standing in my name. And may I conclude by saying—

Jim Lloyd (Robertson, Liberal Party, Minister for Local Government, Territories and Roads) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Lloyd interjecting

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

and I think the minister at the table, Mr Lloyd, will be interested in this—that later today I will move four in-detail amendments, all about fairness, and if he cares about fairness he can vote for them. With those words I move:

That all words after “That” be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:“whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House condemns the Government’s lack of honesty about:

(1)

its plans for extreme industrial relations laws before the last election;

(2)

the impact of its inherently unfair Work Choices laws including the way these laws have:

(a)

caused the pay and conditions of individuals on Australian Workplace Agreements to be cut;

(b)

allowed good workers to be dismissed for no reason at all;

(c)

placed an unprecedented paperwork burden on small businesses; and

(d)

destroyed the independent industrial umpire;

(3)

the cost of the taxpayer polling research which apparently led the Government to dropping the term ‘Work Choices’ and bringing this Bill to the House;

(4)

the magnitude of the taxpayer funded advertising campaign to promote the Government’s political spin on industrial relations;

(5)

the fact that this Bill leaves Australians still overwhelmingly exposed to the harshness of Work Choices; and

(6)

its intention to legislate even harsher laws if re-elected”.

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the amendment seconded?

Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the amendment and reserve my right to speak.

Stewart McArthur (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have been listening closely to the member for Lalor and some of the comments she has been making. I observed two things, one of which is that she is going to remove the industrial relations legislation put forward by the Howard government lock, stock and barrel. She is putting forward in the parliament that that would be the intention of the Labor Party if, by chance, they came to the government benches. My second observation is that the member for Lalor does not have a clear proposition to put before the Australian people as to what she would put in place of the current industrial relations legislation. So that is quite clear from her remarks, and her amendment before the House also reflects the opposition’s woolly and unsubstantiated view of industrial relations legislation.

I am delighted to speak on the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007, which will ensure that the government’s objectives of improved wages and flexible employment conditions under our workplace relations reforms are achieved. This bill is front and centre in the public debate about whether the national government is going to help move Australia into the future or whether we are going to hold back our country, our people and businesses with policies of the past, just as the member for Lalor has enunciated in the last 30 minutes. The amendments put forward in this bill are intended to help ensure that Australia’s workplaces are a constructive part of the modern, dynamic, flexible economy and that the Australian people, who work hard to help build this nation through their enterprise, skills and efforts, are appropriately rewarded.

Before I make specific reference to the bill, it is important to emphasise the clear philosophical objectives of the bill and the core vision that underpins the government’s efforts to improve the working conditions of Australian families. The first objective is that a worker and an employer should be able to sit down and agree on terms and conditions of employment that are to the mutual benefit of both parties. I emphasise that. (Quorum formed) Individual workers and employers are in the best position to decide what employment conditions, wages, hours of work, flexibility and bonuses will deliver a suitable reward for effort, provide encouragement and get the job done. Some people suggest that politicians in Melbourne, Sydney or Canberra should set wages and conditions, but there is no way the parliament or the bureaucracy can dictate the best set of wages and conditions for all of Australia’s 10 million workers.

Some people think the industrial relations commissioner should set wages and conditions by reaching some compromise between the ambit claims of unions and businesses that are fought out in the adversarial environment of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. That process has been a proven failure in addressing the needs of individual workplaces and individual workers.

There can be no-one better placed to know the interests and needs of individual workers than the workers themselves, and there can be no-one in a better position to understand the needs of the business than the employer. This is why the government has taken action to make it easy for employees and employers to sit down and negotiate their own terms and conditions of employment that are mutually beneficial. The second objective is that the government wants to create an industrial relations system that encourages higher wages, better pay and more profitable businesses that can generate new jobs. Better wages and higher pay are the objectives in introducing flexibility to the industrial relations system. No-one wants wages to go down or families to be put under increased pressure.

The Labor Party and the unions, who have bankrolled the Kevin Rudd election campaign, have talked a lot about the unfairness of the flexible workplace system but they have struggled to come up with concrete, real-life examples of where Australian workers are worse off. Labor and the unions have tried to create a perception through advertising—a major advertising campaign, I might say, with huge amounts of dollars involved—that some working Australians in lower income jobs might be worse off under a flexible industrial relations system. They have failed to produce hard evidence both here in the parliament and in their public relations campaign.

The reality of Australian workplace agreements is that an employee will only sign one if it is in their interests and if it is more attractive than their current award conditions. That is my fundamental tenet. That is what I fundamentally believe, and I know the evidence on the record suggests that is the case. Why should any worker sign an AWA when legally they do not have to if the AWA is for less pay or less suitable conditions than the pre-existing award? The changes that are brought forward in this bill will address the uncertainty that has been generated by the ACTU advertisements and the Labor Party. These changes will introduce a legislated safety net provision to ensure that any AWA agreed from 7 May 2007 must provide for fair and reasonable compensation when protected award conditions are traded off. All this is for the benefit of the worker—and I again emphasise that.

When I rose in this place in November 2005 to speak on the Workplace Relations Amendments (Work Choices) Bill 2005, I did so with a belief that these reforms would improve the conditions of Australian workers and create extra job opportunities for unemployed Australians and also for people who had been out of the labour market and would like to do more work. When I look at the actual job outcomes over the last 13 months, I note we can see that the early experience of life under the more flexible IR system is more jobs and higher pay. Over the year since March 2006, more than 326,000 new jobs have been created. This means 326,000 Australians and their families are now earning more and are in a more stable financial position than was the case prior to these reforms.

I would not be so bold as to claim that the IR changes are the sole causal factor of these positive job outcomes, but I have no doubt that our reforms have been a very positive factor. Of particular interest is the fact that 85 per cent, or 277,200, of the new jobs generated in the past year since the implementation of flexible workplace relationships have been full-time jobs. That is a remarkable achievement in an economy that on some occasions has been moving towards casualisation. Prior to the government’s changes, unions were concerned about casualisation of the workforce. The experience of the past year would indicate that employers have responded to the new workplace relations and the abolition of Labor’s flawed unfair dismissal system by offering full-time jobs instead of casual options. That emphasises the point that changes to unfair dismissal encouraged full-time jobs rather than casual jobs that were not subject to unfair dismissal provisions.

On the wages front, Australian Bureau of Statistics wage-price index data shows that on average wages have increased 4.1 per cent since March 2006. I emphasise that point: since the introduction of the government’s workplace relations system wages have increased, especially when compared to the rhetoric of those opposite. Real wages have grown by 19.8 per cent since 1996, the result of the greater flexibilities that the government has introduced into the industrial relations system progressively since that election in 1996. By comparison, the value of real wages under the previous Hawke and Keating governments decreased by 1.8 per cent. That is the system that the Leader of the Opposition and the member for Lalor want to take Australians back to, the award system that has been advocated by the member for Lalor, whose intent is emphasised by the amendments tabled in the House this morning.

Workers have taken the opportunity to have flexibility, they have taken the opportunity to negotiate their own wages and conditions, and they have negotiated higher and better wages and conditions. Information provided by the minister shows that employees on AWAs are earning on average nine per cent more than employees on collective agreements and 94 per cent more than employees on award rates.

So we have the situation that AWAs provide a greater productivity than the former award structure. We see this in the factories, in the workplaces and in those plants that I visited. We know that mining industries in the Pilbara region of Western Australia have now become highly profitable apart from the commodity prices that are being received. They are highly productive. The culture that pervaded those industries for 20 years before the introduction of the AWAs has been overcome. The situation in Western Australia is that those employees have cashed out their award conditions and have found themselves remarkably well ahead and enjoying the prosperity of the commodity price boom. No centralised wage-fixing system could have provided that productivity and profitability.

We find that the profitability of the better industries is not being spread across Australia, as was the case with the centralised wage-fixing system and as we found in 1981 under the Fraser government when the centralised wage-fixing system brought about an explosion of wages. Because one sector was doing well it was considered by the centralised wage-fixing system that everyone else in Australia should enjoy that so-called prosperity. It proved a false dawn. In fact, that was a key factor in both unemployment and increases in inflation. The strike rates since figures have been held, since 1913, indicate virtually no strikes in the Australian economy under the current arrangement. That is a far cry from the 1950s and 1960s under the centralised wage-fixing system.

This bill provides some surety as to fair pay and conditions for those workers receiving under $75,000 per annum. This ensures that those workers who might be at the lower end of the spectrum will be protected by the law of this parliament. (Quorum formed)

The existing workplace laws provide protected conditions under the Australian fair pay and conditions standard: minimum wages set by the Fair Pay Commission; a maximum of a 38-hour ordinary working week; four weeks annual leave; personal and carers leave, including sick leave; and parental leave, including maternity leave. The expanded safety net provided by the fairness test will make sure that there is a fair and reasonable compensation payment built into individual AWAs in recompense where the following items are traded and cashed out: shift and overtime loadings, annual leave loadings, public holidays, monetary allowances, incentive based payments and bonuses, penalty rates and rest breaks. This safety net will ensure fairness for workers who are in a vulnerable position—fairness for workers who are signing up for jobs in low-income roles where there might be little bargaining power. Some people have expressed concerns about the fairness of young workers, 16-, 17- and 18-year-old first-time workers, negotiating pay and conditions with a potential boss. The fairness test and safety net will ensure fairness for our young Australians.

The fundamental test of AWAs has been that workers get paid more; otherwise they choose to remain on award conditions. The safety net will ensure that people are better off if they choose to sign an AWA. This legislation demonstrates the strong commitment by the government that a more flexible industrial relations system should work to the positive benefit of workers. Industrial relations is not a winner-take-all environment, as the class war relics of the labour movement would have us believe. Instead, employees, employers and the whole country should benefit from cooperative industrial relations where higher pay and improved profitability are the natural outcomes for workers and employees working hand in hand on shared goals for mutual benefit. The Labor Party and unions should always remember that even under a class warfare model of industrial relations there is no job in a bankrupt business. Those opposite do not fully understand that.

The legislation will establish a Workplace Authority—replacing the Office of the Employment Advocate—which will assess AWAs for compliance and fairness. Where a new AWA that has been entered into from 7 May 2007 does not meet the fairness test, the Workplace Authority will work with employers to ensure that the agreement is upgraded to meet the fairness test requirements. In such a situation, employers will receive back pay. An employee cannot be sacked because an AWA has been found not to comply with the laws and fairness test. The assessment of AWAs under the fairness test will not involve legalistic hearings. This will not create an onerous red tape burden on businesses. There must be identifiable parties. An unfair test cannot be run on mythical arrangements.

The new industrial relations system under the Howard government will replace the 4,000 awards. This is what the member for Lalor would return to. I note the very good work of the Alcoa plant in my electorate and, in the coastal resorts, the flexibility that has resulted for the smaller restaurants and motels from the workplace changes. I strongly commend this legislation, even given the interruptions I have had from those opposite, who are rather unhappy that we are introducing sensible, carefully thought through legislation. (Time expired)

Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If Australia is to move forward and prosper as a nation, we need a modern industrial relations system that balances the flexibility required by business with the security needed by employees and their families. This government’s extreme industrial relations system has tipped the balance too far against working families by removing things like overtime and penalty rates, leave loadings, rostering protections, and redundancy pay for many. The amendments contained in the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007 will not—I repeat, will not—restore the balance. They will not restore sufficient basic conditions that Australian families rely on. They will not restore the faith of the Australian people, lost by a government who did not even see fit to consult them on their industrial relations laws at the last election. Work Choices is at the heart of why people no longer trust John Howard and Peter Costello. Prior to the last election, Work Choices was never mentioned. The government—

Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I take a point of order. It is absolutely important that the standing orders relating to the proper identification of members in this place are upheld. The member for Lilley has not done that.

Kim Wilkie (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member for Moreton will resume his seat. The member for Lilley has the call and is reminded to refer to honourable members by their title or seat.

Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, they don’t like it because they know that Work Choices is at the heart of why people no longer trust the Prime Minister, John Howard, and the Treasurer, Peter Costello. Prior to the 2004 election, Work Choices was never mentioned. The government did not seek a mandate for Work Choices or anything that resembled it. The member for Moreton did not take this to the people in Moreton at the last election. When, thanks to Queensland, John Howard won an unexpected Senate majority, he went on national television, put his hand on his heart and declared before the people that he would not abuse or misuse the mandate that he had been unexpectedly given. But he has been abusing that mandate ever since then. Nowhere is that more evident than it is in Work Choices—and the Australian people know it.

The Australian people have good reason not to trust a pre-election Prime Minister and a pre-election Treasurer. They have more form than a Melbourne Cup race book. The Australian people also know that if the Prime Minister is re-elected we will not only see a return to Work Choices as we have known it; the Prime Minister will go further. If the Prime Minister is re-elected we will see harsher industrial relations laws in this country. Why do we know that? Because his key supporters have said precisely that. He believes in these laws. His key supporters believe in them and that is why they will make them harsher if they are re-elected. Senator Minchin told the HR Nicholls Society, when he did not know that a journalist was in the room, that Work Choices was only the first instalment in the government’s IR plans. The Treasurer has not ruled out harsher laws either. We have the finance minister and the Treasurer all on the record leaving open the possibility of making these laws harsher after the next election.

What is now clear from the bill that is before the House today is that the government now know they have gone too far with their extreme laws, which rip away penalty rates and other conditions. They know they are out of step with the Australian community, so what they are trying to do is to beat a temporary retreat, to pretend that somehow they have wound back these laws. They are not fooling anyone with this attempt at an extreme makeover and a political retreat. Why is it that they have instructed the Workplace Infoline to drop the name ‘Work Choices’ from its language? Why is it that they are spending millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on political advertising just a few months out from the election? It is to save their political hide, but I think the Australian people have seen through this mob.

This bill is about clever politics. It is not about good policy; it is about creating a perception. It is not about restoring sound process. It will take a lot more than a multimillion-dollar taxpayer funded advertising campaign to restore balance to Australia’s industrial relations system. The bill says there is a new test which is somehow supposed to strengthen the security of Australian families and working Australians. But there are holes so big in this test that you could drive a truck through them. They have not put a safety net in place or, if they have, it has gigantic holes in it. It is a small step forward, but the fundamental unfairness of this legislation remains. Its elements are ill defined and it does not protect basic conditions Australian families rely on. Of course it comes with a bureaucratic army: two new institutions—the Office of the Workplace Ombudsman and the Workplace Authority—and a compliance framework, we have learnt, which will involve recruiting 600 inspectors to make the system work.

If fairness has been restored, why is there a need for 600 inspectors? If they have gone all the way to restore these conditions, why do they need 600 inspectors? Is it not the case that the laws are still unfair? That is why 600 inspectors are required. Instead of policing bad laws, what about putting in place fair laws in the first place? I will tell you why. Because they are not committed to fair laws. They are committed to an extreme makeover just before the election. They will come back after the election and go down the same road again, and double it, because that is the record of the Howard government.

Compared with the system the government introduced last year, these changes may improve the situation for some people, and that is a good thing. I am not convinced it will, but I cannot see how it will make them worse. So for this reason we do not want to prolong the uncertainty caused by these changes. We will not seek to delay the passage of this bill through the parliament, but we have very serious concerns, as the Deputy Leader of the Opposition has already noted. We are concerned that these changes do nothing to protect important award conditions, such as redundancy, rostering protections, long service leave and so on. There is a lack of detail about the meaning of terms like ‘fair compensation’, ‘exceptional circumstances’ or ‘compensation of significant value’. There is disturbingly little scope for scrutiny of the decisions made by the Workplace Authority under these changes.

In short, there is nothing in these amendments that diminishes our resolve to repeal Work Choices and replace it with a system that delivers an appropriate balance between the flexibility needed by a business and the security needed by employees and their families. A sensible and modern industrial relations system takes a middle path that balances flexibility needed by business with security needed by employees and their families and this bill does not achieve that. It certainly goes nowhere near that middle path—the middle path put forward by the Labor Party in this parliament.

If we are to build prosperity into the future beyond the mining boom, current policies need to be directed to lifting productivity and harnessing the talents and abilities of all of our people. The government can dress its industrial relations laws up in all the taxpayer funded spin and propaganda it likes, but this will not alter the fact that the government’s Work Choices industrial relations laws will do nothing—I repeat: nothing—to boost productivity, which has gone backwards in relative terms, on this government’s watch. This government’s failure to invest in the drivers of productivity, despite the rivers of gold flowing from the mining boom, is one of the most significant policy failures in its 11 long years at the helm. The government has been led by a narrow ideological agenda and it has been increasingly forced to rely on desperate arguments to justify the benefits of Work Choices. The first desperate economic argument that it puts is that Work Choices has been responsible for our recent jobs growth. This is one of the great cons of the Howard era.

Despite the strongest world economy in more than three decades and a once-in-a-generation mining boom, the Prime Minister would have us believe that Work Choices is responsible for 326,000 jobs created over the 13 months since March last year. This is a whopper. As porkies go, it is a whopper. This is just another economic myth of the Prime Minister designed to detract attention from the fact that the government has no plan to build prosperity beyond the mining boom.

Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The other day the Speaker ruled that the terminology ‘porkies’ in connection with comments made by the Prime Minister was unparliamentary. I ask that the member for Lilley withdraw that comment.

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

The member for Moreton should know that I was not in the chamber at that time. I am not aware of that. I will discuss it with the Clerk. In the meantime the member for Lilley has the call.

Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is just another economic myth of the Prime Minister designed to detract attention from the fact that the government has no plan to build prosperity beyond the mining boom. In a candid interview with the Financial Review on 18 December last year the Treasurer admitted that the government’s workplace laws ‘don’t create jobs; the economy does’, and he is right. The Australian economy is being swept along by the strongest global economic growth in more than 30 years and China’s appetite for our commodities and resources has helped take our terms of trade to their highest level in more than 50 years. So it is not surprising that it is in the mining states of Western Australia and Queensland and in the Northern Territory that employment is being driven. Those two states and the Territory are driving about half of all employment growth, despite the fact that they make up less than one-third of the labour force. While the mining states have seen the greatest benefit from the mining boom, other states have also benefited. As the Reserve Bank noted in its Statement on monetary policy released this month, the increase in Australia’s terms of trade and:

... the associated increase in national income has benefited all states through such channels as higher dividend payments to shareholders, increased demand by the resource-rich states for goods and services from the other states, and higher government revenues.

Labour market economist Professor Bob Gregory has also argued that the major source of jobs growth is not Work Choices but the strong growth in the economy which, in his view:

... is mainly driven by China, both through cheaper import prices and stronger export demand.

That is a view supported by Treasury secretary Ken Henry, who argued in his March departmental speech to staff:

Much of our recent macroeconomic and fiscal success is based on past reforms, assisted by the terms of trade.

If you ever wanted to see a slap in the face for the Treasurer, that is certainly it—a complete repudiation of the rubbish line he has been running in this House about the impact of Work Choices. Yet the Prime Minister continues to pass off the benefits of the mining boom as benefits from his industrial relations laws, as does the Treasurer. The reality is that much of our current employment growth has been generated directly or indirectly by the mining boom. The government is never far back when it comes to claiming credit for things really associated with the mining boom.

Earlier this month the Treasurer sought to claim that the massive tax windfalls generated by the mining boom were a product of his good economic management. The Treasurer attempted to mount the argument that the benefits of the biggest terms of trade boom this country has seen in half a century were somehow quarantined to company tax paid directly by the mining sector. That is complete economic nonsense and flies in the face of the view expressed by the OECD, his own department and many respected economists. As the OECD noted in its Economic Outlook report of last week:

... those countries that are major commodity producers (particularly Norway, Canada and Australia) have benefited from a tax windfall resulting from high commodity prices.

Another slap in the face for the Treasurer. In making these claims, the Treasurer ignores the boost to income tax collections from stronger employment and wage growth, not just in the mining sector itself, but also in other businesses serving it, like construction. He ignores higher capital gains tax from higher dividends paid to shareholders of mining companies, but also other companies that they do business with. He ignores jobs created in the finance sector, which provides the capital for infrastructure projects, and in the booming residential housing sector and so on. These sorts of claims are a reflection of a government that has been all too content to squander the benefits of the mining boom on things like $1.8 billion of political advertising over its 11 years, rather than investing the profits of the boom in future prosperity.

The government has also argued that its industrial relations laws are necessary reforms that will lift productivity and living standards. Yet the government has not once—I repeat, not once—asked its own key economic policy agency, the Treasury, to model the benefits. Why would that be? Why would you not ask the Treasury to model the benefits? Because you would not get the answers that you wanted. That is why the Treasurer has not asked Treasury to do that modelling.

In February this year the Treasury confirmed yet again that the government had not bothered to ask for an analysis of the government’s industrial relations changes since their introduction. The reality is that there is no available economic evidence that suggests the government’s industrial laws will lift productivity growth and future living standards. What we do know is that, since Work Choices was introduced in March last year, productivity growth has pretty much stalled. In fact, the Treasury is projecting that this financial year productivity growth will be zero. That is yet another economic fact that the Treasurer has chosen to ignore. The Prime Minister has further argued that winding back his industrial relations laws—ironically the very thing he is now purporting to do—would damage the economy, weaken our capacity to compete and destroy jobs. It is a claim that is completely bereft of substance. It is not backed up by any empirical evidence. In fact, it is about as credible as his 11 denials of a taxpayer funded climate change ad campaign in the parliament over the last few days.

I know facts and straight talking are something the Prime Minister is not entirely comfortable with, but here are the facts. Labor’s industrial relations system will take a middle path. It will be underpinned by workplace level collective enterprise bargaining, where employees and employers can directly bargain over employment conditions and productivity improvements. We know that an economy operating under an industrial relations system based on workplace bargaining can generate strong productivity growth. Over the five years after Labor engineered the shift from centralised wage fixation to enterprise bargaining in the 1990s, productivity grew at the rapid pace of 3.2 per cent per year. In the five years after the Prime Minister introduced AWAs, productivity grew by an average of just 2.2 per cent a year. As I have said, since Work Choices was introduced, productivity has barely grown at all.

The government’s industrial relations laws reflect a narrow economic agenda. They are not the pathway to higher productivity. They are not the pathway to higher living standards. They do not build prosperity by undermining security. You do not create wealth by cutting wages and conditions of hardworking Australians. You create wealth by building a strong economy, by investing in the skills of your people, by boosting productivity through modern infrastructure, technology and innovation and by getting the incentives right in the system. These are all important elements of a broad and balanced middle path that will achieve higher employment, productivity and living standards.

The real risk to Australia’s future does not lie in Labor’s middle road in industrial relations; it lies in the complacency of this government over the last decade to invest in the drivers of productivity and growth. But, of course, rather than fronting up to our core economic challenge of turning around our flagging productivity growth, the Treasurer has instead been tying himself in knots with arguments about Labor’s industrial relations policy. The Treasurer has asserted that winding back Work Choices would cause sharp wage rises and fuel inflation. But one of the government’s key claims about Work Choices is that it would lead to higher wages. The Treasurer cannot claim that Work Choices causes higher wages and then complain that winding it back will cause higher wages. That is a nonsense. His central strategy seems to be that, if he shouts loudly enough, if he employs enough theatrics and bombast in the parliament, all these illogical propositions will suddenly become logical.

After last year’s failed leadership bid, the stakes are very high for the Treasurer at the moment. It is not surprising that there is no allegation too desperate, no logic too flawed, no claim too dishonest for the Treasurer to try on. He is really pushing the envelope of credibility right to the edge these days. In fact, almost daily, we see the Treasurer making a new sacrifice of his credibility on the altar of electoral advantage—for example, the Treasurer’s recent claim that Labor will reimpose a centralised wage fixation system. This is patently dishonest and he knows it. Labor will not be going back to centralised wage fixation. After all, it was the Hawke and Keating governments which moved away from nearly a century of centralised, arbitrated wage fixation in this country. It was this move by Labor which stopped the damaging wage spirals of the previous decades, the last of which was on the current Prime Minister’s watch as Treasurer in the Fraser government.

We face big challenges as a nation. There are the competitive challenges associated with the rise of China and India and of addressing climate change, to name a few. We are only going to get the Australian people—employers, employees, small business owners and public institutions—to make these changes and meet these challenges if they perceive that the rules are fair. If people think that the rules are rigged in favour of one side or the other, there will be a backlash and we will lose the support of the community for change. It is a backlash our community cannot afford if we are asking employees to play a part in meeting the challenges ahead. (Time expired)

Kim Wilkie (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before I call the honourable member for Moreton, I advise the House that I have checked the record and, on 23 May, the Deputy Speaker ruled that the term ‘porkies’ was unparliamentary and required that term to be withdrawn. I understand that the member for Lilley withdrew that term at the time the point of order was raised; therefore, no further action is required.

Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, thank you for your conduct in that regard. The member for Lilley is well known in Queensland. I have known him for 23 years and he is a bit of a joke, really. He is known around the ridges as the ‘member for gilding the Lilley’. Essentially, whatever he says is always a great exaggeration.

Let me tell you exactly what is in the Labor Party’s policy document with regard to industrial relations. Page 14 of the document says that the bargaining participants will be free to reach agreement on whatever matters suit them. But the key thing to remember is that no employee will be able to escape the mantra of ‘no ticket, no start’. If a Labor government is elected later this year, compulsory unionism, either through membership or by involvement in every employment agreement, will be the way Australia is run. Employees will have a union application form stuck under their nose every time they start a new job. Labor’s policy document says that unions will force employers into having the following requirements in workplace agreements: deductions from an employee’s pay or wages for trade union membership subscriptions, paid leave to attend trade union training or union meetings—it could be a barbecue—and bargaining fees to trade unions. So even if you do not want the union directly involved in your discussion you have to pay the union. There is no doubt what the opposition is about in this debate. It is all about the financial purchase the unions have over their decision making. Labor’s policy also says that it will provide unions with information about employees bound by the agreement; that any future agreement must be a union collective agreement, mandating that union involvement must always be there in dispute resolution.

The point I make is that members on the other side are afraid of the facts in relation to their own ambitions. They want a union thug at every door. They want a union boss at every cash register, deciding who is hired and who is fired, and they then take pointless efforts to stop—

A quorum having been called and the bells being rung—

Honourable Members:

Honourable members interjecting—

Kim Wilkie (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before this gets out of hand, I remind honourable members that privilege does not apply during quorums or divisions.

Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What the Australian Labor Party are afraid of is the fact that, while the government is introducing legislation to further underline the simple principle that people with skills and abilities can negotiate directly with their bosses and trade those skills and abilities to earn more, the Labor Party want to reinstitute a system where you can be sacked from your job for not being a member of a union—you can be sacked from your job for not being a member of a union but you cannot be sacked from your job if you steal from your boss. That is the sort of system that Labor had in place. That is the sort of system that members opposite continue to—

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

Order! The member for Moreton will resume his seat. Honourable members are required to either take their seats or leave the chamber and not conduct conversations in the aisles.

Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Fair dinkum, the disruptions from those opposite do not need to be further enhanced by any further delays in this debate. The thing that is absolutely critical to this discussion is that, while the government is introducing further strengthening of the safety net to ensure you only go forward and you do not go backwards, proving the big fib of the scare campaign from those opposite, they are afraid to hear the fact that they want to re-sponsor a system that says ‘no ticket, no start’—where the unions are back in your life, you have to pay a fee to a union whether you like it or not, you can be sacked from your job for not having union membership but you cannot be sacked from your job if you steal from your boss. Those are the simple facts. Those are the differences that people have to decide on.

Whenever there is an election called later in the year people will have to make a simple choice: do you want the unions back in your life or do you want to have a system of workplace trust in place? The government’s Work Choices legislation, the reforms to the Workplace Relations Act that we introduced last year, has successfully grown the number of jobs—for one very plain and simple reason: the government has put in place a system that says to the employers of Australia, ‘You’ve been saying that, once Labor’s unfair dismissal law went, a law that said you could be sacked from your job for not being in a union but you couldn’t be sacked from your job if you stole from your boss, you would hire more people.’ We have given the confidence to the employers of Australia to hire more people—325,000 more jobs have been created. At the same time workplace trust has instilled a system where people with skills, abilities and experiences to trade have been able to do so.

In that old Industrial Revolution argument about the owners of capital versus the owners of labour, the owners of labour have the power in this country—they have the power to decide where they want to work and what they want to earn. The trade union movement is sidelined. The big impact for those opposite, with 26 out of the 30 members of the Labor Party frontbench being former union officials, is that they have their positions in this place delivered because of the union official status that they had before entering this place. That is their place in the scheme of things. The opposition frontbench, because of the affiliation fees that various unions bring to the Labor Party, and their influence on the decisions they make, are petrified that their circumstances are going to change. They are not worried about workers. You do not hear anything from the members of the Australian Labor Party about workers. They don’t represent workers; they represent—I was going to say ‘wankers’, but I guess that is unparliamentary, so I had better not. The point is that they do not represent workers; they represent the thugs of the union movement who want to have complete control over the way in which employment is generated in this country.

It is a time for workers in Australia to make a choice. If they have the skills and the abilities, something to trade when they go to their employer, and their employer does not respond, then at that point those workers are in a position where they can move elsewhere and take their job prospects to another place. That is what is happening. At the same time, under the government’s industrial relations changes introduced last year, most employers are doing the right thing. The few who have done the wrong thing have been highlighted in this place. Whether they have paid 2c an hour more or 45c an hour more, it does not really matter—either way, those employers do not deserve to have anybody working for them. What I would say to any employer who is not realising the opportunity they have to cement the relationship between them and their employees, to create a circumstance where people are well rewarded for their efforts, their skills, their abilities and their experience, is: you don’t deserve to have anybody working for you. I am on the side of the workers. People on this side of the chamber are on the side of the workers. But on the other side they are on the side of the union thugs, the union bosses—the people who put them here and who keep them here.

You only have to look at the efforts of the Commonwealth public sector union. A couple of months ago they said, ‘We want every Commonwealth public servant, everybody hired by the Commonwealth, if a change of government occurs later in the year, to compulsorily join the Commonwealth public sector union.’ Why? Affiliation fees. Why? Affiliation fees purchase power. Affiliation fees also mean they will be able to get more members of the Left into the federal cabinet. That is what this is really all about. In Labor’s industrial relations program is the forced joining of unions. In the policy they have announced people will be forced to join a union—no ticket, no start. That is what Labor’s vision for Australia is. It is all about the power plays that are necessary in order to cement people in certain positions in this place. That is what it is all about. There is nothing there about the workers. It is not about workers getting some advantage—after all, if it were, they would actually be heralding the fact that we have seen a massive increase in people’s personal incomes. Real wages have risen 23.4 per cent over the life of this government and they continue to grow. Strikes in 2006 reached the lowest level on record, which simply means that we are not seeing the union bosses muscling in, pushing people around, acting like the thugs they are capable of being and forcing people out of work and out of money over some particular principle. Remember the great tomato sauce strikes of the seventies and eighties? There was no tomato sauce in the cafeteria so it was, ‘Righto, brothers—all out!’ That was what they made them do. When the Darling Harbour project was being built in the eighties, 20 years ago, there were the ‘dim sim strikes’. What did that deliver for the BLF? The dim sim allowance. They could smell the Chinese restaurants of Sussex Street cooking lunch, which put them off their work—and until they got a dim sim allowance of five bucks a day, or whatever it was, they were not going back to work!

That is the sort of lunacy that Labor’s industrial relations delivered in the past. While we have put 23.4 per cent extra on average into people’s pay packets and have delivered 4.4 per cent unemployment, and the focus is on getting it down even lower, the Labor Party’s record shows a small rate of wage growth and the suppression of workers’ ambitions—(Quorum formed) We have had yet another wasted point of order by an opposition member who does not want the truth. The Labor Party call a stop-work meeting every time the going gets tough. It is like the great tomato sauce strike and the dim sim allowance strike all over again.

Here am I, outing the truth that, under Labor, wages went down by 1.8 per cent. That is what they did. The accord of 1983 was all about suppressing the workers. I have heard the member for Lilley say, ‘Let’s get back to an accord type context.’ That is all about taking workers and employers as far away as is humanly possible and putting up a whopping great big wall called the union movement between them. We are saying that we want to see workers and employers negotiate with each other. We want to see employers appreciate their workers and reflect that in the pay packet. We want to see employers and workers work out a way that will work for them. We want to see more full-time jobs created, and that is exactly what we have been able to do. We have been able to restore a sense of trust. But we have conceded, through this legislation, that there is a need to further strengthen the safety net. We have put a line under $75,000 and said, basically, that that figure and anything below it has to be even further tested, further resourced and further strengthened to make sure that people who are at the margins, who are new in the workforce, who are in a vulnerable position, who are in lower wage jobs or who are teenagers—the sorts of people the Labor Party have tried to highlight and for whom they have tried to make out that suddenly everything has gone wrong—are further protected.

What we have seen as a result is that the teenage unemployment rate, which was 17.3 per cent in April 2007, is half what it was in July 1992. Labor’s great love for the teenage workforce, expressed by their concern about industrial relations practices, saw them drive teenage unemployment up to 34.5 per cent. Labor love to create victims. They love to create the sense that you cannot have a point of trust between employers and employees. Whereas the government believe that most people are going to do the right thing on most occasions, but we are now strengthening the laws which underpin that those who do the wrong thing will face the penalty for it.

That is the point of difference between the Liberal and National parties and the Labor Party. Labor believe that most people cannot be trusted and that you need to create a legislative environment where people are restricted in their conduct and control—in other words, big unions are involved in the discussion. Whereas we on this side believe that you need a legislative environment which says that most people can be trusted and that those who do the wrong thing will be penalised by law, and that is what we are doing today. We are further strengthening along those philosophical lines. We actually believe that those who want to collectively bargain can do that, and should be able to do that. But we do not want to see a circumstance, which Labor want to introduce after the election, where if there is just one member of a union in a workplace everybody in that workplace will be subject to union intervention. That sort of lack of trust and lack of maturity shows that, because of their strong affiliation and the purchase that has been made of them and their opinions by the union movement through their affiliation fees and through the way in which the Peter principle operates, whereby incompetent union officials get selected and appointed to federal parliament, members opposite have that sort of principle guiding their conduct. Labor are showing that they have to return on their preselection in this place. With 26 of 30 along the front bench being former union officials, my point is proved.

What really disturbs me is that I cannot find where any of them have actually been on the tools. I cannot find any having been union officials who have started by actually hammering in a nail or drilling a hole or weaving a fabric, or doing anything that involves the trade that the union they are a member of represents. I cannot find any of them actually having been workers; they have simply been officials. Nothing drives people in this country more crazy than the idea of being forced to have the unions in their lives.

A few weeks ago, Rod Cameron, the Labor Party’s pollster of choice, said that he does not know why Labor cannot get over the idea of personal agreements—not individual contracts. These civil law contracts that the Labor Party are all about are so draconian and unfair, compared to the guarantees delivered under Australian workplace agreements. Rod Cameron cannot understand why Labor cannot get over it. He said quite plainly—and he is right—‘People do not want the unions back in their lives.’ But that is what the Labor Party will represent if their agenda gets up after the next election. I welcome this bill because it further strengthens the government’s ambition for people to earn more, not to go backwards. I commend this bill to the House.

Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industrial Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In speaking on the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007 I begin by responding to some of the comments made by the honourable member for Moreton. Clearly, he is so out of touch with what is going on in the current industrial relations scene. He is so out of touch that it sounded as though he was giving a speech in the fifties, never mind the seventies, eighties and nineties. I think all of the assertions he made with respect to Labor’s policy are entirely and utterly wrong. But the debate we are having on this bill today is no ordinary debate. This bill and the Work Choices laws it seeks to marginally amend are about what sort of country Australia is and what sort of country Australians want it to be—whether we want to live to work or work to live.

We know the Prime Minister has always held a radical view on industrial relations but only in this term—his 14th parliamentary term, his 34th year in parliament—has he had the political opportunity to impose his plan on Australian families. Knowing what we know about the Prime Minister and about his radical IR views, how can this amendment to Work Choices be seen as anything other than ensuring protection for only one job in this country—his own?

Labor clearly wants an IR system that is productive but fair. Labor—not the coalition, despite the rantings by the member opposite—commenced the move from central wage fixation to enterprise bargaining, but we did so without throwing fairness out of the back door. Why is this bill not a sufficient remedy for what ails Work Choices? Work Choices is fundamentally flawed. It is unfair and unnecessary. It is complex, and it is not a system for a modern economy. Let’s remember: the government spent $55 million of taxpayers’ money to try to sell Work Choices to Australians, telling them that their employment conditions were protected by law. If those very expensive commercials on television were telling the truth, I would not be standing here at the dispatch box this morning debating this tokenistic bill. And it is a token. It may well help some employees in this country. There may be some marginal improvement for some employees in some workplaces in this country, but it will not fix what is wrong with Work Choices. It will not be fixed by sacking one minister—a minister who this morning moved to guillotine debate on this bill—and replacing him with another. Hockey might be the jockey, but it is still the same old horse, and what a nag it is. If it had entered the Melbourne Cup last year—

Phillip Barresi (Deakin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Members will be referred to by their correct title or by their—

Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industrial Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

it would still be running, and the Prime Minister ought to know that changing a horse’s name—

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

Order! The member for Gorton will not speak over the Deputy Speaker when he is addressing him. I have asked the member for Gorton to refer to members by their correct title or by their seats.

Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industrial Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Indeed, if it had been running in the Melbourne Cup last year, it would still be running. The Prime Minister ought to know that changing a horse’s name will not make it win any races. It might get you in trouble with the stewards, but it will not win any races.

The government is in trouble. Let me tell the House why. When the Prime Minister referred to the coalition’s promises in the 2004 election campaign, there was no mention of Work Choices. On 28 September 2004, the coalition’s industrial relations policy was announced by the Prime Minister. There were no references in that announcement to the weakening of the independent umpire, to the abolition of the no disadvantage test, to the removal of unfair dismissal laws for employees employed by companies with between 20 and 100 workers and to the primacy of Australian workplace agreements over collective agreements. In fact, the Prime Minister did not foreshadow any of the more radical elements now contained in Work Choices, which were not removed by this bill. Consequently, there was no mandate and, I contend, no confidence demonstrated by the government that these policies had the support of the majority of Australians. Introducing the proposed changes to the parliament eight months later, the Prime Minister said:

The measures I am outlining today represent the next logical step towards a flexible, simple and fair system of workplace relations.

Labor refutes the assertion that Work Choices is flexible, simple or fair. Let me first challenge the government’s assertion that the new laws create flexibility and the required environment for economic growth. It is true that the economy is growing. In fact, Australia is enjoying its 16th year of economic growth. However, economic growth has slowed, despite the unprecedented resources boom. Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory are growing rapidly, due largely to that boom. We are seeing a modern-day gold rush in the mining industry. In fact, mining is experiencing 15 per cent real growth each year.

When the government seeks to take credit for employment growth, we know what is fuelling that growth—and it is not Work Choices. In fact, since the introduction of Work Choices, employment growth, from March 2006 to January this year, was 2.39 per cent. That is lower than for the same period in 2004-05, when it reached 2.64 per cent, and also lower than in 2002-03, when it reached 2.79 per cent. Employment growth is not increasing as a result of Work Choices. In the first six months since Work Choices was introduced, productivity growth went out the back door by a further 1.6 per cent. So here we have the situation where, in short, our economy grew and productivity accelerated that growth when a comprehensive safety net, a no disadvantage test, unfair dismal protections and an independent umpire all existed. That refutes the contention that somehow Work Choices is fair.

Is Work Choices simple? That is what the Prime Minister asserted. The Prime Minister said that the government is determined to make it simpler to bargain at the workplace level. He said that in his statement in May 2005. By the end of that year, the simplicity promised by the Prime Minister amounted to more than 1,000 pages of draft legislation followed by another 400 pages of regulation. This legislation was the height of a small child. On top of that, we now have this bill being introduced. This is a flawed bill. As I understand it, since it has been introduced there have been further amendments introduced to be made to the bill. So we now have amendments to the amendments. Whether you support the merits of the bill and whether you agree on the extent to which it can improve the lot of workers in a workplace, the fact is that this bill is flawed. The process by which the government has set about amending or atoning for its sins with respect to Work Choices is entirely flawed.

These laws are complex and, indeed, they are manifold. Complex rules to calculate everyday matters like leave entitlements have been amended, but they are still complex—and more complex than before Work Choices. Onerous record-keeping requirements had to be amended and the dates for compliance postponed again and again. There are unclear rules about what can and cannot be included in agreements. There is uncertainty about when an employer must withhold pay for periods of industrial action. There is little guidance about what is a genuine operational reason for terminating an employee. The government also asserted originally that Work Choices was fair. Indeed it has suggested that it will be more fair as a result of this bill. The government says, and it has said all along, that Australian workplace agreements are good for employees. But let’s look at the government’s own figures.

Senate estimates in May last year revealed that 6,263 AWAs had been lodged with the Office of the Employment Advocate since the commencement of the government’s legislation. Of those sampled, 100 per cent—that is, all of them—excluded at least one protected award condition; 63 per cent, almost two-thirds, removed penalty rates; 52 per cent, more than half, removed shiftwork loading; and 16 per cent removed all award protected conditions. This trend, confirmed by Office of the Employment Advocate figures which were subsequently leaked to the Sydney Morning Herald, confirmed Labor’s fears that Work Choices was driving down employment conditions in workplaces. AWAs in particular were being used as a pernicious instrument to subvert awards and conditions of employment in workplaces. There is no doubt that many AWAs were being forced upon employees. The government are so well aware of this that they expressly inserted a provision in the legislation that said it is not coercion to refuse employment to a prospective employee if they are told to sign an AWA if they want to get a job.

We also know that the intersection of these laws with the unfair dismissal changes meant that no employee could stand up to his or her employer and bargain in good faith genuinely for an individual agreement. There might be some with a set of scarce skills who would have the market power to do so. But, in the main, what employee would be in a position to bargain with and defy an employer putting a particular agreement before them on the table? Given that the changes to unfair dismissal laws have not been changed by this bill, it is still the case that five million Australian workers can be sacked for any or no reason whatsoever. How do you expect those employees, without any employment security at all, to stand up and say, ‘I would like a little change there, an amendment here and then I will sign that agreement’? We know it is fanciful. The government knows it is fanciful. And this bill will not fix it. This bill is an attempt to pretend to the Australian public that things have been fixed, but of course they have not.

The key to Labor’s industrial relations system will be collective enterprise bargaining. Evidence here and overseas proves that collective enterprise bargaining can achieve higher productivity and wages outcomes than systems based on individual contracts. Such a system invites employers and employees to work collaboratively. Labor’s policies will focus on increasing productivity but will also seek to restore balance in the system. Labor do not support the view that Australian workers must needlessly suffer in order to ensure economic growth. We seek to ensure that Australian families can juggle work and family interests without undue stress. The benefit of economic growth is diminished if we fail to ensure that people can have a decent life in and beyond their workplace. We are also confident that awards and collective agreements in conjunction with common-law arrangements will provide sufficient flexibility to satisfy all parties—or at least satisfy all parties that do not want to act in a roguish manner.

Despite the rhetoric of those opposite, I do not believe that most employers want to act in a manner that would be improper for their employees. But this is what you have: you have set of laws that allow bad employers to do bad things and force good employers to consider doing the same thing. It is a race to the bottom. It is forcing good employers to have to consider cutting employment conditions because bad employers are doing so. When you have that situation, the best of employers is placed in the position where they are under competitive pressure to consider affecting adversely their own staff.

It should be remembered that common-law arrangements already cover 30 per cent of all employment agreements in Australia. They have existed throughout the life of this government, they existed before 1996 and they will exist beyond the life of this government. We believe that the common-law agreements—which, by the way, are 10 times more popular than AWAs—are a sufficient instrument to be used in conjunction with awards and agreements to ensure sufficient flexibility. I think they refute the assertion that there is not sufficient flexibility within Labor’s plan for industrial relations.

Let’s now look at the government’s panic since the polls showed them that Work Choices is poison. This is the only reason why the Prime Minister has responded. Remember, the Prime Minister is the author of the legislation. The legislation is a manifestation of the Prime Minister’s dream of the last 30 years. There is only one thing more important to the Prime Minister than his industrial relations plans—that is, his continued presence in the seat across from me at the dispatch box. The only thing more important to the Prime Minister than his industrial relations plans is his own future in the role of Prime Minister of this country. So what did he do once his own pollsters told him that Work Choices was poison? He attempted to set up a set of conditions that have been contrived to convince enough people that he is fixing the problems of Work Choices. We announced our policy on 28 April. The government announced changes to the operation of Work Choices a week later. One week later, on 4 May, the government announced changes to the Work Choices legislation. I watched the media conference held by the Prime Minister and the minister. The minister looked like he had been called up for This is Your Life. He did not even know what he was doing there. He was standing there next to the Prime Minister wondering what the hell he was doing there as the Prime Minister announced that there were going to be changes to the legislation. There were announcements made and the very next day newspaper advertisements appeared across the country and television and radio advertising commenced. What we discovered in estimates was that the expense behind that has amounted to $4.1 million so far.

More interesting is that whilst the announcement was made on the 4th the operation would commence on the 7th, which was three weeks ago, and we are debating the bill now. We had advertisements on television and radio and in the newspapers about a law that did not exist and does not yet exist. We saw it for the first time this week and the government has spent millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money explaining a law that did not exist. That is an absurd situation, but it is an explanation for the panic inside the government, because they know now that Work Choices is poison. They would love to be able to leave it untouched, but it is poison and they are seeking to make amendments to it. In the current political context we see a government seeking to pretend that there are sufficient changes to remedy Work Choices, which Labor says cannot be fixed by such amendments.

We know that the government need not have guillotined the bill. There are many members in this House, representing their constituents in every state and territory, who wish to speak to this bill. They will be refused that right because the government will close down debate before the end of today so that members in this House will not be given an opportunity to speak. I would also imagine that it is to protect the government members who have been defending Work Choices for the last 18 months and do not want to go on the record and have to defend it again. We know who spoke on Work Choices and who defended it, and we know they have not changed their intent. We also know that after 18 months of Work Choices they want to convince the Australian public that we are going to get 18 weeks of fairness, but then, if they win the election, they will go back to what they want. They want to convince the public that we had 18 months of Work Choices, where they hid the figures and did not disclose them—we had to uncover them—and then they give us possibly 18 weeks of so-called fairness which is not in any way going to improve Work Choices in a proper way. They say that somehow that is going to fix the problem. That will not fix the problem.

There are problems with this bill. Firstly, we have 250,000 Australian workers on AWAs that were made pursuant to Work Choices before these proposed amendments, and they will not be able to fix those agreements. That means we have at least a quarter of a million people, if not more, on agreements that will not have this so-called fairness test apply to them. Whatever improvements could exist, those employees and their families will not be better off and will not have any remedy for those agreements. They are not to be changed and that means we will have employees working side by side on different AWAs with different conditions doing the same job. They will be doing the same job in the same workplace because the government has completely hashed this and has only sought to amend it for their own political hide. Despite the changes arising from this bill, an employee may still be worse off under a workplace agreement than under an award.

Further, it is not clear what fair compensation might be. The announcements refer to benefits such as higher hourly rates of pay and also to matters such as car park spaces or flexible hours. I think it is important to ask: will the mere offer of a job be considered sufficient compensation to offset any loss of protected award conditions in certain circumstances? The Prime Minister hinted that an offer of a job in certain circumstances may be sufficient, so there may not be fair compensation.

We have a vague definition of struggling businesses although we do not know what that means or how it will be determined. There will be no review of any decision made by the new authority, the former Employment Advocate, so we will not be privy to that. We will not know the way in which that form of compensation may exist or how struggling companies will be able to exempt themselves from this so-called fairness test.

There are major problems with bill. It does not go to the heart of the protections required. As the shadow minister said, they can change rosters without notice and that will not change; they can remove all your redundancy entitlements that are in the award and that will not change. There are so many areas that are unprotected. More importantly than the bill itself is the intent of the government. Whatever improvements there might be—and I have conceded there are some marginal ones, and that is why we will support the bill—the government do not believe in this set of laws, they do not believe in fairness in the workplace and they never have believed in fairness in the workplace. The only reason they are introducing this bill now is to save their political hide. The only job that this government concerns itself with is the Prime Minister’s. It does not concern itself with ordinary working families who are working hard to pay off mortgages and that is why this government is in major trouble. (Time expired)

Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When one looks at the opinion polls on a regular basis around Australia, it is pretty clear that what the Labor Party is seeking to do under the new Leader of the Opposition is to create a veneer of moderation. The ALP would have us and the community believe that it has set aside its past as the party of the unions, controlled by the unions and a party which legislates for the unions. The shadow minister for transport, roads and tourism is at the table and, in a prior manifestation, he was Australia’s peak trade union leader and I must say that he was somewhat better than some of the others. Having said that, the Labor Party is clearly the party of the unions. The wonderful thing about the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007 is that it does give the people of Australia the opportunity to see the Labor Party in its true clothing. The wolf in sheep’s clothing will have its fleece removed and we will see the Labor Party for what it is. The Labor Party cannot help itself in this debate; it must come forward with its ideological bent supporting the growth of trade union power.

What this government has sought to do since 1996 is to bring about an Australian economy that is world class. We have made some essential changes. We appreciated that, as a nation, we could not allow ourselves to fall behind the rest of the world. We have taken some very difficult decisions. We were the first government to reform our outdated and antiquated tax system through the introduction of the GST. We have made sure that we have a much more efficient waterfront. We have moved people from welfare to work. And we have brought about reform of the industrial relations system.

The Labor Party would have us believe that we are a party which is opposed to the rights of ordinary working men and women. When one listens to the speeches made by members of the Australian Labor Party in this place, it is pretty clear that the Labor Party is tired and that it is the same old party it always was. Hopefully this message will get through to the Australian people in the months between now and the election: the Labor Party is the party it always was. It might appear to be more moderate, it might appear to be more financially responsible and it might appear to have put aside the things that caused the Australian people to vote against it for so many years, but the reality is, when one listens to the debate in this bill, that members of the Australian Labor Party are still mouthing the rhetoric, principles and outdated attitudes that historically have highlighted the Labor Party as a party controlled by trade unions. (Quorum formed) I would like to thank my friend the honourable member for Melbourne Ports for gaining a slightly greater, although necessarily temporary, audience for what I was saying: that this debate gives all of us the opportunity to see the Labor Party the way it always has been—the party of the unions, the party controlled by the unions and the party that is dedicated to legislating for the unions.

This government has reformed the industrial relations system but we have carefully monitored the law to make sure that it retains the aims that the legislation had when implemented by the parliament. This industrial relations legislation seeks to bring about increased flexibility. The Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007 introduces a new fairness test which will enhance the safety net for over 7½ million Australians making workplace agreements. It will enable employers and employees to modify or exclude protected award conditions, but only where employees are fairly compensated. So this bill is finetuning the legislation which has been carried by the parliament.

I will state some other facts which should allay the concerns expressed by members of the opposition. The fairness test guarantees employees fair compensation in lieu of conditions such as penalty rates, overtime and shift loadings. The stronger safety net provides additional protection to vulnerable employees, including younger people and those from non-English-speaking backgrounds. The bill will guarantee that, when Australian workers enter into a workplace agreement, it will be a fair one that has been approved by an independent statutory authority. This bill is not an about-face by the government; it builds on the very real, meaningful and substantial reforms which we have introduced since 1996 and again more recently last year.

This bill is an important part of an employment system which has reduced unemployment to a rate of 4.4 per cent; in some parts of the country it is even lower. It has created two million jobs, many of which have been full time, over the last 11 years. And it has been responsible for close to 10½ million Australians being in work. The bill will ensure that Australia’s future economic prosperity is bolstered by a flexible and modern industrial relations system.

The honourable members opposite would have us believe that there are inadequate safeguards in this legislation. The honourable member for Gorton, speaking in the House, said that he conceded that the bill, in his view, contained marginal improvements but that it simply did not go far enough. Well, the introduction of the fairness test is accompanied by the establishment of two independent statutory officers, the Workplace Authority director and the Workplace Ombudsman, who will play key roles in making sure that the safety net is maintained for those 7½ million Australians.

The bill will require the Workplace Authority to apply the fairness test to ensure that workplace agreements provide for fair compensation in lieu of protected award conditions such as penalty rates. The ombudsman will guarantee that employers comply with their legal obligations in relation to the fairness test. The ombudsman will strengthen the policing role that has been undertaken by the Office of Workplace Services. The government is providing significant funding to ensure that these functions are well resourced. Most people would concede that that is a very important step.

The opposition would have us believe that common-law contracts are an adequate substitute for Australian workplace agreements. At first hearing, ‘common-law contracts’ sound as though they might be something roughly equivalent to Australian workplace agreements, but the problem is that nothing is further from the truth. I would like to outline to the House what common-law contracts supported by the Labor Party will actually mean. If a worker is covered by an award and employed under a common-law contract, he or she is entitled to be paid in accordance with the award. If hours are worked which entitle the worker to penalty rates under the award, the worker must be paid those penalty rates. This has been the case in Australia for close on a century. It is absolutely false to suggest that a common-law contract provides the flexibility that Australian workplace agreements provide. Under common-law contracts, employers and employees do not have the freedom to enter into their own arrangements, because they are always confined by a rigid award system. This is a classic case of the Australian Labor Party saying to the people of Australia that they support increased flexibility. When one understands the laws underpinning those common-law contracts, it is clear that the flexibility which the ALP would have us believe is there is not actually there. That is why we need the industrial relations changes which have been made by this government and continue to be improved by this government through the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007.

This new industrial relations system brings about more flexibility and convenience for the Australian workforce and reduces the stifling impact of an industrial system which has well and truly passed its use-by date. What might have been suitable during the class warfare battles of the 1890s is certainly not suitable in 2007. The ALP, despite its veneer of moderation, continues to support industrial relations principles which would take Australia back to the industrial dark ages. The coalition government and successive ministers ought to be complimented and commended for taking some difficult decisions, for not just accepting that what was there was good enough and for looking in a visionary way at what Australia needs if we are going to compete with the world. This bill gives the Australian people an insight into the collective mind of the Australian Labor Party. Despite the fact that the Labor Party would have us consider that it is in some way ‘New Australian Labor’, it is ‘Old Australian Labor’. This bill strips away any attempt by the Australian Labor Party to claim that it is a modern party dedicated to a positive prosperity for Australia in the future. (Quorum formed)

Since we seem to be having these constant quorums, I will use the rest of the time, which I was not going to use in this particular debate. The fact that we now have more honourable members in the chamber enables me to reiterate how false the support of the Australian Labor Party for common-law contracts actually is. The ALP would have us believe that those common-law contracts bring about flexibility. The reality is that those common-law contracts do not bring about extra flexibility and the situation is that the unions will still be able to subvert Australian workplaces under these common-law contracts. The Labor Party is hoodwinking the Australian people by failing to properly disclose that common-law employment contracts are incredibly inflexible and give the union movement the ability to smash any stability and consistency that an employer may have to have.

Looking at the pious second reading amendment moved by the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, I see that the Deputy Leader of the Opposition once again appears to be supporting the so-called ‘unfair dismissals law’ that was introduced by the Australian Labor Party in government. I used to be in small business, and many members on this side of the House used to be in small business. Not many members on the other side were ever in small business. But we all understand that employers do not want to lose good employees. Good employees are extraordinarily difficult to come across. Good employees are extraordinarily important to keep as part of your workplace. Why on earth would any employer seek to get rid of a good employee without cause? When we were in opposition, I heard lots of stories from the Sunshine Coast workplaces of ordinary small business people who were prepared to go out there and have a go and to put on extra people to help boost the local economy and to help create jobs. Yet under Labor’s unfair dismissals laws those people were dragged through the tribunals and were dragged through the courts because they had a person on their staff who was destroying their business. Ultimately, what they effectively had to do was write a cheque just to get rid of that person off the books. What we have done through our exemptions for small business is to recognise that we ought to encourage that sector that is the engine room of the Australian economy.

A huge proportion of employment in Australia is created by the small business sector. I think it was Kim Beazley who said at one stage that the Labor Party ‘was not the friend of small business’. In this debate once again we see Labor Party members standing up in the parliament and saying that it is not the friend of small business. If you strangle small business, you strangle the Australian economy. This attitude of the Australian Labor Party and this outdated 1890s industrial system that they seem to want to go back to are simply going to undermine the Australian economy in the unfortunate event that the Australian Labor Party is elected to the treasury bench at the election later this year.

This government has a proud story to tell. Since March 1996, more than two million jobs have been created. Over 1.1 million of the jobs created are full time and almost 900,000 are part time. Since Work Choices came in, 326,200 additional jobs have been created. Since Work Choices came in, 277,200 full-time jobs have been created, accounting for 85 per cent of all jobs created. There are well over 10.4 million Australians in work at the moment—a record high—with 7.4 million in full-time employment and 2.9 million in part-time work. This government has the runs on the board. We have a fair and compassionate industrial relations system. We constantly seek to make sure that our system is up to date for Australia. The Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007 is a further tool in the armoury of this government to make sure that we have a world-class industrial relations system that is fair to all Australians. (Time expired)

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the second reading amendment moved by the member for Lalor. I must say at the outset that I am intrigued by the title of this bill. It is called the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007. A stronger safety net? There is no safety net under Work Choices—never has been, and there is no intention for there to really be one in the future. The truth, though, is that any concession by this government, in its desperation, that advances fairness will be supported by us but it will not end the unfairness of its Work Choices system. This House will have the opportunity—and members opposite will have the opportunity to join with us in supporting amendments to this bill later—to advance even further the test of fairness. Let us see if they are prepared to do it. Let us see if they genuinely believe in the need to advance fairness.

Work Choices is an unfair workplace relations system. Work Choices offers no choice. If in fact the employer decides he will not bargain in good faith, that employer does not have to. The system of workplace relations that this government has introduced reweights the whole equation in favour of the employer. It is a take it or leave it approach: take the AWA or take the sack. Work Choices abolishes the independent umpire. It destroys collective bargaining. It does not protect the right to freedom of association. It does not require good-faith bargaining. This bill is an inherent admission of the failure and the unfairness of Work Choices.

Whilst I am on the topic of Work Choices, I note that we still talk about it but the government does not. The government has dropped the term. So poisoned is ‘Work Choices’ in terms of what it conveys—no choice, and work chances but certainly not work choices—that the government has dropped it from its advertising and marketing direction. Now the great policy that was supposed to lift productivity and help workers dare not speak its name. The government has disowned it; it has become an orphan. Yet this government would have you believe that this was going to be the great panacea in terms of lifting productivity. I will come to that issue a bit later.

Here we have an advertising campaign on which $5 million has already been spent before we even have the legislation. How can we be advertising anything if we do not know what it is that is being introduced by way of legislation? But $5 million has been spent before they knew what they were advertising only to promote what they weren’t as they had dropped the title. And the $5 million which they have already spent on this flawed approach is estimated to rise to about $40 million—just on this advertising campaign alone.

Why do we have this legislation before us? We know the system is unfair. It is acknowledged by the government that they have to do something. How far they will go, I will come to in a minute. The truth is that the Prime Minister fundamentally does not believe that his system of workplace relations is unfair. Why? Because he has never believed in encouraging a system of industrial relations in this country that fosters cooperation. I remember when the current Prime Minister was shadow minister for industrial relations when Labor was in office and Labor was developing the Prices and Incomes Accord with the trade union movement of this country, which I had the privilege to lead as President of the ACTU. John Howard came to the office to try to understand what the accord mechanisms were about. I took him through at great length what we were involved in—sharing the commitment to growing the wealth of this country, but on the basis that in whatever we created together, there should be fairness as to its distribution. That is a fair deal. It was the Prices and Incomes Accord that laid the basis for the prosperity in the country. It was the accord that controlled inflation and brought interest rates down. It was the accord that gave distribution to the workforce other than through money wage increases. It was the accord that gave this nation superannuation. It was the accord that understood the importance of trading the social wage for the money wage and reducing the cost to the employer so that we could lock in low inflation and keep the low interest rates.

Let’s remember that, when Labor came to office, John Howard had left an economy as Treasurer in 1983 with 11 per cent inflation and 11 per cent unemployment and interest rates at around 16 per cent. He never wants to talk about that. He will talk about what Labor did, but he will never talk about what his record was. Who ensured that this economy laid the basis for its sustained recovery? It was the Labor Party in cooperation with the trade union movement. That is what comes from a cooperative system. But it is also a system that delivered its own fairness. It is a system that John Howard never sought to understand because he didn’t believe in it. He believed in re-weighting the system in favour of the employers, of seeing workers as costs, not as human beings who have to earn a decent income and bring up families, not as skilled workers and contributors to a productive workforce who need to be invested in, not a partnership that needs to be fostered at the enterprise level. The Prime Minister wants none of that. He wants to turn us into a dog-eat-dog society, to drive individualism. Workforces do not operate as groups of individuals; they operate as teams. Why shouldn’t we be fostering collective bargaining, the collective approach? That is Labor’s way, but it is not this government’s way and it is not what this legislation does.

So why the change? On 4 May the Prime Minister had read the polls—and they have got worse for him since. Fearful, and building on his ‘annihilation’ message, he announced he would introduce a new ‘fairness’ test to the poison that is Work Choices. I ask the House to note that it is not a no disadvantage test; it is just a fairness test. Labor supports a no disadvantage test and so did the Prime Minister until he got control of the Senate, but the fact is that he does not believe in it. To define ‘fairness’ we have legislation and an explanatory memorandum of 150 pages. What is fair about that? Also, what is fair about the government announcing the legislation on 4 May, almost a month ago, but not introducing it into this House until Monday night? So they take four weeks to draft this cobbled together hotchpotch, and then only give the House one day to debate it. What is fair about that? As for whether people should trust this government to deliver this message, why should we believe them? After all, it was the Minister for Finance and Administration who, at an HR Nicholls Society function, said about Work Choices:

There will have to be more reform ...

Last week the Treasurer was asked if he could guarantee whether there would be no further changes if the government were re-elected and he was Prime Minister. These were the Treasurer’s words:

Well, I’m not going to speculate on what might happen after the election.

If you need any further confirmation that this legislation will be changed if the government is returned, you only have to look at what was said by the henchman of the outfit, Peter Hendy, who heads up the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He was Peter Reith’s right-hand man, people might remember, in the waterfront dispute, involving that sinister midnight raid that stripped workers of all their wages and conditions. Peter Hendy is now running one of the major employer operations in this town. He said in a press statement yesterday:

Yesterday’s amendments—

having criticised them and expressed disappointment about them—

will need to be monitored over time.

What is that code for? That is code for ‘Re-elect this government, and even this sham of a fairness test will be stripped away.’

Labor is for fairness. But this fairness test does not go anywhere near far enough to restore the fairness and balance in the system. There is some improvement, with the ability to investigate unfair conditions imposed on workers, but it does not take away the unfairness of what is in place. The reason we are prepared to support this in the end is that it does make a marginal improvement. I will tell you how it makes a marginal improvement. People might remember the circumstances of Darrell Lea. Everyone knows the chocolate company Darrell Lea; we buy their chocolates, we enjoy them. Just before Easter they offered AWAs to all of their casual employees, some 150 people. Those AWAs cut casual loading, weekend and public holiday penalty rates, rostering protections and sick leave for no compensation—not one cent.

Under this legislation, that cannot happen in future. Unfortunately, nothing can be done for those 150 Darrell Lea workers because this legislation is not retrospective. The legislation introduces a fairness test that says, ‘If conditions are to be stripped away there has to be fair compensation.’ I point out it is not ‘full’ compensation, but ‘fair’ compensation. I will come to the question of how we define fairness in a minute. The Darrell Lea circumstance could not be repeated under this legislation—something would have to be offered in return. That is why, in the end, we are prepared to support the legislation, but the trouble is that it does not go anywhere near far enough. What we want is a system that does restore the right to collectively bargain, that does restore the requirement for employers to bargain in good faith and does restore the independent umpire. That will not happen under this legislation. That will happen under a Rudd-led Labor government.

Let us look at the detail of the legislation. What is this new fairness test? As I say, it takes almost 150 pages to try and describe it. What does it do? This legislation still does not protect crucial award conditions. The only fairness that has to be addressed is in relation to any changes over the 11 protected award matters—rest breaks, shift allowances, overtime, penalty rates and public holiday pay, for example. It does not cover other crucial award conditions, such as redundancy pay, long service leave and flexibility in rosters. Understand what that means: even under this new fairness test, if an employer strips away those benefits there is no requirement for any compensation at all in relation to those aspects. As I said, fair compensation—even in relation to the 11 matters—does not mean full compensation.

But there is another question. How does the government assess what is fair? We do not know. The legislation establishes a secret process. It is up to the Workplace Authority director to make a judgement as to whether there has been fair compensation for the stripping away of just 11 conditions. There is no requirement for a time frame on the decision, which means an employer can be started under unfair conditions and, if they are found to be unfair, restitution made later. So the employer can still start people working unfairly and there is no time frame for decision, no ability for the employee to have input, no ability to have their say as to whether they think they are being compensated fairly or not. No reasons are required to be given when the Workplace Authority director hands down their decision. There is no right of appeal and, as we have seen with the Darrell Lea case, a workplace agreement, once struck, can last for five years—five years of entrenched unfairness.

The body that is going to undertake these secret investigations comes at a cost of $370 million over the forward estimates and has 600 assessors. Can you believe the system the government is putting in place? This is a government that has effectively abolished the conciliation and arbitration system in this country—the independent umpire which has served this country well, which hears both sides, holds open hearings, gives reasons and all of those sorts of things. It has abolished the independent umpire and instituted a secret police organisation to determine fairness. That is what this government means by introducing fairness.

Let me come to the question of productivity, because the government asserts that productivity will increase under its workplace relations system. I have made the point that Work Choices is an unfair system, but it is also bad for the economy. It is bad for the economy because it does not drive productivity at the workplace. I talked earlier in this address about the contribution the trade union movement had made through the accords to productivity. Let us look at the comparisons. The cooperation that Labor was able to produce through those accords produced big dividends for the economy. The 1990s saw the biggest step up in productivity ever in the history of the country. Between 1991 and 1996 labour productivity improved from 1.9 per cent to 2.5 per cent—the biggest increase ever. Do you know what the budget papers forecast productivity to be? Zero. Not only have they not increased it but also they have reduced it to zero.

The big upward trend that we experienced up until we lost office in 1996 continued for another four years. Why? Because the government could not get their changes to industrial legislation through the parliament. It was not that they did not try. The then minister, Peter Reith, tried—his first wave of industrial relations reform, his second wave, his third wave—but there was a Senate that kept blocking it. Between 2000 and 2005, when they started to get the changes to their workplace relations system into place, productivity, which peaked at 3.1 per cent under our system—Labor’s system—plummeted to 1.7 per cent, almost half. Now the budget is projecting it is going to go to zero. When we are a hugely fast growing economy why would you introduce a system that was working against our interests in terms of advancing productivity? The Productivity Commission has estimated that, if the productivity growth that Labor oversaw could be maintained now, the decline in productivity that comes about because of an ageing population could largely be contained.

Labor had an intergenerational solution, through the workforce, to our ageing population and it came about through cooperation and fairness. The government blew it. Not only has productivity plummeted but their obsession with reducing union influence, rather than working to a more productive economy, is costing us in terms of the economic sustainability of this country. Compare productivity in Australia with New Zealand, which went down the AWA route. Compare productivity in the iron ore industry in Western Australia, which has AWAs, with productivity in the coal mining industry in the Bowen Basin—which I have recently come back from—which has collective agreements. Productivity in the coal industry is significantly higher, greater than double that in the iron ore industry.

This legislation does not make the system fairer. Work Choices is an inherently unfair system. It is bad for workers and it is bad for their families. It strips away their rights and entitlements and the time they have to spend with their family, but this legislation is not just about unfairness. This legislation, whatever it attempts to do, does not correct the fundamental flaw. It is an unfair system. It is bad for workers. It is bad for the economy and that is why—(Time expired)

Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I note that I am speaking after one of the many former ACTU presidents who sit with the Labor Party in this parliament. What that serves to highlight is that the next election will be the most audacious union grab for power we have ever seen, at a time when only 20 per cent of the workforce are members of a trade union. When only 15 per cent of the private sector workforce are members of trade unions, we still see one workplace that is fully unionised—that is, the federal parliamentary Labor Party caucus. It is no obstacle to preferment, to advancement, to elevation if you are a former trade union official. Twenty-six of the 30 Labor frontbenchers are former trade union officials. Actually, after the next election, win or lose, it will be even worse, if you can believe that, because the best Labor seats are being set aside for current trade union officials, for the union bosses. In my state of South Australia, in the seat of Port Adelaide—a Labor seat since Federation—the Secretary of the LHMU, Mark Butler, is to be the Labor candidate at the next election. The other key union official, Don Farrell, the Secretary of the SDA, is to be a candidate for South Australia for the Senate and will replace Linda Kirk, a lawyer, an academic—(Quorum formed)

Labor’s celebrity strategy is a smokescreen for an audacious union grab for power. The best Labor seats are being set aside for union bosses. They will all be coming into parliament—Greg Combet, Bill Shorten, Richard Marles—to take out insurance on Kevin Rudd, to ensure that what Kevin Rudd does is in the interests of the unions and the union bosses. It has nothing to do with what is in the best interests of Australia, the economy and the people. I am really worried about the future, that we are going to see a return to the bad old days of union dominance, union thuggery and union interference in businesses.

Only in the last week we have seen a number of cases which highlight the way the union movement and the Labor Party think about these things. We have heard Dean Mighell boasting about the way he has ripped off businesses and Kevin Reynolds bragging about the abolition of the ABCC, a watchdog body which has ensured that the rorts which characterised the construction industry are being stamped out. Worst of all was the way the Labor Party dealt with the Lilac City Motor Inn, a business which had its reputation and its name smeared across Australia. What we see is a double standard whereby a business which has a Labor connection is treated with kid gloves while a business which does not have a Labor connection is smeared. It is typical of the union mindset, the bullyboy tactics and the thuggery which characterise the whole culture of the labour movement.

The problem, as I see it, is that you cannot claim to be an economic conservative and at the same time give the unions what they want. The problem we have is that, with Labor’s IR policy, the Leader of the Opposition left it to the shadow minister for industrial relations to sort out the details on Labor’s IR policy, and she gave the unions what they want. Some day there is going to be a clash between what is in the interests of Australia, what is in the interests of families, what is in the interests of businesses, what is in the interests of jobs and what is in the interests of the trade unions. I cannot see the Leader of the Opposition standing up against trade union interests for the sake of Australia’s economy.

The key to the workplace relations system is in having a much more flexible system. One of the problems with the old accord was that having a centralised system of setting wages was very poor. It was very bad for productivity in Australia. I believe very strongly that it is important to have wages set in the workplaces and to have them set cooperatively between employees and employers. One recent example of this flexibility is the Port Adelaide-Enfield Council. There, a clear majority of staff voted for a five-year collective agreement with annual pay rises of four per cent. This was against what the Australian Services Union wanted. As a staff representative stated with regard to the union, those guys have a different backing. Their backing is from a national point of view and they are against Work Choices. It became apparent that they were not interested in anything else. In other words, the unions will look after themselves but they could not care less about what the employees actually want.

If Labor are elected at the end of the year, those employees would not have had the chance to negotiate with their council a system that benefited them. The council’s human resources manager stated that these workplace changes have allowed for a stable work environment. The title of Labor’s IR policy, Forward with Fairness, is completely misleading. Firstly, it has nothing to do with going forward. Labor policy will send the industrial relations system back 15 years. The days of union power in the workplace and of class warfare finished years ago. This is something that the Labor Party needs to recognise. What we need to do in the current economic climate is to encourage people to succeed in business, applaud people who create jobs and build the economic performance of Australia. Since 1996 we have had AWAs. They have been absolutely critical to the performance of the mining industry, and they have been critical to the growth in the Australian economy. They have been critical in a number of sectors: restaurants, hospitality and retail. The Labor Party has an outdated view with regard to how businesses work. Every business will see their employees as a resource. What the current workplace system allows for is the flexibility for employers and employees to agree to find an arrangement that suits them.

I welcome the introduction of the fairness test. I think it is an improvement. What it does is to allow for people who are on incomes below $75,000 to ensure that their AWA will not be below the award. The intention was not to have AWAs which were below the award. The intention was to have flexibility so that people can find an arrangement that suits them.

There are a number of problems with Labor’s IR policy. There will be no restrictions on union content in agreements, so they will also have a centralised system allowing for pattern bargaining across entire industries. This will have a devastating effect on inflation, as wage pressures, skills across different economic sectors and interest rates will suffer. This policy flies in the face of the Leader of the Opposition’s claim to be an economic conservative—and I suppose he claims to be a good economic manager. Businesses around the country are deeply concerned about Labor’s industrial relations policy. The Australian building and construction industry, the Master Builders Association and the Mines and Metals Association have all expressed concern over Labor’s policy. Even in today’s Australian there is the headline ‘Firms fear the return of unions’. Business groups are raising concerns that Labor’s industrial policy would allow union involvement in the permanent running of a company’s operation.

Again, today, we see another union boss, Dean Mighell, from the Electrical Trades Union, gloating about ripping off businesses by extracting millions of dollars from them. The unions do not care about workers; they care about themselves. They cannot wait for Labor to win this election so that they can start attacking businesses. If Labor wins the election, the country will be controlled by a union movement that represents only 15 per cent of private sector workers.

There are a lot of troubling aspects of a Labor government. A return to a Labor government will be quite dangerous for the Australian economy. We do not know what they are going to do with secondary boycotts in the Trade Practices Act. This has been part of the reason why for the last 11 years we have had such a low level of industrial disputes. It was absolutely critical to reforming the waterfront that we had the secondary boycott provision in the Trade Practices Act. One thing we do know is that they will abolish the ABCC. This has been very important in cleaning up the rorts in the building and construction industry. This is a $50 billion industry, so the health of the building industry affects us all—it has enormous flow-on effects throughout the economy. Independent economic research undertaken by Econtech in 2003 concluded that if productivity in the construction sector matched that in the more efficient residential building sector the level of gross domestic product would rise by 1.1 per cent, CPI would fall by one per cent and consumers would benefit by $2.3 billion. It was estimated at that time that it was costing around 30 per cent more to build the same project in Melbourne compared with Sydney.

The findings of the Cole Royal Commission into the Building and Construction Industry in 2003 presented a compelling and unassailable case for change. It concluded that the commercial building industry is one that is characterised by lawlessness, standover tactics and shonky corporate practices. It found that conduct of this kind, which would be unacceptable and even criminal in any other industry, is regularly tolerated because honest participants feel powerless to do anything about it. (Quorum formed) If Labor are elected what we will see is the abolition of AWAs. We will see a winding back of the reforms of the last 15 years and we will see a return to the bad old days of strikes, disputation, union domination, union interference in businesses and union thuggery.

The problem we face is the fundamental conflict between what is good for Australia and what is good for the union movement. Anyone would recognise that there will be times when these two come into conflict. The problem is that the union movement, which controls the Labor Party, has taken out insurance by stacking the parliament full of former trade union bosses. What we see is that 26 out of 30 of the Labor frontbench are former union bosses. And it is actually going to get worse at the next election, because the best seats have been set aside for the most powerful union bosses to come in, to take out insurance to ensure that the Labor leader does what is in the interests of the unions—not so much what is in the interests of employees, not so much what is fair for families, not so much what is in the interests of Australia.

There are a lot of very disturbing signs about how dangerous the Labor Party would be if they were elected to office. We have seen that they would abolish the ABCC. We have seen that their IR policy has not even made any attempt to be fair; all it has done is give the unions what they want. We do not know what they would do on secondary boycotts. It looks like we are going to face compulsory union bargaining: ‘good faith bargaining’ will be compulsory union bargaining.

As I conclude my remarks I welcome a former official of the FSU—another one of the 26 out of 30 former union bosses, former union officials, who are on the Labor frontbench.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before I call the honourable member for Prospect I remind the opposition that the Deputy Speaker has ruled that the chair will only acknowledge a quorum call at intervals that exceed 15 minutes, as they otherwise constitute a deliberate disruption of the parliament. I recognise that we are now calling an opposition member, so there will be no likely quorum called, but I remind opposition members that in the case of government members that rule will be enforced.

Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Boothby for his welcome to the dispatch box and for the promotion that he bestowed upon me. The Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007 purports to create a test that will ensure that certain working conditions are protected by law. These are the same conditions that the government told us were protected by law, with taxpayers’ money, not so long ago. These are the same conditions for which the government spent $55 million of taxpayers’ money on advertisements saying that these conditions were protected by law. Of course, they were wrong: they were not protected by law then. The advertisements were wrong and the government by introducing this legislation has acknowledged as much.

Now they are spending more taxpayers’ dollars in telling us that, this time, they are protected by law: ‘Sorry about that, we got it wrong last time. We told you they were protected by law, a slight mistake, but this time we’ve got it right.’ Now we are seeing even more taxpayers’ money being spent on these advertisements telling us that, this time, they are protected by law. This reminds me somewhat of that great novel Nineteen Eighty-Four: there was a mistake and, all of a sudden: ‘We’re at war with the wrong country and we apologise for that. We are no longer at war with Eurasia; we’re now at war with east Asia.’ This government has adopted an Orwellian method of communication, spending $55 million of taxpayers’ money not so long ago to say that conditions were protected by law and now reverting to the position that those conditions are not in fact protected by law but that now they will be.

The government raced out advertisements, claiming that it was important that people know their working rights, before this legislation had even been drafted. One need only look at the time line to see what is driving these changes. On 3 April, the Ministerial Committee on Government Communications approved Open Mind Research Group to undertake market research on workplace relations, and on 24 April a draft report was received by the government from that company. It was not until 4 May that the government announced changes to the operation of Work Choices, and it was not until that day that the first set of instructions were sent to the parliamentary counsel. But on the next two days, 5 and 6 May, advertising commenced on these changes. On 7 May the changes came into operation, although it was not until today that these changes began to be debated in this House. This is not a change driven by policy; this is a change driven by spin and by desperation in an election year.

The money being spent on these advertisements, combined with the money spent on the previous round of Work Choices advertisements, the advertisements that had the stamp ‘Protected by law’ on them, together with the expenditure for more workplace inspectors, brings the cost of the Work Choices legislation to $1 billion of taxpayers’ money. It did not cost that much to introduce the workplace relations reforms that the government brought in in 1996—I think that cost well under $20 million. It certainly did not cost that much for the Keating government to introduce its enterprise bargaining reforms in 1994. I doubt whether that cost even $10 million. But these reforms and the associated government spin have cost taxpayers $1 billion. I wonder whether the Australian people have a view on how that money could have been better spent. I am sure they do.

But what credibility do the government have when they say in this chamber and in the media that these changes will make workers better off? The Prime Minister was asked when he first introduced Work Choices—the love that dare not speak its name. I am not sure that we have heard the term ‘Work Choices’ used by members opposite, but I am sure it has been used by members on this side of the House because, after all, it is the name of the bill, the Work Choices amendment bill that the government introduced last year. When he was asked about these changes and whether he could guarantee that nobody would be worse off, the Prime Minister said:

My guarantee is my record ...

He was right, and his record was not good enough. Today, we see the government introducing legislation in an attempt to guarantee that no worker will be worse off, because the Prime Minister’s record was simply not good enough. The Prime Minister was asked specifically whether the abolition of the no disadvantage test in the last round of reforms would mean that workers would be worse off. He said:

Oh, no, that’s not right. The no disadvantage test was working in its complexity to prevent the making of workplace agreements. The goal of getting rid of the no disadvantage test is not to hurt people, it is to make it easier for workers and their employers to enter workplace agreements. That’s the whole purpose of the no disadvantage test. To argue... This change. To argue that would be absurd.

It was not absurd, and the government is acknowledging as much today by introducing this legislation. The Labor Party warned that the abolition of the no disadvantage test would leave workers worse off. The government told us that we were being ‘absurd’. The government told us that we were being scaremongers. The government told us that we were wrong. But, today, the government walks in and says, ‘Actually, you were right.’ It is not me saying that. I was drawn to some comments by the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, who, when he was asked whether the previous legislation had made mistakes, said:

I wasn’t the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations in the past—

whenever a minister says that, you know there is a flick pass coming—

but if you’re saying to me that we got it wrong in the past, well we did.

He further said:

We got it wrong.

…            …            …

We underestimated what would have happened if we put in place a system that may lead to people trading away penalty rates without fair compensation.

…            …            …

We are now putting in place a stronger safety net. We are ensuring that people get more, not less, insofar as the law can.

So the minister has acknowledged that the Labor Party were right when we said that the abolition of the no disadvantage test would in fact disadvantage workers.

I noticed when watching the parliament this morning that the former Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, the member for Menzies, got to his feet to speak on the guillotine—remember him? It is easy to think that maybe he is not involved anymore. Clearly, the Crosby Textor polling is showing that he is not a popular figure for the government, because you rarely hear from him these days. But he got to his feet this morning and defended the guillotine motion. He said that these changes are finetuning to fix unintended consequences. It is more than unintended consequences. The Labor Party warned that workers would be disadvantaged if you abolished the no disadvantage test, yet today the government comes in and says, ‘We’re fixing unintended consequences,’ acting a few months before an election in a desperate move to regain the public relations battle. This is from a government that told us the conditions were protected by law.

The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations is right about one thing: they did get it wrong. We saw this in the figures released in 2006—the most up-to-date figures available because the government has refused to release any more figures on Australian workplace agreements. They have refused to be open and transparent and to let the Australian people make a judgement about the effect of Australian workplace agreements. But we saw 63 per cent of Australian workplace agreements abolishing penalty rates; 52 per cent removing shiftwork loadings; 22 per cent not providing for an increase over the life of the agreement; and 100 per cent of AWAs excluding at least one so-called protected award condition. One hundred per cent of Australian workplace agreements abolished one condition which the government spent $55 million of the money of the Australian people telling them was protected by law. All they were protected by was spin. Now the government is attempting to say—painting the ruse—that they are protected by law.

We have seen examples of Australian workplace agreements that have abolished conditions and allowed for unfair compensation in return—companies which were simply complying with the law; companies which were simply and understandably maximising their chances under the extreme laws introduced by this government. We have heard the argument—we have heard it from the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations—that these changes work because we are in good economic times, that unemployment is low, that it is an employees’ market and employees can name their price in a strong bargaining position. In some cases there may be some truth to that. In some cases, in some segments of the workforce in some regions of the country, workers may be in a stronger bargaining position than they might be in other economic circumstances, but it is not across the board.

I was speaking the other day to an employee from Western Australia who was on an Australian workplace agreement. I asked them whether they felt they were in a good bargaining position or whether they just took the offer on the table, a take-it-or-leave-it basis. They made it very clear to me that it was made clear to them that the offer was on a take-it-or-leave-it basis and there were plenty of other people willing to do their job. That was in Western Australia, the tightest labour market in this country.

The government claims that, because of good economic times, employees are in a strong bargaining position. Some are; many are not. Even in segments of our economy which are doing very well, employees do not feel necessarily that they are in a good bargaining position. Putting that aside, you do not develop an industrial relations framework which will last indefinitely based on the economic conditions that are in place at one particular point in time. The economy will inevitably turn down through any set of circumstances—a downturn in our terms of trade or a downturn in the world economy. The scenario put by the government is that in good economic times and times of low unemployment, employees are in a good bargaining position. Therefore, by definition, when the economic times are not so good and when employment conditions do turn down, employees are going to be in a much worse bargaining position, and the same framework will be place. The same framework which this government says allows Australian workers to bargain from a position of strength will be in place when Australian workers are not bargaining from a position of strength. When all the cards in any negotiations are completely on the other side of the table, that is not fair. We need an industrial relations system with balance, fairness and flexibility, but the balance and fairness in this industrial relations system falls well short of that test. These changes fall well short of that test as well.

Let us look at the detail of some of these changes—something that members opposite have been reluctant to do because it is not in the Crosby Textor manual. The Crosby Textor manual says you only talk about union bosses; you do not talk about substance. Let us have a look at the substance of these changes. The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations says that they will operate in a similar fashion to the old no disadvantage test, which this government abolished. He is not quite right. As you would recall, Mr Deputy Speaker, the no disadvantage test was imposed on this government by this party and the Democrats in the other place. The government did not want to do it in the first place but, in order to get their original workplace relations changes through in 1996, the Senate imposed a no disadvantage test, which this government reluctantly accepted. The no disadvantage test prescribed that an AWA must, when compared to the underpinning award, leave the employee no worse off. This test is quite different.

In fairness, the changes do provide that an employee needs to receive fair compensation for the exclusion of certain award matters: rest breaks, incentive based payments, bonuses, shiftwork loadings, allowances et cetera. There is no protection for other award conditions such as redundancy pay, rostering protections or long service leave. They can be traded away with no fair compensation. Award conditions that are over the norm and more than what is normally the case—for example, extra leave provisions for flight attendants and childcare workers and, indeed, teachers—have no protection. The Workplace Authority Director will not be required to follow precedent, give reasons for a decision or establish published guidelines for reaching his decisions. There will be no right of an appeal.

What we see is something quite different from the no disadvantage test, despite the rhetoric and spin—taxpayer funded—from the government. We see something very different from the no disadvantage test, and we see a number of caveats and conditions in the operation of these changes to Work Choices. We see that family circumstances and exceptional circumstances of the business can be taken into account. That is not necessarily something I object to, but it is not prescribed as to how that would operate. There is no definition of ‘exceptional circumstances’. There is no definition of ‘family circumstances’. There is no mechanism to explore whether the director of the Workplace Authority needs to talk to the individual about family circumstances or whether the director must simply accept the word of the employer about the employee’s family circumstances.

There are holes in these changes to the Work Choices legislation, but, having said that, any measure that might improve the fairness of these extreme Work Choices laws needs to be supported. It would not be hard to improve the fairness of these laws. It is not a difficult ask. We are not sure whether these changes will, at the end of the day, achieve any improved fairness, but we acknowledge that they might. We acknowledge that there might be some workers who are protected by these changes. Therefore, it is incumbent on us to support them. And we are certainly sure that we cannot see a way that these changes can make the legislation less fair. We cannot see any adverse impacts from these changes to this legislation. Therefore, we are prepared to support them.

The government think, in their desperate PR battle at five minutes to midnight, that they can neutralise this issue and say: ‘The difference between the Labor Party and the Liberal Party in industrial relations is not as much as it once was because we have introduced a fairness test. We have ensured that Australian workplace agreements must be based on fairness.’ This is incorrect. What they have done is to introduce a PR test, a test designed, with the help of taxpayer funded advertisements, to get them through to October or November.

Considering that this government did not have a mandate for these changes at the last election, considering that this government did not say anything about Work Choices at the last election, considering that they did not say anything about their changes to AWAs, considering that they did not seek a mandate on which to base these extreme industrial relations changes, considering that they did not come clean with the Australian people before the last election, it is anybody’s guess how long these changes to Work Choices would last after the next federal election should the current government be returned.

This government has form. The Prime Minister has a 30-year project to introduce these extreme industrial relations laws. As I have said in this House in the past, in the 1970s he had a point but the world has moved on and it is time for the government to drop its extreme ideological agenda and to introduce real fairness into the workplace relations system. If it does not, it may fall to a Rudd Labor government to do so later this year.

David Fawcett (Wakefield, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As I rise to support the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007, I also want to draw to the attention of the House the fact that the opposition have only two members here to speak to this legislation. That is how much importance they place on it. The government has given them the courtesy of speaking without being interrupted throughout their speeches. In contrast, this morning has been absolutely racked by the opposition preventing the government from being able to speak to this bill without being interrupted. I think almost every speaker has been interrupted by the opposition. I just draw the attention of the House to the fact that in a democracy we should be able to speak about the issues and debate the ideas without resorting to those sorts of tactics and interruptions.

I want to speak about why this bill is being brought forward, about what the bill covers and about who will benefit from it. Predominantly, this bill has been brought forward because of the conflict of ideas being played out in Australia as we speak—in the media, in workplaces, in people’s homes and in community groups. What we are seeing is that we have one group who are assuming that everything is bad and that we need to restrict the majority of Australians and, in so doing, penalise the flexibility of workers, their families and employers to make arrangements that will suit them, that will enable the Australian economy and the Australian community to continue to develop, just because a few employers and employees do the wrong thing.

Contrast that with the approach of the government that says: ‘We trust and want to reward individuals for good behaviour and for good work, because in the vast majority of cases people do work together constructively. We want to put in place a framework that gives them the freedom to do that and to obtain the maximum benefit for families, for workers and for the businesses that at the end of the day provide the jobs that keep our economy going and that enable us to pay for the services and things that we wish to see—investments in education, infrastructure and defence.’

This battle of ideas has led to TV campaigns very much drawing on the fears that people have. It is interesting to note that in July last year the Daily Telegraph was the first of the media to come out and really highlight the fact that all of the ads that the ACTU had run had been discredited. So here we have an organisation—the ACTU—that has an Australia-wide reach, that has the potential all around Australia to find real cases of people who have been disadvantaged by the government’s changes to industrial relations laws, and the ones they chose to put on national television have all been discredited.

Time and again in this parliament the opposition have brought up cases in an attempt to show that people have been disadvantaged. I look particularly at one last year where workers at a Lufthansa subsidiary were offered the choice of an AWA or an existing collective agreement. But what was presented to the House and to the Australian public was that these people were being forced onto an agreement that was going to cut their conditions. What was not revealed to the House was that they had a choice. What was not revealed to the House was that there was up to a 16 per cent increase under a bonus scheme and that those workers stood to have around a 13 per cent increase in their take-home pay.

Just in case you happen to think that bonuses are not very fair, an analogous example is an agreement that the CFMEU put in place for Dunlop Bedding only the year before that. So we are seeing being presented to the Australian public a large degree of misinformation. That has caused a lot of fear. The most recent ads that have been flying around, which talk about percentages and statistics of agreements that do not include things like overtime, are the latest example of this. They show that side of agreement but they do not talk about the side of the agreement that helps people balance work and family. In my own electorate of Wakefield I am aware of people who have decided that they would rather have more flexibility in their work hours during the week so that they can meet obligations for either elderly parents or children, who they need to drop off and pick up from school and sport, and in return they will work on a weekend for normal-time pay. That arrangement enables them to balance work and family and to be in the workforce whereas under a strict award situation, where they are expected to work normal time or on the weekend for penalty rates, they would not be able to meet those obligations and so they would not be able to be back in the workforce. For those people, that is an advantage that helps them to be in the workforce, and a benefit to their family and to the broader society but that balance is not brought out in the ads.

Having said all that, the ads have been effective. The perception and the fear is out there and that is why government has acted to bring in another part of the framework to directly address that fear rather than have people say, ‘The ad says, “What about my 17-year-old?” ’, The reality that people are not listening to is that the 17-year-old is protected by the fact that he has to have an adult, his parent or guardian, to sign his workplace agreement, which never existed under the previous system, so there are more protections for them. People talk about low paid or unskilled workers not being able to negotiate or bargain. What they do not acknowledge is the fact that you can have the union bargain on your behalf if you wish to. People talk about the fact that it is take it or leave it but do not acknowledge the fact that under the old system, if the workplace had an award or an EBA, that was take it or leave it. You turned up, took what you were given and had no opportunity to bargain or discuss terms and conditions with your employer.

So what this change is looking to do is to say: ‘We hear that concern. We acknowledge that concern is out there.’ We still maintain that, as we look at this battle of ideas, we are better off to say that we will put in place a framework that frees up people to maximise opportunities for employees, employers and their families. For those who work against that, who disadvantage people, we will penalise them but we will set the vast majority free to get on with their lives and we will encourage and reward that behaviour as opposed to adopting the approach of restricting everybody, just to make sure that the few do not abuse the system.

A quorum having been called and the bells having been rung—

Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

For the benefit of the member for Wakefield who made some comments about this at the start, page 268 of House of Representatives Practice says there are two general principles that are operative here in relation to a quorum. First:

it is not the duty of the Chair to count the House until attention has been drawn by a Member to the state of the House—

Thankfully; otherwise no-one would ever get heard in the place. Second:

when attention is drawn, the Chair is obliged to make a count or have a count made.

Stewart McArthur (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr McArthur interjecting

Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Corangamite will not reflect upon the Chair. The Chair is simply carrying out his duties, as is required by this House.

David Fawcett (Wakefield, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I recognise your remarks about you carrying out your duties in accordance with the procedures and I appreciate that. My comments are directed mainly to members of the opposition who are hypocritical in their application of this order because they never call a quorum upon their own speakers when there are only one or two addressing the same topic. My constituents have voted for me to come here, to represent them and to be their voice in this parliament. The actions of the opposition are to essentially hold a stop-work meeting, which is stopping the process of democracy so that we cannot have a fair and informed debate about something that impacts on the lives of all Australians.

Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Ms Hall interjecting

David Fawcett (Wakefield, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Even now, as I am speaking, the opposition are interjecting and trying to cut off the opportunity for this debate. I will use the words ‘work choices’ because Work Choices is legislation that this government brought in to benefit Australian families, Australian workers and the Australian economy. It is disappointing that, despite the many benefits of these changes, there has been such a negative fear campaign focused on only one or two elements of them. What people do not recognise through these fear campaigns is the broad structural changes that have given us a national system of industrial relations. It is a system that has given us choice. Unlike the Labor Party, this legislation actually provides for freedom of association. It offers a choice of AWAs, union collective agreements, non-union collective agreements, union greenfields agreements or employer greenfields agreements. It enables unions to be parties to collective agreements. It enables union officials to be bargaining agents for employees. It maintains the rights of union officials to enter workplaces and it maintains the rights for unions to take lawful industrial action. I have to tell you, not all of those choices and not all of those rights exist under what is being proposed by the opposition.

Some of the commentary that is appearing in the media now highlights that the broad structural changes and the details about even these areas in question are benefiting Australian society in terms of the number of jobs created and the number of long-term unemployed who are now able to move into the workplace. That is because employers, for the first time in a long time, have the confidence to say, ‘We’ll give this person a shot, we’ll give them a chance at a job, because we know if it doesn’t work out that we can make other arrangements,’ as opposed to leaving that person in the long-term unemployment queue for even longer.

So what is this fairness test? The fairness test is a structure that we are putting in place basically to reassure people that the vast majority of employers are doing the right thing. It means that there will be an independent umpire who reviews workplace agreements to make sure that employees receive fair compensation whenever that agreement removes or modifies protected award conditions, such as penalty rates or overtime loadings—which have been the focus of much of the fear campaign that has been put out there. The starting point would generally be monetary compensation, and that would equate to things like the agreement I spoke about earlier, at the subsidiary of Lufthansa, which put in place a bonus scheme where, under the AWA, people in fact had the potential to earn significantly more money than they did under their collective agreement.

But it is not necessarily just monetary things that people are looking for. I alluded before to the example of those people of Wakefield who I know have been happy to say, ‘I’ll work under conditions that don’t have overtime payments, on a weekend, because that gives me flexibility during the week.’ If they are happy to sign up for something like that and say to the independent umpire, ‘Yes, if the flexibility means being able to balance my work and family life, being able to pick up my children from school or sport or to care for my elderly relatives, I’m happy to work on a weekend with no overtime,’ then that is an agreement that they should be able to make with their employer without a third party coming in and saying that that is unfair. The Workplace Authority will be able to conduct the fairness test and say, ‘This has been offered, you’ve accepted, and we recognise that that is fair,’ even though the monetary advantage is not there.

The fairness test will cover employees with a base salary of under $75,000 on an Australian workplace agreement and it will cover all collective agreements. This also gives some certainty to people who come in to work for the larger chain stores, for example. People often talk about the fast food industry, concerned about what might be offered to young people. Because the agreements will have to be certified as fair, there is higher degree of certainty that what will be offered to a young person is not going to disadvantage them.

This fairness test is really the government saying that what we have put in place has provided advantage to the whole Australian economy—more jobs, more people in work. We recognise and we hear that there is concern in the community because of the fear campaign that has been put out there. So this test is us responding to that in an appropriate way—not to limit freedom, not to limit the endeavours of small businesses who have often gone out on a limb and invested their own time and money to create the opportunity for other people to work. We are addressing this fear and concern by putting in place a framework that guarantees these conditions so that we will get the benefits that were the intent and, in practice, the outcomes of the Work Choices legislation. We are putting in place a framework to address the fear that has arisen in much of the Australian public because of the very misleading campaign that has been run by the ACTU and the Labor Party.

That brings me to my last point, on choice. Who do the Australian people want to choose to be speaking here? Who do they want to choose to run the country in the future? A government that is prepared to take the hard decisions that have made a significant difference. For example, GST—that was a significant decision, a significant change in the way that Australia collected revenue, and it was criticised by members opposite who said it was a day that would go down in history as being the undoing of modern Australian society. Yet now there is not a state government in this country that would seek to reverse the GST system because of the significant growth and revenue base it has given them to deliver things like health care, education and policing under the state system. So, despite the criticisms that this government has received, it has been prepared to take those hard decisions.

This industrial relations decision recognises the fact that, in the private sector workforce, some 85 per cent of people are not members of a union. They have recognised in practice that they can negotiate with their employer, they can be an independent contractor and the majority of employers are looking to do the right thing, particularly with the ageing of the population, as we face a shortage of not only skilled workers but even unskilled workers. In the area of Virginia and in the manufacturing areas of Elizabeth and Salisbury in South Australia, I am speaking to employers who are looking for more workers. I passed a packing shed the other day in Virginia and they had a sign out the front saying: ‘Stop! Workers required.’ Now, these employers are going to do the right thing by their workers because they need them. If you are a market gardener, you cannot actually plant a crop if you do not know whether you will have workers to harvest the crop, particularly crops that are time sensitive; for example, some of the organically certified crops are very time sensitive for harvesting. So those employers will do the right thing by their employees.

So this government is seeking to empower the majority of Australian people, who are fair and decent people, both employers and employees, to get on with running their businesses and growing the wealth of this nation which enables us to fund the health and education systems we have as well as balance work and family. We are not seeking to impose the view of a very small group—and I note again that union membership in the private sector is only 15 per cent, yet they dominate the Australian Labor Party. Later this year, if the Australian public choose the Australian Labor Party to govern this country, they are in essence going to be choosing the union movement to govern this country again, with all of the thuggery that goes along with that, with the restriction of choice and the lack of freedoms that have extended well into our history and that have caused some of the worst disputation and loss of productivity we have seen. I support this bill and I commend it to the House.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australians are not afraid of hard work. They are not afraid to put in the hard yards to get ahead. Generally speaking, Australians will do what it takes. They are amongst the hardest working individuals in the world. By their nature, Aussies are also a flexible lot, ready to roll up their sleeves and get on with it. But they also have a good sense of what is fair. Built into the Australian psyche is the notion of a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. When women and men choose to work longer hours on weekdays and decide to give up their weekends, they deserve to receive overtime and penalty rates to help pay a bit extra off the mortgage, pay for the kids to be involved in sport and simply have a bit more peace of mind. It is because Australians know what is fair that they can instantly recognise a political quick fix when they see it, especially when it comes from the Howard government wrapped in television and newspaper ads, and badged with the words ‘fairness test’. They know that this is the same government that rode roughshod over their working rights and conditions earlier in the election cycle that is now proposing this so-called test—just months after they were out there proclaiming that these conditions would be guaranteed by law, and now we have a political quick fix just months before an election.

I listened to the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Joe Hockey, this morning on radio talking about how in the past Australians who signed on to AWAs were worse off—they gave up their conditions without getting proper recompense for them—but now it would be different. The problem with that is that the government, when it passed its Work Choices legislation, said that this would not occur, and it has. Make no mistake: no amount of rebadging, no amount of advertising and no amount of amending the legislation formerly known as Work Choices will restore the balance in our workplaces. This Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007 is all about the job of the Prime Minister rather than the jobs of working Australians.

The Labor Party remain totally opposed to the Prime Minister’s unfair Work Choices laws because we are a party created by working people and built on their determination and steadfast belief in the fair go. We remain opposed to laws that were born when the ideology of a single man started to dictate the shape of the nation, when a Senate majority of one provided a temptation so great that the Prime Minister abused the trust Australians placed in him when they returned his government in 2004, when unfettered control of both houses of parliament became an attack on the values of Australian society. It is a government so driven by ideology that it did not hesitate to make draconian changes to the Australian industrial relations system despite never having sought a mandate from the Australian people to do so. For the same reasons, Australians were forced to endure draconian changes to the welfare system, the gagging of important debates like that on the antiterrorism bills, inquiries on important legislative items done and dusted in a matter of days and sometimes hours, the ideological abolition of voluntary student unionism and, indeed, the gagging of this very debate before the parliament today.

How can anyone forget the comments of a government so drunk on power that the chairman of the Senate Economics Legislation Committee, Senator Brandis, in August 2005 was reported telling his coalition colleagues that the idea of an inquiry into the Work Choices legislation was ‘stupid’ and that:

There’s nothing in this for us ... Senate inquiries are a free kick for the Labor Party, the media never run anything except things that are embarrassing for the Government and it won’t have any public purpose because the detail will be in the legislation for all to see anyway.

For his efforts, for trashing democracy, the Prime Minister saw it fit to reward Senator Brandis with a promotion to the ministry.

These unfair industrial relations laws are driven by a man who has lost touch with the Australian people and what they value: the right to a fair go regardless of what you do for a living, where you live and how much you earn. The changes inflicted on Australian workplaces have turned worker against worker and undermined the security of family life. Salaries have been cut, conditions scrapped, entitlements slashed and minimum standards attacked. The Howard government have gone too far. Rather than governing for all of us, they govern for some of their friends. The Prime Minister said he would keep interest rates low, but we know rates have gone up eight times. He said he would get the economy right, but now he is squandering the opportunities offered by the unprecedented resources boom. He said he would protect us from terror, but instead he has taken Australian troops to war in Iraq and made all Australians feel less safe. He said the Senate majority would not go to his head, but, of course, we know he has gone too far. But there are some things he never said anything about: nothing about his plans to slash wages and smash awards; nothing about scrapping penalty rates, overtime and redundancy pay; nothing about trashing public holidays like Anzac Day; and nothing about giving bosses the right to sack workers whenever they like.

Australians know what is fair when they see it and they know that these amendments to Work Choices will not stop the unfair industrial relations laws continuing to hurt working families. This is because these changes are not motivated by the national interest. These changes are purely motivated by the political interests of the Howard government. The Prime Minister admitted that his hasty Work Choices amendments have been made because of perception and said:

There is this perception in the community that there might be situations where people are vulnerable to having their penalty rates and overtime loadings traded away or taken away without adequate compensation.

Now I don’t want that to happen ...

It is too late; it has already happened.

The Work Choices legislation is no perception. Just ask the workers at Spotlight or the long-serving Tristar workers in my electorate who have been cheated out of their entitlements because of the Howard government’s extreme industrial relations laws. These Australians have worked hard to contribute to community life and the economy. They have been thrown on the scrapheap. What they have to do is turn up to work each and every day and clock on when there is no work to do. Why is that occurring? So that when they are laid off they will reduce their redundancy payments. These Tristar workers came to this parliament last year. I asked questions in the parliament last year. They were prepared to meet the government, the Prime Minister, the then Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Kevin Andrews, or anyone else from the government. The government ignored their plight. The government sat on their hands. That is not perception; that is the reality. For the government, the employees’ plight became an issue only when Alan Jones and others in the media took an interest. This spurred the government to call the actions of the company immoral and criminal, but it did not drive them to action and to make changes to the Work Choices laws. They sat on their hands for months while Tristar workers were being treated so unfairly day after day.

It is clear the Howard government is not interested in the plight of Australian workers; it is just interested in being re-elected. It has already spent, in a week, $4.1 million of taxpayers’ money on industrial relations advertising in an attempt to achieve that goal. That was, of course, advertising before the legislation was actually introduced into this chamber—contempt for this parliament and for proper legislative processes. That was on top of the $55 million advertising campaign in 2005 to tell hardworking Australians that their award conditions would be protected by law. Of course, we know that that protection is not there. We know because the government itself says it is not there but proclaims that this legislation will fix the problem that it said was never there in the first place. So why should Australian workers trust the government? We could have done a fair bit in employing extra doctors and nurses or putting more money into education and housing with that $60 million, but it is a self-indulgent government that is prepared to spend an unlimited amount of taxpayer funds in order to secure its own political interests.

I would like to turn to the gaping holes in the Work Choices amendments before us. Firstly, there is the argument that there is fair compensation for loss of protected award conditions. The proposed amendment states that, if a workplace agreement modifies or excludes any of the listed protected award conditions, the agreement must provide fair compensation for the loss of the protected award. This raises a number of concerns. Firstly, there does not appear to be any compensation provided for loss of award conditions not subject to the so-called fairness test. These include conditions such as additional leave for certain industries, redundancy pay and rostering protections. Given that the Howard government’s own statistics on AWAs show that 100 per cent of all agreements took away at least one protected award condition, and recently leaked figures show that workers have lost all 11 so-called protected award conditions in 44 per cent of AWAs signed since Work Choices was introduced, it is likely that many employees will still be worse off under an AWA than under an award, despite the government’s proposed amendments.

Secondly, it is unclear what ‘fair compensation’ constitutes and how it might be calculated by the Workplace Authority. This is particularly concerning because the government has always argued there is no methodology that enables proper comparison of the circumstances before and after an AWA. In fact, on 26 March this year, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations stood at the dispatch box opposite. The Deputy Opposition Leader, Julia Gillard, had asked:

Will the minister give the Australian people one reason—just one reason—why his government will not direct the Office of the Employment Advocate to recommence the analysis of Australian workplace agreements and to publicly release it?

The minister, Joe Hockey, replied:

Because, with the introduction of AWAs and the changes made under our laws a year ago, no-one has shown me a formula that allows you to compare apples with apples.

So, what does ‘fair compensation’ exactly constitute? The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations outlined in his second reading speech that ‘a slice of pizza will not constitute non-monetary compensation’. We are grateful for that clarification, but what about an occasional fancy dinner, some frequent flyer points, a discount on grocery items for someone who works in a supermarket or a weekly tank of petrol? I am sure that further clarification would be appreciated not just by workers but also by employers across Australia.

The second argument is that these amendments to the Work Choices legislation are about the issue of consultation with employees. Let us presume for a moment that the Workplace Authority does find a way to calculate the value of lost award conditions. The proposed legislation remains unclear as to whether the Workplace Authority will even consult with the employee to ascertain whether he or she considers the compensation to be a genuine benefit. Also, the legislation appears to make no provision for the employee to appeal the decision if he or she considers it to be insufficient compensation. It seems to me that, despite the government’s rhetoric that the Workplace Authority will consider the ‘industry, location and economic circumstances of the business and the specific employment circumstances or opportunities of the employee’, the fairness test provides an escape route for employers who undercompensate rather than a protection mechanism for employees incurring the loss. It is not surprising really. The Howard government would never have introduced their extreme industrial relations laws if they had the needs of working Australians in mind.

Labor will move amendments in the consideration in detail debate later this afternoon. If the Howard government is genuinely concerned about compensating all workers for the loss of award conditions, it will support our amendments. But let us be clear: Labor remain totally opposed to the Prime Minister’s extreme Work Choices laws. There is nothing in the proposed amendments before us that will stop Labor abolishing Work Choices. They are not about introducing flexibility or fairness into the industrial relations system. They are all about clever politics. Australian employers and employees were expected to comply with changes to the Work Choices legislation from Monday, 7 May, even though the legislation had not been written, let alone released. To add insult to injury, taxpayers’ money was used to advertise the new laws that had not seen the light of day. This is clever and cunning politics before sound policy, and public relations before parliamentary process.

It is clear that the proposed changes to the Work Choices legislation will not fix the lack of balance in Australian workplaces. They will not change the fact that the Prime Minister has lost touch with the needs of working Australians and with the challenges they face when juggling work, family and sudden roster changes. Labor supports the amendment in the hope that it may benefit even one working Australian. But, in government, Australians can rest assured that we will do things differently. Labor supports a real safety net: legislated minimum conditions and modern, simplified awards. We support enterprise level bargaining to drive productivity. Labor introduced enterprise bargaining. Labor supports individual common-law agreements which cannot undercut the safety net. We will ensure that, when minimum wage cases are handed down, pay rates are published to assist employers.

Labor’s system will be overseen by a new, one-stop shop industrial umpire. We will be tough on unlawful industrial action. Above all, Labor’s policy will be fair, balanced and productive. The Prime Minister may be a clever politician, but hardworking Australian families can see that the only job the Prime Minister is worried about is his own.

It is quite extraordinary that the government, which says that this legislation is so important, which has spent so much of taxpayers’ funds on advertising this campaign, which is truncating debate in this House by moving a gag motion, can only find eight members of parliament who are prepared to speak on this legislation. There is not a single frontbencher, besides the minister, who is prepared to put their name on the speakers list to speak on this legislation. It is extraordinary that the government is too embarrassed to actually stand up and support this legislation which, it says, is critical. This is all about the Prime Minister’s past ideological obsessions. It has nothing to do with securing Australia’s future prosperity.

Phillip Barresi (Deakin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was not sure where the member for Grayndler was going with his speech on the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007. He was going through all the ills and sins of the fairness test amendment the government is introducing today. I thought he may surprise me by saying he is going to vote against it. Right at the end, after spending most of the time allocated to him decrying these changes and the need for them, he came out and said he will support it. I thank the member for Grayndler for clarifying the total confusion but, of course, that is typical of the Australian Labor Party. There is constant confusion about the Labor Party’s position on industrial relations. We have yet to see from those opposite a policy that lasts longer than a week or so. Labor’s dangerous industrial relations policies are a real threat to jobs, to wages growth and to the nation’s ongoing economic security. We have a dangerous industrial relations policy as a result of their movement, which is all over the place, on this policy area. Of course, they are waiting each time to ensure they get the tick off from the union movement outside this place.

I rise today to speak on this important reform of the workplace relations system, particularly the introduction of the stronger safety net. The fairness test, which is at the heart of this bill, strikes a real balance between the needs of a flexible labour market system that responds to the competitive forces in our economy and the needs of individuals for personal security when they enter into the negotiation process. I have spoken in the past about the importance of building a modern and flexible industrial relations system. This is vital to ensuring our nation’s long-term prosperity. I know that members on the other side have made the same statement. There is a bit of commonality around that statement, but we differ of course on the approach for how to get there. We certainly believe that, in building such a system, it is important that a strong, responsible safety net is in place to further strengthen the negotiation process between working Australians and their employers.

The Australian economy is going through a period of unprecedented growth and expansion and the reforms of the past 10 years have meant that more Australians than ever before have jobs—and, most importantly, have higher wages. But we cannot rest on our laurels. Labour market reform is vital to ensuring that we lock in this prosperity for the long term. Since the first workplace reforms were introduced in 1996, real wages have grown by 19.8 per cent according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Furthermore, since March 2006, which is only about 15 months ago, when Work Choices came in, more than 300,000 new jobs have been created, with wages growth continuing at around 4.1 per cent for those in the workforce. The need for this legislation has already been spoken about by the minister and the Prime Minister.

I would like to pay tribute for a few minutes to the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, the Hon. Joe Hockey. The minister has shown a great deal of competence, understanding and, more importantly, a willingness to engage with businesses and employees around the country. I have accompanied him on some of his visits—not on all of them, but on some. This visitation program has been pivotal. During these visits we heard from employees and employers. We heard of employees moving from casual to full-time employment because of the ability to go into a flexible workplace arrangement with their employers. Thanks to these visits, we are now seeing changes taking place as a result of the minister listening to what has been said. I would like to thank him as well for his visit to Victoria, and particularly his visit out to Deakin just prior to these changes being announced. That visit, in particular, down to Victoria certainly provided great impetus for introducing these changes. (Quorum formed) There is one thing about those on the other side: they cannot escape those traits from their union movement days. In the past they called people out onto the grass. We do not have grass here; we have carpet. But they are still calling everybody out. Ring the bell and get them out here. I thank the Chief Opposition Whip for giving me an audience.

The fairness testing arrangements introduced in this bill will provide a stronger safety net for the majority of working Australians. It is a safety net that promotes fairness whilst retaining the flexibility that has helped produce the conditions that we have today—conditions such as a 33-year low in unemployment, which now sits at 4.4 per cent and in some parts of my electorate is even lower. We have the lowest level of strike action since 1913. Of course, as I mentioned earlier on, we have seen real wages growth of over 19 per cent since 1996. The test within this bill means that fair compensation and security is provided to employees where protected conditions such as penalty rates and overtime are modified in a workplace agreement. I thought that was what the other side wanted: fair compensation and security to be given to employees when trading away penalty rates and other conditions. Of course we know that the ACTU—and this comes straight out of Greg Combet’s mouth—has entered into these sorts of negotiations in the past, where compensation has been given for trading away penalty rates, overtime and other traditional award conditions. I would have thought that this measure would have had universal support from those on the other side. So when I hear the member for Lalor saying that this amendment only goes 99 per cent of the way I am confused by that statement, because she obviously has not read the full implications of this bill.

The amendments will be welcomed by many constituents who live in my electorate of Deakin in Melbourne, particularly those who have argued for a safety net and an enforcement regime. The new arrangements mean that people earning under $75,000 per annum base pay will be able to have their employment arrangements scrutinised by the Workplace Authority in order that they receive fair monetary or non-monetary equivalent compensation. These changes mean that the personal circumstances of both the employer and the employee will be taken into account. Working families can take into account their outside of work responsibilities when negotiating new employment agreements—a condition, I might add, that has always been in place. This bill certainly reinforces that provision. It expands choice and flexibility to those who have been forced to work under inflexible awards and collective agreements. This flexibility has been further underwritten by creating a cop on the beat in the form of the Workplace Authority. I would have thought that members of the public listening to this debate, those who have had some concerns and have been scared off by the union movement’s fear campaign, would welcome the fact that there will be 600 new workplace assessors ensuring that the right thing is done by the employee. No-one, I would have thought, on either side would want to see a situation where a rogue employer is allowed to get away with abusing employment arrangements—whether it be by 2c or by 45c. We do not want to see that sort of situation. Those employers certainly do not deserve to have employees employed under  such conditions.

The powers of the Workplace Authority will be to provide advice to employers and employees on how to make an agreement fair for both parties. This needs to take place within 14 days. Importantly, if the agreement fails to meet the fairness test within the 14-day period it will become null and void and revert to the pre-existing agreement. If there is no agreement, it will revert to a default award which will then come into effect. The Workplace Authority will have the power to strike down contracts if they do not meet the fairness test conditions. I think this would be a welcome provision in these amendments by those on the other side.

The protection of penalty rates will also be a key component of the new fairness test. If the employer and employee agree to a trade off without an obvious monetary value, the new independent umpire, the Workplace Authority, must be satisfied that the compensation is of significant value to the employee and their individual needs. This is not too dissimilar to the way that it has operated in the past through the Industrial Relations Commission.

The Workplace Ombudsman will replace the Office of Workplace Services. The Office of Workplace Services, in its brief 15-month history, has represented employees in fine style. Since March 2006 it has contacted 46,600 workplaces, undertaken over 2,000 workplace audits, lodged or completed 37 litigations against employers and recovered over $10 million in employee entitlements on behalf of 6,300 employees. This office has been an office of real power and that power will be boosted even more through these amendments. The fairness test will build off these strengths and ensure that: the general public have real confidence in a system that provides the flexibility demanded by modern nations while still providing protection to the vulnerable, the young and employees coming back into the workforce after a number of years absence; an employer cannot dismiss an employee because an agreement fails or may fail the fairness test—and that is part of the protection; an employer cannot coerce an existing employee to modify or remove a protected award condition—if they do, the Workplace Authority will certainly come down and strike the agreement out; and an employer would pay any compensation which the employee is entitled to within a specified time limit—compensation that the employee values, in answer to the member for Grayndler’s comment during his contribution.

The great irony of this debate is that the Labor Party is not offering a fairer, more flexible system. The Labor Party is offering a dangerous industrial relations policy—a policy that is a danger to jobs, jobs growth, wages growth and, as I said earlier, ongoing economic prosperity. This party which, according to its spin doctors, cares about working conditions, even forgot to add a minimum wage to its 10 minimum conditions—the member for Lalor spoke about what Labor’s policy will be—now making it 11 minimum conditions. But then again, I am confused whether it is 11 because only yesterday in an opinion piece by the member for Lalor in the Age, she said:

Labor supports a real safety net. Ten legislated minimum conditions ...’

I ask: is it 10 or is it 11? Each day there seems to be more and more confusion with those on the other side. The deceptiveness and short-sightedness of the ALP’s claims to be the workers’ friends have been shown up by their insistence that, despite supporting this bill, if they come into office they will abolish the fairness test provisions, showing that their posturing today is simply hollow rhetoric. You either support the bill or you do not. If you do not think that it is worth it, why are you going to support the bill later on this afternoon when we come to the vote?

The Labor Party’s industrial relations policy was sold out to the ACTU. The price for the sale was $100 million. The member for Holt may laugh, but he knows as well as I do that, if he breaks that down, $20 million of the $100 million has been set aside for 20 seats. We know that they are cashed up. I dread to be a constituent in the next election who goes to the letter box and opens it. There will be a flood of mail coming out. Based on the $20 million—$1 million per federal electorate for the 20 electorates that have been chosen by those on the other side. They have sold out to the ACTU. For this price, unions will have unprecedented access to workplaces. It is going back to the bad days of bullying and standover tactics in the workplace.

We only have to listen to words from the mouths of those in the union movement. A senior union official—I think it was Greg Combet; I apologise if it was not—said, ‘We used to run Australia and it would be great to go back to those days.’ Dean Mighell from the ETU, whose official is standing for my seat, said that it would be fun to play around with employers. These are words from the union movement. They are basically saying that we are going back to the old days. Kevin Reynolds from Western Australia said that he would like to see a situation, with the abolition of the Building Construction Commission, where once again he is in charge. Labor’s own policy document reinforces the message that the union movement will be back in town—that is why their industrial relations policy is a danger to the Australian nation—but it says nothing about union rights of entry to businesses. From this glaring omission in their own policy document we can only assume that access by the union movement to businesses will be unlimited. Page 14 of their policy document, Forward with fairness, states:

Under Labor’s System, bargaining participants will be free to reach agreement on whatever matters suit them.

With unlimited access to the workplace under Labor, there will be no limit on what the union bosses can demand to be in agreements.

This is the kind of industrial environment that we are basically going to go back to. Under Labor, there will be no limit on what union bosses can demand to be in agreements. ‘No ticket, no start’ will be back. Unions will be able to demand that only union members be employed at a business. And they will be making demands about deductions from employees’ wages, restrictions on the use of contractors or labour hire arrangements, paid leave to attend union training and union meetings—all the things which have stifled businesses in the past will come back. There will be unlimited union right of entry and the encouragement of people through various means to take up union membership and, of course, the return to the dreaded unfair dismissal provisions.

Labor has said it will support the government’s proposed amendments to outlaw union bargaining fees which give unions the power to collect fees from workers who have chosen not to be union members. However, we cannot trust these words. How can we trust Labor when their own policy document, Forward with fairness, states:

A Rudd Labor Government will also remove the Government’s onerous, complex and legalistic restrictions on agreement content.

Labor will be introducing bargaining fees once again. (Time expired)

Steve Gibbons (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor remains totally opposed to the Howard government’s draconian Work Choices laws because there is very little in these changes that will make the government’s Work Choices philosophy acceptable to the majority of Australian working people or make it any fairer. Nor will they stop Labor getting rid of Work Choices completely if we form government after the next election.

Stewart McArthur (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr McArthur interjecting

Steve Gibbons (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Corangamite interjects. I listened to his contribution earlier today and I would have to say that if he were any drier he would shatter.

These changes to Work Choices are a pitiful attempt at clever politics from a tired government—a government in decay and decline. We should not forget that the Prime Minister kept his plans for extreme industrial relations reform from the Australian public prior to the last federal election. But once he gained control of the Senate, the Prime Minister introduced these Work Choices laws to rip the balance out of Australian workplaces. Now, with an election around the corner, he responds to his polling and hastily creates changes to his Work Choices laws. To use the Prime Minister’s own words, it has been done because of ‘perceptions’. But actions speak louder than words.

The government arrogantly announced these laws on Friday, 4 May, and said all businesses must comply with the changes to the Work Choices laws from the following Monday. During the following weeks, the Prime Minister deliberately refused to provide details to the Australian public. But he did approve a multimillion dollar advertising campaign highlighting these changes—an advertising campaign that should have been funded by the Liberal Party. This is clearly politics before policy, and public relations before parliamentary process.

These amendments will not stop these unfair laws continuing to hurt working families. These changes to Work Choices will not fix the lack of balance in Australian workplaces. Labor will support this amendment, on the outside chance that it may benefit just a few working Australians and their families. We are not convinced it will, but we cannot see how it will make the laws any worse.

Importantly, these changes to Work Choices will not protect basic conditions Australian families rely on, like notice of changes to rosters or redundancy pay. And these changes to Work Choices mean that a huge government bureaucracy will decide, in secret, what can be in an Australian workplace agreement. It will not even have to listen to the employee, but it will need to know all of the employee’s personal and family circumstances.

The bill still has a huge escape clause and does not necessarily apply to employers and employees, depending on their industry, location or specific circumstances. This bill will not change the fact that the Prime Minister and this government have lost touch with Australian working families. There has been enough uncertainty and delay created by these changes—we believe there should be a speedy passage of this bill through the parliament. This shows once again that the Prime Minister is a clever politician but is only interested in clinging on to power. And at the next election, these changes will remind the Australian public just how arrogant and tricky this government is.

In introducing the Work Choices bill over twelve months ago, the Howard government, by listening to the right-wing bigots and ideologues amongst its own ranks, and those who represent a minority of employers—employers who are more focused on ideology than on managing their own businesses—have done Australia a major disservice. They have participated in a foolish and damaging disservice not only to millions of working Australian men and women but also to our economy and therefore the entire nation. It is my intention to present some evidence to support this assertion, which is supported by well-grounded research and authoritative opinion from a range of internationally recognised experts. I will start by providing the House and the public with a few background facts. I will then proceed to demonstrate how this malicious and vindictive Work Choices legislation has begun, and will continue, to undermine Australia’s prosperity and growth and the standard of Australians’ working lives and Australian living standards.

Members will be aware of the disturbing testimony of the Governor of the Reserve Bank on 21 February, 2007 that Australia had enjoyed an average annual growth in its gross domestic product of 2.6 per cent for the period 1990 to 2004. Since that time, however, it has grown at the alarming rate of just 0.9 per cent—well below the rates of our competitors. In addition, and according to the Productivity Commission, ‘import penetration’ of our domestic markets increased from 25 per cent to 36 per cent. The number of jobs targeted for outsourcing overseas—or ‘offshoring’, as it is known—is also increasing. The Australian Industry Group believes that by 2008 our manufacturing sector may have lost 60,000 jobs overseas. A 2005 OECD report identified that up to 19 per cent of the Australian workforce was employed in occupations potentially affected by offshoring. These are truly alarming figures and most of our OECD competitor countries face similar challenges. Most, however, are trying to balance the need for flexibility and reform with the need for stability. The Howard government’s response has been to implement the most unfair and unbalanced legislation since 1904—legislation that is designed to drive down pay and conditions and to prohibit and prosecute the legitimate activities of trade unions in this country.

Our traditional sources of competitive advantage, and therefore productivity, have changed. Indeed, over the past 20 years, Australia’s and the rest of the world’s economies have changed, and the pace of change will only accelerate. During what is referred to as the industrial age, from the late 1930s through to the mid-1970s, companies could rely on the protection of proprietary technology and import tariffs to ensure market domination. A company would not now, as Xerox did in 1959, expect that its product would dominate the world market for 13 years. Now it appears that most leading economists, as well as many industrialists and governments from the Western world, recognise and acknowledge that it is people—

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

Order! It being 2 pm the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 97. The debate may be resumed at a later hour. The member will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed.