Jennie George (Throsby, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I grieve today about the Howard government’s industrial relations policies and its Work Choices legislation. It is a measure of a civilised society that it requires regulation external to the workplace to provide an appropriate balance between the right of an employer to run their business and the rights of employees to fair remuneration; job security, as far as is possible; and dignity for employees in their dealings with employers. This includes the right of workers to participate collectively in the protection and advancement of their wages and conditions of employment. Many of these rights are enshrined in ILO conventions, and it is some of these rights which this government has set out to trash. Our unique system of conciliation and arbitration, dating back to the early 20th century, was established to ensure a fair balance between these two imperatives.

The principle of a civilised society was perhaps best expressed by Alfred Deakin back in 1904, when he introduced the first Conciliation and Arbitration Act. He said:

This Bill starts with the confession that it is based on a humanitarian interpretation of the principles and obligations which form the very basis of civilised society. It leaves to its opponents the creed whose God is greed, whose devil is need and whose paradise lies in the cheapest market.

It is this very system, and the foundations and principles which underpin it, that the Prime Minister has wanted to overturn throughout his political life. The only thing that has prevented the Prime Minister from achieving his vision of a deregulated labour market has been his government’s lack of control of the Senate up until now. When that changed at the last election, he was able, yet again, to pursue his real agenda through the regressive and unfair Work Choices legislation.

The Prime Minister’s agenda has been clear from the day he was elected, back in 1996. He introduced the Workplace Relations Bill 1996. Before the election, the Prime Minister said to the Australian community:

Under no circumstance will a Howard Government create a wages system that will cause the take-home pay of Australians to be cut. Under a Howard Government you cannot be worse off, but you can be better off. I give this rock solid guarantee: our policy will not cause a cut in the take-home pay of Australian workers.

He did not mean it then, just like he does not mean it now. He has never meant to properly protect workers, even under the more recent so-called fairness test. In 1996 it was only through the 170 amendments to the bill, supported by the Democrats in the Senate, that some measure of fairness was reinserted into the legislation.

I now want to turn to one specific element of the 1996 bill that shows the government’s real agenda. Prior to 1996, under legislation that was introduced by the Labor government to extend enterprise bargaining, a no-disadvantage test was put in place. This test covered the totality of an employee’s award terms and conditions to ensure that, when enterprise bargaining occurred, it did not result in an overall reduction in the terms and conditions of employment compared to those provided for in the appropriate award.

The Howard government’s 1996 bill sought to replace that no-disadvantage test with what was then called a ‘no less favourable test’. What did that really mean? The test proposed in that bill required that the terms and conditions of agreements and AWAs were not to be matched against the award but were to be ‘no less favourable’ than seven bare minimum conditions. It sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? It was not really all that different from the Work Choices minimum statutory conditions.

In 1996, the seven statutory minima were: wages at minimum rates of pay, four weeks recreation leave, 12 days of paid personal/carers leave, 52 weeks of unpaid parental leave, long service leave, equal pay for work of equal value and payment for jury service. There was no mention back in 1996, nor in the introduction of the Work Choices legislation, about the right to entitlements—overtime, penalty rates and shift loadings.

The Senate, when it considered this legislation, pointed out that the changes proposed under those seven minimum statutory conditions would expose employees, particularly vulnerable workers, to a reduction in their existing wages and conditions. The majority of the committee came to the following conclusion and I quote from the Senate committee’s report:

The majority of the Committee views these proposals with very serious concern.

That is getting rid of the no disadvantage test and replacing it with seven statutory minimum conditions. It continues:

The protection of conditions underpinning agreements is one of the most important provisions available to ensure that employees are treated fairly in relation to bargaining. The Government’s proposal in this regard represents a fundamental watering down of the existing protection.

The majority of the Committee considers that there is no justification for the removal of the ‘no disadvantage test’. We consider that the proposed ‘no less favourable than statutory minima test’ is not adequate to protect employees and could very well lead to many employees, particularly those with little or no bargaining power, being worse off. Given the Prime Minister’s rock solid guarantee that no-one would be worse off under these proposals this is something which we cannot accept.

The Howard government did not get its way in 1996 because the Senate prevented it through the Democrats inserting many amendments to make the legislation more fair and just. After the last election, as we know, the Prime Minister again tried again to put his insidious laws and beliefs into practice. The Prime Minister stands accused of introducing legislative changes for which he had no mandate—the details of Work Choices which were hidden from public scrutiny before the election.

I found the following interview with Sally Neighbour on the Four Corners program in September 2005 very instructive. The Prime Minister was up to his tricks again. Sally Neighbour asked in the interview of the Prime Minister:

What’s the point of scrapping the no disadvantage test if not to allow people to be disadvantaged?

JOHN HOWARD: 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.

SALLY NEIGHBOUR: But people will be disadvantaged, won’t they?

JOHN HOWARD: No, I don’t accept that for a moment. If workplaces are more productive because it’s easier to organise your workplace by allowing the individual employer and the employees to work out themselves the best way of doing it, workers won’t be disadvantaged, they’ll be better off.

Let me repeat: the Prime Minister said specifically that people would not be disadvantaged under the initial Work Choices legislation. He was categorical, although we all knew the truth. And belatedly, only due to public pressure and an imminent election, the Howard government is now on the run about its Work Choices legislation.

As we know, the only statistics that the government ever released on Work Choices AWAs showed that more than 60 per cent of them scrapped penalty rates and more than 50 per cent took away shiftwork loadings and overtime. Of course, the intent of the changes from the beginning was to take away the fundamental rights and entitlements that workers had bequeathed to them through the award system over many decades.

The government’s latest cosmetic change and the so-called fairness test will not fix the fundamentally flawed Work Choices regime. Fifty-five million dollars of taxpayers money has already been spent on promoting Work Choices and that did not hoodwink the public—it ended up being a publicity fiasco with many copies of the document still warehoused around the country. No new advertising campaign will convince the community otherwise. The amendments now being debated in the Senate will not stop these unfair laws continuing to hurt working families and the changes will not fix the lack of balance in our workplaces. It is for this reason that Labor remains totally opposed to the Howard government’s unfair Work Choices laws.

We know from what I have said tonight that the only things that prevented John Howard from ever realising his full IR dream of a deregulated labour market, without the underpinnings of a proper industrial safety net backed up by award conditions, was the blocking power of the Senate up until the last election. Currently, the only reason he is changing his mind is the strong voice of opposition by the Australian community. The community will not be fooled and this will continue to be a major issue in the lead up to the federal election.