Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Support) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with great pride that I add my voice to the crescendo of the proud men and women of the class of 2007 that have risen to speak on the Fair Work Bill 2008, joining also my other colleagues who fought the good fight in this place against Work Choices during those dark Howard years. It was this class of 2007 that was effectively swept into this place on the back of the public’s anger and disappointment with the previous government in relation to the Work Choices legislation. They asked us to come into this place and the people of Eden-Monaro asked me to come into this place to put Work Choices to the sword. Madam Deputy Speaker, we have our sword in this Fair Work Bill, our Excalibur, and we are about to wield it and it will be a great day for the country when Work Choices is dead.

The public were angry and there were several reasons why they were angry. Firstly, they were ambushed after the 2004 election, when no mention was made of any proposal to conduct a root and branch reform of our industrial relations system which would completely reverse the advances and progression that had been achieved over many years of struggle and sacrifice on the part of many working men and women of Australia and, of course, the goodwill of employers who recognised that productivity was based upon working as a team.

How did this happen? Effectively over the Howard years we saw an extreme right-wing element—a nasty right-wing element—gradually, creepingly annexing the Liberal Party over those years. Fine men and women, true liberals, were gradually weeded out of the Liberal Party, but it was not until the coalition obtained control of the Senate that that nasty right-wing element was unleashed and we saw the full revelation of its ideological bent. That presence, that ideological bent, is still there today and that is why we need to remain eternally vigilant.

Australians do not like extremes of the right or left and they brought us into this place to restore the balance to a reasonable position on industrial relations, but more than that they want an effective industrial relations system that promotes productivity and the economy as well as a healthy, productive and happy lifestyle for working people.

My predecessor in the seat of Eden-Monaro last year was one of those people who adopted the Work Choices legislation as a tenet of faith. He was a very solid supporter of Mr Howard and his ambitions. What were those ambitions? They were effectively to use Work Choices to destroy the right of working people to organise; to effectively eliminate what is a fundamental human right for working people. We have just been celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is important to point out where these principles reside in the fundamental human rights instruments. Article 23 of the universal declaration makes it very clear. It says:

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

That is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that was built on by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in its article 22, which once again stressed:

(1) Everyone shall have the right to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

That provision also referred to the International Labour Organisation convention of 1948, which Australia ratified on 28 February 1973, and that convention said:

Each Member of the International Labour Organisation—

Australia, in this case—

for which this Convention is in force undertakes to take all necessary and appropriate measures to ensure that workers and employers may exercise freely the right to organise.

So, effectively, what the previous government was trying to do was destroy fundamental human rights in this country and specifically the basic right for working people to organise.

This was revealed in my campaign in Eden-Monaro when I was conducting a debate on the radio with my predecessor. In the course of that debate he said very clearly, ‘The unions know that if Labor loses the election then their days are numbered.’ That was his ambition. He let the cat out of the bag. Every union member in my electorate and every union member in the country knew that that was the ambition of the Howard government. They made a living out of playing on the worst aspects of human nature over the 12 years they were in government. They tried to use scaremonger tactics, focusing on refugees or whoever they could fix a crosshair on to obtain political advantage. But in the end they settled on their fellow Australians to demonise—the two million fellow Australians who are members of trade unions. They were demonised; they were the bogeymen. They were labelled as criminals and thugs. But it did not work, because the Australian people had had enough of that sort of tactic—of the scaremongering, of the reds under the bed. So for them it was over.

But the worst of this was that the previous government were not going to lie down with their ambitions for Work Choices; they got out there and tried to sell it. My predecessor, as the then Special Minister of State, was responsible for the advertising budget of the previous government. How much money was in that budget? They spent $120 million on the useless paraphernalia that was sprinkled across the country in an effort to sell us a dead dog as a duck. What could my electorate have done with that money? Forty million dollars would have fixed the Tumut hospital, $30 million would have built the Bega bypass, and the Pambula hospital sorely needs money. Where has it gone? It has been wasted. It was utter irresponsibility with public money. That itself was a crime.

The impact on Eden-Monaro of these extreme Work Choices laws was significant. I had a woman on the phone to me crying about the years she and her husband had worked in a roofing company; they had lost the protections of the unfair dismissal legislation. They were in a company that they had built up over many years, but the employer they worked for sacked them for ‘operational reasons’, that magic phrase that permitted all sorts of actions to be taken that could not be overseen or redressed. My predecessor, when confronted by this claim from my constituents, told them: ‘Go to the Workplace Ombudsman. Use the process that we put in place.’ They did, and they were told that there was no remedy because of that magic phrase ‘operational reasons’.

There was also a massive impact on tourism in Eden-Monaro. The feature that we focused on in terms of the impact of AWAs was that 89 per cent of them cut out at least one or more protective conditions. Significantly for my electorate, 68 per cent of them removed annual leave loadings, 61 per cent removed days to be substituted for public holidays, 50 per cent removed public holiday payments and 25 per cent removed declared public holidays. I was confronted with a delegation of hotel and motel owners and others in my electorate who showed me the statistics on the impact that both the murderous interest rates of the previous government and these AWA restrictions were having on their businesses because the south-west Sydney holidaymakers who traditionally would drive into my electorate for their holidays were unable to do so and the bottom was falling out of that market. So businesses were being hurt in my electorate by these extreme laws which were supposed to improve the economy and to make it simpler. But we know that the Work Choices legislation was twice the size of this Fair Work Bill, with which we are now achieving simplicity in our system.

During the worst excesses of the bureaucracy under the former scheme, the backlog of workplace agreements had swollen to nearly 150,000 because the Howard government had hastily cobbled together a fairness test in May before putting in place the legislation and administrative arrangements needed to implement it. The whole scheme was an abortion from start to finish. It was a nightmare for employers and workers. And it did not focus on the key aspect that our economy needs to move forward, which is the building of teamwork under our collective enterprise agreement process, which will now be put in place with the Fair Work Bill. So many of my workers who were benefiting from collective agreements had been worried about the Howard government continuing to try to put them all on AWAs. They included the Carter Holter Harvey timber workers on the south-west slopes, the mill workers, the workers at Batlow Fruit Co-op, Bega Cheese and South East Fibre Exports and those on the state awards that covered the forestry depots. All of these people were concerned about the impact of Work Choices and its continuing, creeping annexation and destruction of their working conditions.

Now we have this new regime that will be put in place which will focus on the essential element of Australian culture: teamwork. It is what built this country and it is a hallmark of not only our daily approach to getting on as communities and in our working lives but also how we advance this country economically. It is often said that the price of peace is eternal vigilance. It may also be said that the price of freedom and prosperity is eternal domestic vigilance over our fundamental human rights. The Howard government insidiously undermined this country’s proud commitment to human rights and fairness and along the way threatened our productivity as a nation. Lying across the other side of this chamber in the darker recesses of the opposition there burns yet a flame for the return of Work Choices. We on this side, and all Australians, must remain eternally vigilant to prevent its return and to extinguish that flame. I proudly commend the bill to the House.

Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As the member for Fremantle, in speaking about the Fair Work Bill 2008, it is only right that I acknowledge the historic contribution of the Fremantle community on the issue of workers rights. Fremantle has both a proud union history and a strong and positive contemporary union presence. In Kings Square in central Fremantle is the Tom Edwards Memorial Fountain. This fountain commemorates the Fremantle wharf crisis of 1919, during which Tom Edwards of the Fremantle Lumpers Union received a blow to the head from a police rifle butt and later died. On that event, I quote from the Westralian Worker of 1920, whose editor at the time was one John Curtin. He said that Tom Edwards was:

…the first man in Western Australia to give his life for his fellow workers, when seeking to preserve industrial freedom, in conflict with the armed forces of the Government of the day.

In 1998 Fremantle was one of the ports that received national and international attention in the course of the now infamous Patrick dispute in which attempts were made to sack the unionised workforce. It was fascinating to watch part 1 of the ABC’s The Howard Years if for no other reason than to see Peter Reith claim that he had no foreknowledge of the Rottweiler assisted national lockout of waterfront workers when in fact he issued a media statement at 11 pm on the night in question and gave a well-prepared doorstop shortly thereafter.

Fremantle was the site of some very bitter confrontations and some very questionable behaviour by the then Liberal state government in its use of the police in wildly disproportionate numbers to intimidate, harass and abuse lawful and peaceful protestors. In addition to the valiant resistance by members of the Maritime Union of Australia, people in Fremantle still remember with pride the instinctive response of the whole community to the crisis. There were many people, union or otherwise—including my predecessor in the seat of Fremantle, Dr Carmen Lawrence—who came and stood in solidarity with the MUA, who provided food and other supplies to the workers, who stood witness to the actions of Patrick and their lawyers and who sat on the picket line through all that occurred, refusing to buckle.

We marked the 10-year anniversary of those events at a function in Fremantle earlier this year, and I was grateful to the member for Charlton for attending and for helping us to remember what was at stake in 1998, given his key role at the ACTU during that dispute. We watched Bastard Boys and we also sang him happy birthday to mark his 50th, if I recall. It is necessary to remember these disputes, because in the end they were all about the right of workers to organise and to bargain collectively.

A single employee is not in the same bargaining position as an employer. There may be occasions when the bargaining position is equal and there may be occasions when the employee is in a dominant bargaining position—one has in mind, for example, the case of a company chief executive or perhaps a merchant banker—but, as a general rule, a single employee is at a disadvantage in striking a bargain with an employer, particularly a large employer. More is at stake for the single employee, and they are at a disadvantage in terms of the information they possess, the leverage they wield and even the skills they have to negotiate a fair and appropriate outcome. They are not an economic unit but a person, and they have rights. That is why workers join together, bargain together and insist on fairness and safety together. And it is from that foundation, within the structure of a labour market designed to balance equity and economic growth, that workers and unions make a larger compact with the wider community, with government and with employers to pursue greater productivity and innovation in the expansion of our common wealth.

I was pleased yesterday to note the Leader of the Opposition’s fulsome and unreserved support for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights when seconding the Prime Minister’s motion celebrating the 60th anniversary of the universal declaration. It will therefore come as no surprise to those opposite that workers rights are in fact human rights. As my colleague the member for Eden-Monaro has noted just now, the universal declaration provides in article 23:

(1)

Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

(2)

Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

(3)

Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

(4)

Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

And further in article 24:

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

The same rights and principles are reflected in the articles and conventions of the International Labour Organisation, which aim to promote opportunities for women and men to obtain decent and productive work in conditions of freedom, equity, security and dignity. For instance, article 2 of the ILO Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention of 1948 provides:

Workers and employers, without distinction whatsoever, shall have the right to establish and, subject only to the rules of the organisation concerned, to join organisations of their own choosing without previous authorisation.

Article 11 of the convention provides:

Each Member of the International Labour Organisation for which this Convention is in force undertakes to take all necessary and appropriate measures to ensure that workers and employers may exercise freely the right to organise.

Lest anyone think that the ILO is a bolshie grouping of international trade unions, let me emphasise the ILO’s tripartite structure—it has official representation from governments, business and labour. In examining the Howard government’s Work Choices laws in 2006, the ILO Committee on the Application of Standards had serious concerns regarding the impact the new IR laws would have on the application of the provision of key international conventions and, in particular, the effect the laws would have on Australia’s obligation to ensure respect for freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining.

In my electorate of Fremantle, soon after Work Choices came into effect, we saw the kinds of choices it enabled. The new management of an IGA supermarket in the suburb of Hilton placed a demountable in the car park on Friday, marched its employees into the demountable one by one and told them to sign an AWA by 5 pm or face the sack. One employee, Michael King, said at the time:

They just came in with these new AWAs and, you know, spoke to each one of us individually, and basically it came down to either we sign, we sign their agreements, or don’t bother turning up on Monday. Under this new AWA they wouldn’t be paying out for holiday pay, the ten public holidays you get every year.

What happened at the IGA supermarket in Hilton went to the heart of the choice that was at the heart of Work Choices: it was management’s way or the highway.

The Fair Work Bill actually implements the International Labour Organisation convention rights to collectively bargain and to freedom of association within the bill and returns those values and principles to the Australian workplace. Specifically, the right to collectively bargain is implemented by a statutory right—proposed sections 236 and 237—for employees to decide by majority, whether they are union members or not, to collectively bargain. That is, for the first time in Australian industrial regulation, a democratic right will be afforded to employees to express their desire to collectively bargain. If they express this desire, the employer will have an obligation to negotiate with them in good faith. Clearly it will not be an act of good faith to deny recognition of this democratic decision—for example, by offering individual contracts and refusing to negotiate collectively.

Industrial disputes over this very issue have been a thread running through the industrial relations history of this country. The great disputes of the 1890s were fought over the refusal by employers in the maritime and agricultural industries to negotiate collectively and upon their insistence of ‘freedom of contract’. This was famously recognised by Justice Higgins, then a judge of the High Court of Australia and President of the then Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, who put it thus:

In orderly pursuance of the agreement, the Institute gave the proper notice on the 24th November 1896, with a view to getting more satisfactory terms. The shipowners’ reply was a menacing letter, sent—not to the Institute, but to each individual employee—asking him whether he was or was not satisfied with existing conditions, for if not he was “jeopardising his position.” The attitude taken by the shipowners at this date is another illustration, if one were needed, of the general helplessness of individual employees as against employers. Virtually, the shipowner said to the engineer, “If you are not satisfied, go.” This power of giving or refusing employment—of giving or refusing bread—is a tremendous factor in the bargain, an unfair weight thrown into the scale, like the sword of Brennus …

From such disputes arose the Labor Party, formed by trade unions in recognition of the fact that political power was needed to achieve a statutory right to collectively bargain. From the creation of the Labor Party in government arose the industrial relations collective instruments, including awards, industrial tribunals and collective agreements.

The Labor Party’s understanding of and commitment to a fair, harmonious, cooperative and productive industrial relations system is a matter of long standing and in recent times was evidenced by the enterprise bargaining system introduced by the Hawke-Keating government. That was one of the key economic reforms that delivered the prolonged economic growth that Australia has recently experienced.

By contrast, the conservative side of politics has always fought against collective organisation in the labour market, and Work Choices must be seen in that historical context. So too must the Fair Work Bill be seen in the historical context of the values and beliefs of the labour movement.

The ILO convention to freedom of association is implemented in the Fair Work Bill via the general protections contained in the bill. The most important feature here is recognition of the fact that, when an employee makes a free decision to join a union, the employee is also entitled to representation by that union. This right of representation has not previously effectively been enshrined in statute.

In these two areas, the right to collectively bargain and the right to freedom of association, the Fair Work Bill demonstrates the significance and substantial practical importance of the relevant ILO conventions. As the World Bank has pointed out, there are broad economic benefits to be gained from ensuring adherence to international labour standards:

Ensuring the freedom of association and collective bargaining can go a long way toward promoting labour market efficiency and better economic performance.

The best of all circumstances is not a dog-eat-dog world of unfair, unfettered and adversarial industrial competition but rather a compact between employers, workers and government in the interests of all Australians. That compact is once again given life in the form of this bill’s new framework for enterprise bargaining. The Fair Work Bill proves its name by its very substance. It is a return to fairness and reasonableness in the workplace.

I come back to the basic truth that workers’ rights are human rights. A single employee, like a single voter, holds little bargaining power. But collectively workers and voters alike can effect change. That is the beauty of our parliamentary democracy. Last November the Australian public voted for a government that promised to deliver a simple and clear system, an equitable system of workplace relations, a return to this country’s long and proud tradition as a civil society whose very ethos is based on the principle of fairness. The Labor Party promised to keep faith with that tradition. Now, in keeping with this government’s record of honouring its election commitments, that promise is being kept.

Debate interrupted.