Craig Thomson (Dobell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. How are the government’s reforms modernising and streamlining our national economy?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Dobell for his question. Last week I was talking about the importance of hard reform—the importance of hard reform to strengthening our economy, the importance of hard reform to making sure that we continue to have the benefits of prosperity. Our nation has emerged from the global financial crisis stronger than nations around the world. That gives us a fantastic platform on which to continue building for growth. But that means we have to continue with the work of hard economic reform. If we look across our nation today, we still bear many of the hallmarks, even in the 21st century, of the separate colonies that came together to form this nation—that is, we still have many laws in different states dealing with matters which are now truly national.

The government has engaged in a drive to create a seamless national economy—that is, businesses that trade in more than one state actually face the same regulation and do not need to adapt because they are trading in more than one state. Our drive for a seamless national economy has also been about recognising the qualifications and credentials of workers so that a tradesperson who is fully registered in one state does not need to go through further onerous processes in order to ply their trade if they move to another state. This is important national reform.

At the centre of this important national reform is the reform to our occupational health and safety laws. As people who follow the economic reform debate would know, there has been no more important claim by business over the years for business to work effectively across the country than for there to be one set of uniform laws around the nation. This would reduce business compliance costs by $179 million. That is a direct benefit. But of course the indirect benefits to business are far greater than that. In pursuit of this direct benefit to business, the government worked through a COAG process to generate an agreement for model laws, which all states and territories signed on to except Western Australia. It was not easy. There were nine ministerial council meetings, seven meetings of the relevant agency Safe Work Australia, 20 meetings of the Strategic Issues Group, a national review, 240 submissions and two published reports outlining the structure and content of the act, and those exposure drafts received 480 submissions.

At the end of that extensive process there was an agreement for model laws. Key features of those model laws from the point of view of workers were that they would cover all kinds of workers—not just employees—in recognition of the changing nature of our workforce, there would be higher penalties for the breach of a duty of care, there would be no small business exemption, and a qualified health and safety representative would be able to issue a provisional improvement notice and would be able to direct that unsafe work be stopped. These are not rights that are common right around the country today. I take this opportunity to say to Premier Keneally, who has indicated that she wants to walk away from this hard economic reform, that it is in the interests of businesses and employees in New South Wales for the reform to proceed. A deal is a deal, and we will ensure that the deal is honoured.