Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Childcare and Early Childhood Learning) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased today to speak on the Fair Work Amendment (Transfer of Business) Bill 2012. I will just capture the outline of the bill to begin with. This bill will amend the Fair Work Act 2009 to protect employee entitlements in circumstances where there is a transfer of business from an old state employer to a national system employer. The bill will, as far as possible, reflect the existing transfer-of-business provisions in part 2-8 of the Fair Work Act. In general, part 2-8 provides that, where there is a transfer of business, an enterprise agreement, a workplace determination or a named employer award that covered employees of an old employer continues to cover these employees if they commence employment with a new employer within three months of their employment terminating with the old employer. This bill will ensure that, where there is a transfer of business from an old employer to a national system employer, transferring employees will retain the benefit of existing terms and conditions of employment in state awards and agreements as well as their accrued entitlements.

We saw the minister bring a Fair Work Amendment Bill into the House yesterday. I talked then about 53 recommendations. The minister picked up about 17 of the easy, around-the-edges ones. There was actually one about the transfer-of-business provisions. That recommendation pointed to the difficulty that existing businesses have with the transfer-of-business provisions in the Fair Work Act and the lingering inequity of those provisions. This measure today further builds on what is clearly, from the government's point of view, a political wedge.

The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations flew to Queensland to try and interrupt the important job that Campbell Newman has to get the state finances back in the black to announce that the transfer-of-business provisions would now extend to Queensland state government employees. It is clearly just a political trick, because, if you think about the effect of this legislation should it pass this House and the other place—and I foreshadow that we will be opposing it—it is actually not going to hurt the Queensland economy; it is going to hurt the workforce. It is going to hurt the worker who, in seeking to become the workforce of a contracted-out employer and move from employment with the state government, now has to have all of the terms and conditions of that state government employment transferred with them to their new contractor. If you were that new contractor, would you, in today's environment, want to take on the Queensland government's terms and conditions? Those terms and conditions are extremely generous, and that is part of the reason why the Queensland government has to address a looming state debt of more than $85 billion.

The irony of this is that the new Premier of Queensland, Campbell Newman, is fixing up the years of financial mismanagement of the Labor government in Queensland and has no choice but to have this number of public sector redundancies—most of them, by the way, voluntary. It is not an easy situation for those who are affected, and I am not pretending that it is, but it is not something that the government does just because it can; it is something that the government does because it has to.

Again, this minister misses the point because in the transition or the potential transition of the employee this leaves that employee completely out in the cold. Premier Newman was elected by an absolutely overwhelming majority of the people of Queensland because they knew he was the person to take the tough decisions to deal with the massive deficit left by years of Labor economic mismanagement—and that includes previous Labor Party policies.

There are further issues which I need to point out in connection with the proposed transfer-of-business provisions in the Fair Work Act. I mentioned yesterday that the minister brought an amendment bill to the table but ignored the important recommendations made by his supposedly independent panel. They were not independent in our view but the minister was mugged by reality because they were still forced to come up with some clear inconsistencies and some absolutely incontrovertible evidence that the Fair Work Act is not working the way it should. I want to pick up on the issues that exist now with the transfer-of-business provisions which will highlight why it is even more ridiculous for the minister to bring in the extensions to the Queensland public servants which he is attempting to do in this bill.

In the submission to the Fair Work Act review by the Australian Industry Group—a group which the government takes seriously and appoints to various advisory panels and reference groups, and recognises is the voice of industry—the AiG say that the transfer-of-business laws in the Fair Work Act:

… have reinstated the concepts which caused so many difficulties for industry in the late 1990s, prior to a number of High Court and Full Federal Court decisions—

and lists a number of those decisions. The submission continues:

As currently enacted, the transfer of business laws are operating against the interests of both employers and employees. The laws result in a lose-lose-lose scenario where operations are outsourced. Client companies lose because they need to make employees redundant when outsourcing occurs. Companies who take on outsourced work lose because they cannot access the valuable skills possessed by their clients’ employees. Employees lose because their jobs disappear along with their continuity of service for long service leave and other entitlements.

In outsourcing arrangements, the transfer of skilled employees who have knowledge of client systems and infrastructure is often strongly supported by both clients and service providers to facilitate a successful delivery of the outsourced services. Indeed many companies have built their businesses on the engagement of their clients’ employees. However, the transfer of business laws now provide a major deterrent to the employment by the service provider of any of the client’s employees.

Consider the case of a software consultancy firm providing outsourced IT services to a Government, a mining company, an airline and a steel manufacturing company, amongst other clients. The software company no doubt has very different employment conditions to those which apply to these four client companies. Most software companies employ staff on common law contracts, in contrast with other industries where enterprise agreements are common. The transfer of business laws expose companies involved in outsourcing to transferable instruments becoming binding upon their operations for both transferring employees and non-transferring employees.

This applies not just to outsourcing but to insourcing. AiG continue:

Accordingly, the laws ensure that companies will make every effort to avoid employing any employees of their clients.

This further underlines that this is a measure which does not look after the employee, the worker or the workforce. I would say in so many of the businesses we have dealings with that the business is the workforce; it is the employee who has the relationship with the client. So when the client hears about a change of business ownership or structure, the first thing they often ask is, 'Will you still be involved with me as the client? Will I still be able to talk to you because you understand my circumstances?' What we have seen with the transfer-of-business provisions is the government, extremely heavy-handedly, absolutely working to stop that arrangement happening, working to make sure that in the case where the business transfers, the new employer does everything to push the existing employee away. There is absolutely no excuse for that to be the result of this.

So those are the existing transfer-of-business provisions. Had the government had a real problem with them as they apply to Queensland state sector employees, they could have done all this before 2007. They did not tell the Australian people or the IR community, by the way, that they were reinstating old law in the transfer-of-business provisions. They did not talk about it leading up to the 2007 election. They then implemented the provisions in the Fair Work Act but they did not do anything about Queensland state employees because they stuck to the principle that, unless a jurisdiction has referred its rights in this regard, it is appropriate for that state jurisdiction to manage its state public service, and by extension its state administration, itself. There is no role for the Commonwealth in that but if they had had a problem, that is what they should have done.

In reviewing the Fair Work Act, the 'independent' panel recommended that something be done to distinguish voluntary from involuntary redundancies. The irony again of this legislation is that, if you choose to take a generous voluntary redundancy from your employer in the current Queensland situation—there are many voluntary redundancies and I do not decry the difficulties for people losing their jobs in complicated circumstances—these laws apply to you. You are then prevented for three months from moving to the workforce of the new employer—rather, you are not prevented but the employer has to pick up all the conditions you had as a state government employee. In moving to a new world, that is simply going to be impossible for most employers.

So the Fair Work Act review picked up on this huge discrepancy, which is, if you are taking a voluntary redundancy, why should this apply to you?

Anyway, the minister ran a million miles from this recommendation and many of the other important ones we talked about yesterday. Just consider the situation that Premier Newman has to face. Yesterday, we saw a story that said that the individual in Queensland's top bureaucratic job in the final months of the Bligh government pocketed more than a million dollars in less than a year—getting a total remuneration package of $1 million between July 2011 and May 2012; earning $187,000 between 26 March and 30 June. I am not suggesting that this individual would be in trouble in terms of finding another job, because they probably have plenty of savings. But I am pointing this out as the sort of profligacy that Premier Newman now has to address. Premier Bligh was throwing money around in the Public Service like you would not believe. And Premier Newman has no choice but to try and address this. This minister, by the way, is standing in the way.

Let us look at some of the third-party comment following the release of this. I just want to quote from a couple of articles because I think they are worth noting. Following the announcement, as I mentioned, the minister flew to Queensland for a no doubt dramatic doorstop and a Commonwealth rescue package. It is, of course, all meaningless because, if you are affected by this as an employer, you are not going to employ the people involved, and the Queensland government is actually not penalised by it at all. They would just shrug their shoulders and go, 'Ho hum.' Well, you are making it difficult for the people of Queensland, but it is your choice, Minister, and maybe you should think about that.

I will quote from an article by Sophie Morris and Mark Ludlow from the Australian Financial Review:

The move is part of a political strategy by the federal government to stoke voter backlash against big job cuts by the Coalition governments of Campbell Newman in Queensland and Barry O'Farrell in NSW, which are cutting spending because of weaker tax revenue.

…   …   …

The Queensland LNP government said last week it would shift about $500 million worth of government contracts and services from the public to the private sector as part of its attempts to return the budget to surplus in 2013-14.

…   …   …

It would force private companies taking on retrenched hospital cleaners, canteen operators and other staff in the same role to match their public sector conditions—

that is what this legislation would do—

hindering state governments' ability to reduce the cost of such services.

…   …   …

A person fired from their job after it was outsourced would receive the same payout as a government employee.

The federal coalition, obviously, have our own views on this.

Just think about the next step in the process. If an employee was picked up by the new, outsourced employer, and something happens to that employer—because, let us face it, under this government the small business environment is very uncertain—and then, a few months later, the employer loses that employee or has to let them go, there is the long arm of the law coming down to get that employer, saying to them, 'When you do let them go, you actually have to pay out the conditions that they would have had, had they remained as a state public sector employee.' No business is going to take that risk:

It’s unrealistic for any government to expect a private sector employer to continue the often highly restrictive and inflexible workplace arrangements that have been negotiated under state government enterprise bargaining agreements when they take over state government contracts or services.

That is a quote from the NSW Business Chamber chief executive, Stephen Cartwright.

I have not mentioned New South Wales, although the legislation actually does apply to New South Wales, but the minister, or his office or his department, did not really do their homework, because New South Wales Treasurer Mike Baird said that the minister's comments demonstrated an extraordinary level of ignorance towards the New South Wales public sector. Why? Because New South Wales already makes appropriate provision for employee rights in transfer-of-business situations. They are probably not as ridiculous as these ones—

Mr Garrett interjecting—

But it is a fact, Minister at the table, that the New South Wales government has made those provisions for employee rights in transfer-of-business situations. So they have, sensibly, looked after the transferring employees—but not in a way that disadvantages them to the extent that will happen under this minister's bill.

In my quoting of third parties that I think have something to say on this, I would like to quote Gary Johns, who was, I believe, an assistant minister for industrial relations in the Keating government, and he says:

It's as if Shorten wants to pretend that Australia is emerging from a war and that protection of privileged union-controlled public-sector employment is the way to prosperity.

…   …   …

The minister's claim:

… to "respect the rights of state and territory governments to conduct their own administrations" is patently insincere. His intention is to foil the need to properly administer their workforce to the satisfaction of taxpayers.

And Mr Johns goes on to say:

Employer evidence suggests the changes to the former transmission provisions make it less, not more, likely that a purchaser would keep existing employees. This is because the changes make it difficult for a purchaser to restructure the business, including altering inefficient work practices.

These complexities reflect in Queensland—and obviously, from the action that has had to be taken there, in New South Wales—a public sector workforce that is crying out for restructuring. Whenever you see a gap between the same task performed by the Public Service compared to the private service, and you see the additional cost loaded onto the Public Service, alarm bells should ring, because that is not going to lead to efficient operation, either of the sector that we might be talking about or of the state economy as a whole.

I will reflect on just one example from my own electorate of Farrer. I do not really want to mention water in the context of this bill—there is a lot of discussion about water in the House at the moment—but the water bailiffs that are employed by private irrigation companies do pretty much the same job as the water bailiffs employed by the New South Wales government. I am going back to before the current Premier, because I know that moves have been made to address these issues, but if I go back, say, three years, the differential in pay was moving rapidly past almost 20 per cent, and that was not because the private sector was screwing down the wages of its employees; it is because that is what the market could bear. If you create this artificial market in the Public Service, because there is always going to be a public sector salary, then obviously you are going to have claims and work conditions that move that particular job and task and its efficient functioning absolutely out of reach in terms of any financial sense.

So this bill is pretty nonsensical. It is an attempt by the minister to look as if he is acting against the Campbell Newman government. That is not going to work. It does not make sense in a public policy sense. Everyone in this place should care about our workforce and about individual workers who are in the difficult situation of losing their jobs. We would never dismiss the difficulties that employees face. But what we would like to see is governments that make it easier for those employees to pick up another job and make it easier for employees to keep the job they have with a new employer. Give those employees the right to choose—to say, 'I might stay in my same occupation. My terms and conditions might be different, because the previous terms and conditions were unsustainable. But it is my choice.' This takes away employee and worker choice.

I will now sum up some key facts left out by the minister. Queensland and New South Wales public sector employees are not covered by the Fair Work Act because successive state Labor governments decided not to refer their powers to the Commonwealth. How about respecting that decision? Labor's transfer-of-business regime leaves workers and employers worse off, something that has been admitted to and addressed in Labor's own Fair Work Act review. Another fact is that Labor's own modelling projects 4,200 full-time jobs to be shed from the federal Public Service, with further modelling showing federal Labor will cut more than 12,000 employees by the end of 2014-15. So it is okay if the federal government cuts its Public Service but not if a Liberal National Party state government does it? Similarly, in Tasmania the Greens-ALP alliance is shedding jobs—big time, when you consider the size of the Tasmanian economy. We know that that is because of their grave mismanagement of their economy.

So, if you listened to the minister on this subject, you would think that only the coalition cuts jobs in the public sector. I think the minister needs to remove those rose-coloured glasses and get up to speed with what his counterparts in the Labor states—when they were Labor states—were up to, even in the state of Tasmania.

Up close, this legislation is alarming. All employees, should they meet the criteria, will be eligible to transfer their existing terms and conditions of employment regardless of whether or not the redundancies were voluntary and regardless of the generosity of the package. Furthermore, the government has confirmed that the transfer of business from a state government to a private sector employer, for the purposes of this act, is for changes from a whole-of-government perspective, not at an individual departmental level, making it, if possible, even more far reaching.

Let us say that, for example, a state education department decide to outsource some of their duties. They make a number of staff redundant. However, if any of these people were to work for the new contractor for this service, under this legislation the contractor would be required to meet all existing employment entitlements. In essence, this is the government imposing their own employment framework onto the private sector, taking away the private sector's ability to choose what terms and conditions of employment they offer their own employees—and, obviously, all within the confines of the Fair Work system and under current modern awards.

This is a push from a government that completely misunderstands the landscape. I am thinking of examples where contracted-out jobs might apply. What if a state government does valuable counselling work in a public service context? And I know many do, such as my own state government in New South Wales. The logical group to take on that work probably is the charities sector. We know that the charities sector does a great deal with very little. But I do not know that the charities sector could take on the wages, terms and conditions of public sector employees. The fact that the non-profit sector has other things they can offer an employee—such as fringe benefits tax exemptions that flow on to salary sacrifice opportunities, because of their charitable status—just does not count. It does not get offset anywhere. So again you might find that, in the move from state government to private provider, the employee is not that much worse off because they end up with a set of terms that are different but are still not that bad. This is all ignored in this legislation. It simply says that for the three-month period after the employee leaves the government job the new employer has to pick up the whole world of state government employee conditions. That is just not going to happen.

I said that the coalition will be opposing this bill. That will not come as any surprise. Such poor legislation really should be rejected by everybody in this place. We look forward to something more sensible coming through from the government when, in the other place, it has an opportunity to reconsider its own legislation.

The Australian economy is now a lifetime and light-years away from the protectionist era that this minister wishes to hark back to. Campbell Newman has real work to do on the Queensland public sector, whose performance, when compared with the private sector, lags by up to 30 per cent, with the workforce being bound more by tradition than productivity. Campbell Newman has real work to do, and the minister in this place is standing in his way.

Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Greens will be supporting this bill because it provides some small measure of welcome relief to a public that is doing it tough in Queensland. But it will not be enough for them. It is not a rescue package and it comes on top of the federal government's own slashing of public sector jobs through efficiency dividends and other cuts to programs that have been made that will amount to somewhere in the order of 12,000 public sector jobs being lost.

The bill will bring the protections available to some outsourced or privatised workers in Queensland up to the level in the Fair Work Act that has been enjoyed in other states for some time—in Victoria, for example, which has been on the national system for some time. That is appropriate to bring it in line with that standard.

But what is emerging is that the Fair Work Act leaves state public sector workers with significantly less protection than their federal counterparts, and there is much more that the federal government could be doing. This will go some small way but, given the other things the federal government could be doing for Queensland public sector workers and has not yet examined, it does leave the question of whether this is more of a political matter than a matter of substantive protection being offered to those workers.

One thing that has not had anywhere near enough attention is the legislation that has been passed through the Queensland parliament which has effectively rewritten agreements struck between employees and employers. The Public Service and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2012 passed through the parliament excised certain provisions that exist in agreements that had already been struck and said they were of no effect. Any provisions that related to employment security, to contracting out or to organisational change were suddenly rendered null and void. Then, of course, the state government embarked on its significant program of cuts.

Can you imagine the outcry if this parliament said, of certain commercial contracts that had been reached, that three or four sets of terms and conditions that that were part of the bargain struck between the two sides—and that usually involves compromise—were going to be taken out? Imagine if all of a sudden it was going to go back in and undo that bargain and take out three or four key things, and these would be the very things that give employees and their representatives the right to have a say in whether or not they are going to lose their jobs and to have a say in whether or not jobs are going to be contracted out. If that happened, you would hear screams from the opposition that it contravened basic principles of fairness, that it was potentially unconstitutional and that it was taking away terms and conditions without adequate compensation.

Instead, in Queensland we have a situation in which it is okay in the industrial sphere, after parties have struck an agreement, for a government to come in and rewrite it and take away certain provisions. That, I would suggest, raises real questions about whether or not the protections relating to termination change and redundancy—which are enshrined in international conventions that Australia has signed up to and that in the past this parliament has used as a constitutional basis for passing legislation to protect people's rights at work—are available to those workers in Queensland. If that is the case, why are we not seeing here in this bill measures to restore to those Queensland public sector workers the termination change and redundancy provisions that they rightly had beforehand and that, in my view, the federal government would have the power to legislate under the Constitution? If we were serious about protecting Queensland public sector workers, that—as a minimum—should be explored.

That is one area in which we are finding that the Fair Work Act is failing state public sector workers. In my state of Victoria we have been living, over the last couple of years, through some very bitter disputes involving some of the workers who provide the greatest levels of care and support to people in our community. Take nurses, for example. We have seen the nurses involved in a long and bitter industrial dispute with the state government. Why did it go on for so long? One of the things learnt from cabinet documents that were leaked and found their way to being reported in the newspapers was that, because they were bargaining in the federal system, the state government as their employer knew that if it came to arbitration federally there were certain things—namely, nurse-patient ratios—that they would not be able to have arbitrated in the federal sphere. Nurse-patient ratios go not only to fundamental questions of the workload of nurses but also very fundamentally to the standard of care provided to patients in Victorian hospitals.

But the government did not want to give them that. The government knew that, if it held out long enough and could find its way into Fair Work Australia, then Fair Work Australia, when it arbitrated, would not give the nurses a binding settlement with respect to their claim about nurse-patient ratios. It is not just that they might not get what they are asking for; it is that it would be known that they would get nothing. So what did the government do? We know from the leaked documents that the government strung out the dispute with the aim of trying to get the nurses to take industrial action so that the government could then step in and say, 'The industrial action needs to stop and we need to get to arbitration by Fair Work Australia.' In essence, they were engineering a route to Fair Work Australia by trying to provoke the nurses into taking industrial action when all the nurses were after were basic standards for nurse-patient ratios that would have benefited both them and the community.

In that context, the Fair Work Act failed the nurses, because it offered no resolution to that impasse and it allowed the state government to continue to try to provoke them. Ultimately, the matter was settled—but not because of any assistance provided by the Fair Work Act. We see similar problems playing out with teachers, who obviously want their disputes around class sizes and workloads to be the subject of a binding resolution. Yet they know that that will not be the subject of arbitration by Fair Work Australia. So they find themselves at that impasse whereby, under the Fair Work Act, state government employers have the whip hand when it comes to negotiation around these very important issues. We need to fix that in the Fair Work Act as well if we are serious about addressing the difficulties that public sector workers face. That is another area in which it is becoming apparent that state public sector workers do not get the same level of protection under the Fair Work Act as their federal counterparts or as their private sector counterparts.

There is an urgent need, before the situation get much worse in these state public sectors, to inquire into what other steps the government can take as far as industrial relations conditions go to lift state public sector workers up so that they have a gold standard of protection. Nothing in this bill—or even in what I am advocating—is going to put state public sector workers ahead of their private sector counterparts, as the previous speaker suggested. It just puts them at the same level.

We know they are falling behind—we see it every day in Queensland; we see it in Victoria.

So we will be supporting this bill because it is some small measure towards addressing this. But it is time now to do something more than just grab the headlines. It is time to take a serious look at whether the shift that was made when we moved away from the dispute settlement, conciliation and arbitration head of power under section 51(xxxv) of the Constitution to the corporations power to underpin industrial relations legislation is failing public sector workers; to look at whether the referrals of power that have been made are failing public sector workers; and to explore whether the international conventions that we signed up to to provide minimum standards, especially for those public sector workers who find themselves in essential services, provide an opportunity—as I think they do—for the government to step in and lift public sector workers up in the states to the same standards of Commonwealth public sector workers and their private sector counterparts.

Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to rise to speak on the Fair Work Amendment (Transfer of Business) Bill 2012. As the House would be aware, this forms part of a flurry of legislation introduced by the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. A similarly titled bill, the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2012, was debated and indeed passed by this House yesterday—not before the member for Throsby got sufficiently confused as to spend all of his time speaking about the measures contained in the bill that is before the House today. I think that is a powerful indicator of the chaotic process of administration of this House that we are seeing from the present government.

The bill we have before us today certainly meets the standard of being chaotic. This is a piece of legislation that that coalition will not be supporting, and, in the time available to me, I want to make three points about the bill before the House this morning. Firstly, it is a pure piece of politics from a minister with a rich history of such stunts. Secondly, its substantive effect will be to make workers worse off. That is to say, this bill, brought before the House by the party which supposedly is the champion of workers rights, the party that purportedly stands for the worker—notwithstanding the fact that very few Labor members of parliament have ever been on the shop floor and that their association with working people is purely theoretical in the career trajectories of most—if passed into law, will make workers worse off.

The third point I wanted to make is that this is a terrible piece of policy if it is our objective, as it ought to be, to maximise employment, and if it is our objective, as it ought to be, to facilitate sound public administration by state governments in the areas for which they have responsibility.

I turn, firstly, to the proposition that this is a pure piece of politics from the minister. The minister jumped on a plane to Queensland to announce that he was going to boldly intervene to protect state public servants in Queensland and other places. He issued a press release which was redolent with soaring rhetoric:

The Gillard Government will not stand idly by and let the Liberal State Governments cut wages and conditions by stealth.

And you could see the glint in his eye as he sought out the television cameras and waved them in his direction so he could make this bold and sweeping commitment. When you analyse this statement, it is rather odd that he is accusing a Liberal state government of acting by stealth. The process of achieving reductions in the public sector in Queensland has clearly been a highly public and transparent one. Nobody says it is a pleasant process, nobody says it is an enjoyable process and nobody says it is an easy process for the many people who are affected and are being made redundant. Governments are called upon to make difficult but necessary decisions, and that is what the Queensland Newman government is doing as it seeks to deal with the inheritance of many years of poor public administration in that state.

As has been pointed out to the House, there does appear to be something of a contradiction between the bold actions of the minister in this case and the minister's shrieks of silence when, in its 2011-12 budget, the previous Queensland Labor government introduced redundancies to reduce staffing by 3,500 positions over 2011 to 2013. There were similar shrieks of silence from the minister, this apparent bold defender of state public servants, when the South Australian Labor government announced it was reducing the Public Service by 1,400 positions. And in Tasmania there will shortly be 2,300 Public Service workers made redundant due to actions taken by that state Labor government.

Again I emphasise: I do not criticise those state governments for taking those decisions. I do not engage in the infantile point-scoring that has characterised the minister's approach to this issue. I make the point that these are difficult questions of public administration, but these are issues that state governments are charged with managing. They receive a finite amount of money, some of it from state taxes and charges, with the vast majority of it being payments transferred to them from the Commonwealth, and they have large and growing public expenditure commitments in areas like health, education, police and so many other important areas. It is those governments that are charged with making difficult choices to optimise the resources they have available to them. We have the extraordinary scenario now of a Commonwealth minister engaging in short-term petty politics and making it considerably more difficult for state governments to get on with discharging the responsibilities which, under our Constitution, are squarely their responsibilities.

As I have pointed out, and as other coalition speakers have pointed out, there is a yawning contradiction between the minister's so-called bold actions here and his failure to take action in other situations.

That is a powerful piece of evidence that what the minister is engaging in is a pure piece of politics. His actions are redolent with contradiction, but perhaps that is not surprising for a former national secretary of the Australian Workers Union who is also an old boy of Xavier College and also a former son-in-law of a Liberal member of parliament.

The next proposition that I want to put to the House this morning is that the actions that the minister has taken through the legislation that he is introducing are in substance going to make workers worse off. Let us analyse the effect of these provisions. When a worker is made redundant from a state government department, that worker will in quite a wide range of circumstances find himself or herself in the position such that, when they seek employment with a private sector employer, the previous terms of conditions will attach to them and it will not be open to a private sector employer to employ that worker unless those terms and conditions apply. That is so regardless of whether the redundancy was voluntary or not and regardless of the terms and generosity of the redundancy package.

What is more, it is clear—and the government has confirmed this—that the transfer-of-business provisions will apply at a whole-of-government level and not just at an individual departmental level. Let me explain what that means. If it is the case that the department of education has engaged in an outsourcing process but an employee from the department of health is made redundant and seeks employment at the organisation to which the department of education has outsourced certain activities, then that employee will also be subject to these transfer-of-business provisions. The effect will be that redundant public servants seeking employment with private providers will potentially be disadvantaged.

What is more, as the government also has confirmed, if a private employer refuses to employ a redundant public servant because of the transfer-of-business provisions, then that person is not in a position to do anything about that. As a consequence, this nakedly political stunt is actually likely to make workers worse off. It will be harder for them to get a new job because in effect the Gillard government will have tied an albatross around their neck by imposing on them certain minimum terms and conditions.

Proposed section 768AK of this bill describes something called a copied state employment agreement. That copied state employment agreement will apply by operation of the law to the employee as that employee goes to work for the new employer. The practical consequence of that will be that private sector employers considering employing somebody who has this particular albatross around their neck are likely to conclude that the potential employee is not somebody they wish to take on. Instead, they will choose to take on somebody who is not subject to those particular terms and conditions. In other words, we have a bill before the House that is going to impose upon a certain class of people who have been made redundant by a state public service a set of terms and conditions that will bind a certain class of employers who might be considering taking them on. The effect in substance will be to make those individuals less attractive to future potential employers. A recent survey of human resources managers conducted by the Australian Human Resources Institute indicated that 37 per cent of respondents agreed that the transfer-of-business provisions had a negative or very negative impact on business.

The third proposition that I would like to put to the House today is that this is a poor piece of policy. In arguing that point I would like to quote from an article written recently by former Keating government minister Gary Johns. He wrote:

Bill Shorten not only delivered the Ben Chifley oration on the weekend, he wants to bring back Chifley-like policy. How else to explain his extraordinary intervention to save state public servants' entitlements if, and when, their jobs are outsourced by the Queensland government?

Chifley, for example, started the Commonwealth Employment Service in 1946 to provide for 'the re-establishment in civil life of members of the forces'.

It's as if Shorten wants to pretend that Australia is emerging from a war and that protection of privileged union-controlled public-sector employment is the way to prosperity.

Shorten wants to protect state public service entitlements where a state government outsources work or sells assets to private-sector employers by introducing an amendment to the Fair Work Act.

That is a good analysis of the impact of this bill.

When you analyse the relevant provisions of this bill, including proposed section 768AD, the test as to whether there is in fact a connection between the old state employer and the potential new employer is extremely broad, and there are certainly likely to be a wide range of unintended consequences. You are likely to find a significant number of potential private sector employers conclude that employees who have been made redundant by a state government are unattractive as potential employees because—through no fault of their own but as a consequence of the operations of this bill—those employees will have certain terms and conditions attached to them and the new employer and the potential new employee have no choice as to whether those conditions continue to apply. As a consequence, employers are likely to say that it makes more sense for them to seek out somebody else to work for them rather than a person who comes, through the operation of this act, with certain terms and conditions attached to them.

I might also add that, as a matter of public policy, to see a Commonwealth minister engaging in gratuitous interference in the capacity of state governments to deal with matters which are properly their responsibility—the allocation of resources, including human resources—is deeply regrettable and makes it harder than it needs to be for state governments to discharge the responsibilities that under our Constitution are allocated to them.

For a host of reasons this is a very bad piece of legislation. It is motivated by a political stunt of the minister, a former union secretary, wanting to appear a hero. On analysis, the impact of these provisions will be that workers will be worse off. The coalition does not support this legislation.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Fair Work Amendment (Transfer of Business) Bill 2012. It is hard for me to find my feet. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out that the member for Bradfield does not support this legislation. I thought it was a dead certainty that the opposition would be supporting this, especially when saw a couple of Queensland MPs in the chamber who have had to deal with the fact that, since the LNP government came to power in Queensland, 26,000 people have lost their jobs—14,000 of them public servants. I think the member for Herbert just left. His constituents include some of the 40 nurses sacked from the Townsville Hospital by the LNP government. The suggestion was that somehow nurses are not frontline workers—unbelievable. I am pleased to be speaking on a bill that will protect the entitlements of state public servants threatened by job cuts announced by state Liberal and National governments.

I will provide a little bit of history for those opposite on industrial relations in Australia. We do things a little bit differently from the rest of the world. Since we became a Commonwealth, Australia has always had an approach that we should look after workers. It is not a case of 'let the market rip'—and, almost on cue, the member for Mayo walks into the chamber. We have never believed that we should just let the market rip and that there should be a straight relationship between employer and employee without any safety net or platform supporting workers rights. If we go back to the Harvester decision, we see that Australians have always recognised that.

Federal governments trying to interfere with the presumption that workers should be supported and that there is uneven bargaining power—that employers and employees do not have an equal contractual relationship—has only happened twice, and on each occasion the people have let the Commonwealth government know their disapproval at the next election. It happened back in the thirties. When Stanley Bruce brought in retrograde, progressive legislation—bang!—he lost his seat. The next time, when someone maybe got some bad advice from their advisers about bringing in Work Choices, which does happen, and I note the member for Mayo is in the chamber, Mr Howard, the member for Bennelong—bang!—lost his seat. The Australian people recognise that there should be fairness in the workplace and support for workers. That is the reality.

We are not like the US where there are people with half a job. We have always believed that if people are working they should be able to have enough food, to put a roof over their head and to even have a bit of a weekend—or, if they have to work on the weekend, to receive extra remuneration for that. Those are the basic, fundamental tenets of workplace law in Australia.

It has changed over the years, and I commend the Hawke and Keating governments, who made incredible changes. When I was growing up there was central wage fixing—men in suits basically determining what was going to happen across a set of awards. Hawke and Keating, knowing that we had to modernise the Australian economy, took incredible steps. The accord was one of the great moments in Australian history, when business, unions and government came together and worked out how we should do these things. I remember those times. I remember that move from central wage fixing and negotiations to enterprise bargaining. It was similar to what happened with superannuation, where workers were able to trade off and say, 'We will give up a wage increase and instead take it as superannuation,' along with some inducements in Medicare. That is a quick history of the Commonwealth government's approach to negotiations. I did not go into Work Choices but I will touch on that later.

My wife has been a public servant for 22 years. In that time, working in the same job in child protection, she has worked for many different premiers: National Party premiers, Labor Party premiers and now a National Party premier. In that time, she has always loyally served the people of Queensland—not the government but the people of Queensland. That is what a public servant does. Obviously, in that time she has never seen anything like the recent 14,000 job cuts that the Campbell Newman state government undertook—crazy times in Queensland.

Consequently, the Commonwealth government has had to step up. The amendments proposed in this bill will extend the transfer-of-business provisions in the Commonwealth Fair Work Act to circumstances where a state government outsources work or sells assets to a private sector or national workplace relations system employer. The provisions are based on the new employer, not the state government, to ensure that they are valid. The amendments follow recent announcements by Liberal and National state governments that they intend to cut tens of thousands of Public Service jobs—as I said, 14,000 Public Service jobs have been cut in my home state of Queensland. And, as I said, that is in the context of nearly 13,000 other jobs that have been cut over the last six months in Queensland. In addition to these jobs cuts, the Newman government has also recently legislated—and this is unbelievable; I say that as someone who has worked in industrial law—to override employment security provisions and limitations on the use of contractors in state public sector agreements, paving the way for outsourcing of public sector jobs.

If we look at the history of enterprise bargaining, going back to 1992 or 1993, these were hard fought negotiations over the years and—bang!—they were gone. They were just signed away overnight. It was not an election promise or an election commitment but a sudden overnight change.

This bill provides the Commonwealth with the opportunity to do what it can to protect the terms and conditions of these workers. The Labor Party has a long and proud record of standing up for workers rights. I have always seen myself as part of the political arm of the union movement. That is the history of the Labor Party.

This side of the House came to government with a clear commitment to bringing fairness, balance, flexibility and simplicity to the Australian workplace relations system, and that is what happened when we were elected to government back in 2007. Prior to this—in the lead-up—we had outlined a clear plan to end Work Choices and move towards the fair work policy.

The government have delivered on our commitments regarding workplace relations. Over 16,000 enterprise agreements covering more than 2.2 million employees have been approved. Around seven million Australians are currently protected from unfair dismissal. We had heard that it was going to be the end of the world if that policy came in. Nevertheless, the Australian economy has grown. More than 800,000 jobs have been created since this government was elected on 24 November 2007. I particularly thank the small businesses who stepped up during the global financial crisis and retained employees at a time when they could have sacked them.

The historic equal remuneration decision for workers in the social and community services sector awarded wage increases of between 23 per cent and 45 per cent to SACS workers in recognition of the fact that their work had been traditionally undervalued due, you could argue, to the fact that it was predominantly a female workforce. That could not have occurred without Fair Work, and I particularly thank the ASU from Queensland, who did great work before this legislation was in place in terms of valuing the work of SACS workers in Queensland.

We now have consistent protections for textile, clothing and footwear workers across the national workplace relations system—some of the people who were most exploited under previous industrial regimes. We have implemented the Road Safety Remuneration System to make sure there are real protections for drivers across Australia who would otherwise face economic pressures to drive dangerously long hours that put all Australian road users at risk. I am sure the member for Wright will talk about the 'safe rates' legislation when he speaks. I know he has a long history with the driving industry.

What is the opposition's position on workplace relations policy? As we heard from the member for Bradfield, they oppose it. So far we have heard nothing other than union-bashing and meaningless banalities. But, if the Liberal and National state governments are any indication of what the Leader of the Opposition would do, Australia would be in for more job cuts, reduced protections for workers, cuts to community organisations and cuts to family assistance payments. It will the old opposition three-card trick. We saw it in Queensland. They would bring in an independent audit, by some bloke called Peter Costello—very independent!—and then sell and sack and slash. That is the approach that they have flagged.

Given our strong record on fair and balanced workers rights, we do not accept that employees should be worse off or that they should have their entitlements put at risk simply because their jobs are outsourced by a state government. That is why Minister Shorten has introduced this bill—to protect the conditions of former state public sector employees.

The bill he has introduced will achieve this by providing for the transfer of terms and conditions in state awards and state agreements when there is a transfer of business from a state public sector employer to a national system employer; by enabling Fair Work Australia to make orders on a transfer of business, consistent with the existing transfer-of-business rules of the Fair Work Act 2009; and by clarifying the interaction between the transfer of employees' terms and conditions of employment and entitlements in the national system, including the National Employment Standards and other necessary transitional and technical provisions.

The reforms in this bill mean that the Commonwealth will establish for the first time a nationally consistent set of transfer-of-business rules for public sector employees that will protect their entitlements when they transfer to a national system employer. The transfer-of-business rules in the Fair Work Act reflect the government's clear policy intention to protect employees' existing terms and conditions of employment where their employer has changed but their work stays exactly the same. If you look at the history in the UK and other places where there has been a lot of outsourcing you see a clear, common theme: basically, wages are cut, and health and safety are cut. The standard operating procedure for the outsourcing of any government entity is a cut in wages and then a cut in health and safety. The costs that flow from cutting health and safety are often sold back to the government.

This side of the House appreciates and respects all public servants. That is why this Friday, in response to the widespread Public Service sackings by Premier Newman, I will be attending one of the jobs and skills expos funded by the federal government. It will be a fair dinkum helping hand at a time when it is needed most in Queensland. This expo is one of the many that form part of our $850,000 funding commitment to further support those workers who have been sacked from the state Public Service. I am told by my staff that we have had to expand the room size of this expo, given the large number of people who are registered to attend on Friday.

This highlights the importance of what the Gillard Labor government is doing to assist workers who have lost their jobs in Queensland and throughout Australia and to assist those workers who are in the firing line of having their livelihoods outsourced. I will always stand up for the rights of Queensland public servants and I will never accept that they should receive lesser conditions than those in other jurisdictions. That is why I proudly commend this bill to the House.

Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for Moreton, who managed to get at least most of the way through his speech. He only had 2½ minutes left of his speech to talk about workers rights, which he believes in so strongly. The member for Blair yesterday could only get about six minutes into his speech. The member for Throsby just read the wrong speech on workers rights yesterday. I am not sure what the member for Throsby is going to do for today's speech, because the speech he read yesterday on yesterday's IR bill was on the bill before the House today. So it could be a little confusing when the member for Throsby comes into the House.

The Fair Work Amendment (Transfer of Business) Bill 2012 is a bill which very much reflects what the modern Labor Party is all about—stunts and trickery. We had an attempt at a history lesson from the member for Moreton, but what he failed to mention in the history lesson was the situations that the state Liberal governments have inherited in each of those states. He mentioned Peter Costello on the way through. Long should we remember Peter Costello in this place, because it was Peter Costello who delivered nine out of 11 budget surpluses when he was the Treasurer of our country and he put the Australian budget situation into a position where, when he left government in 2007, there was $20 million in the bank, unlike the $258 billion of debt which has been built up by this government since.

That is only a very small part of the debt story in Australia. The debt story in Australia is far greater and the state Labor governments are wholly and solely to blame. The Treasurer of Australia, while his record is appalling and he is a spending profligate, is not anywhere near as bad as some of the state Labor governments—although he is getting worse.

Campbell Newman, let's not forget, won the biggest majority in the country's history at an election 18 months ago because the Queensland people worked out that under successive Labor governments they had been led up the garden path. There was no money left. So Campbell Newman and Treasurer Nicholls have to fix this budget situation before getting into genuine crises of public finances up in Queensland. I come from South Australia and I can tell you we still have a state Labor government spending its way into a fiscal crisis.

In 1992 the South Australian debt position was $11.5 billion. That was after the State Bank of South Australia collapsed. It was a huge issue for the state of South Australia and, in fact, still reflects on the confidence of our state as we debate this bill today. It was an enormous dent in the state's economic future and has had an impact for some time. The Liberal government, elected as a part of the resulting crisis from that State Bank collapse, reduced the debt in South Australia to nearly zero. There were a couple of billion dollars of debt left when they lost government in 2002. Today the South Australian budget papers predict that the public sector debt in South Australia will reach $13 billion. That is after the state Liberal government at that time privatised electricity assets, improved the efficiency of the Public Service and made all of the reforms necessary to ensure that the debt was brought back under control.

Reintroduce a state Labor government and back comes the debt, back comes the size of government and back comes the profligacy we have seen throughout the country in New South Wales, in Queensland and in the federal government. When a Liberal government is elected in March 2014 in South Australia it will have to make very difficult decisions to ensure that the budget is brought back under control. The services necessary to the people of Queensland, to the people of New South Wales and, hopefully, to the people of South Australia can still be delivered because ultimately government is about ensuring that those base services that are required to be delivered—what government is actually there for—can be delivered. Spending itself into a situation where it cannot afford to deliver the necessary services of health, education and child protection is a pretty dangerous situation for a state government to get itself into. That is exactly what the Anna Bligh government did in Queensland, it is exactly what the Peter Beattie government did in Queensland and it is exactly what Jay Weatherill is doing in South Australia.

Campbell Newman is making the right, tough decisions to ensure that Queensland public finances are put back in place. He is actually doing no more and no less than what the Treasurer in this place tells us he is doing, although we know it is not true. We know that the federal Treasurer continues to waste millions of dollars. We know that in the government's own budget papers they are cutting public servants. I predict we will not hear a word from the member for Blair about the federal government cutting public servants. We have not heard a word from the member from Moreton and I suspect we will not from the member for Blair on the South Australian government's budget papers, which say it is slashing 1,400 public servants this year. These are stunts and trickery.

The member for Blair, the great workers' representative, cannot get through a 15-minute speech defending the workers. It is all political puffery. Realistically what the government are doing is introducing a piece of legislation into this chamber which damages workers and their future. That is what this legislation actually does; it makes workers worse off. It provides no support. It provides political cover for a Labor Party that are desperately looking for a political narrative. That is all that this legislation is about. It is not about ensuring good governance in our country. It is not about ensuring that people can have more security at work, which is what they will try and have you believe.

Ultimately the nature of government does change. The nature of the services and what the community demands from time to time does change. Undoubtedly in the last 20 years there has been too much power given to the states. We regularly talk in this place about red tape. Red tape ultimately is regulated by bureaucrats. There is a need for government to deliver certain public services but, quite clearly, in the last 20 years it has been an over-reach. There will be need for efficiencies to be found as we can see from the Labor government at the federal level, which are outrageously slashing 4,200 public servants—to use their language. I hope they have a jobs expo in Canberra to help those public servants that they are slashing. Of course they will not because this is all about political trickery.

This bill is not about ensuring the public gets the services they need delivered to them that they want delivered to them and no more. This is about ensuring the government have a bill before the House so the member for Blair and the member for Moreton can get up and say 'Work Choices, Work Choices'. That is all we hear from those opposite. It is a mantra that has been drummed into them. They have been told by Bruce Hawker and by their national secretary: 'You just have to say it as much as you can.' It is a KPI every month. How many times can we say it? How many times can the member for Blair say it each month? Not enough yesterday. He had nine minutes left where he had all those opportunities to say the words 'Work Choices' but he just could not get them out. He could have sat there for nine minutes parroting it. He could not quite get there. At least he was better than the member for Throsby, though. At least he gave a speech on the bill. At least he grabbed the right talking points on the way through. It was a bad day for the member for Throsby yesterday. It was one of those days he will not put in the memory bank as a good one.

This is a further bad bill from a bad minister who is interested in looking after vested interests, looking after his mates, looking after those in the superannuation industry he wants to support, looking after those union friends he wants to ensure have a future career in a government funded position and looking after the political prospects of the Labor Party, not of the general economy, not ensuring that state governments can put back on a strong footing state budgets that have been so decimated by such bad Labor governments over so long. This bill is a debate about the consequences of state Labor paying too much for too long. And guess what is happening at the federal level? Exactly the same thing. The Labor Party are ashamed of their state friends and they are trying to create a counter-debate here to take away attention. They are trying to make a debate about something else so that people do not focus on the fact that Labor's record in state government is shameful. It is exactly the same with the federal budget, where a debt of $258 billion has recently been announced. That is what this bill is all about.

Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I see that the member for Mayo had about five minutes left. Perhaps he had no more anti-union, anti-worker tirades in his sloganeering and smearing of workers. I notice that he did not address the bill at all in relation to this. But that is not surprising because a couple of days ago he and his colleagues over there decided to vote against protecting workers entitlements in relation to the fair entitlements guarantee bill to make sure that Australian workers who were affected by liquidation and the bankruptcy of their employer have stronger protections in terms of their entitlements. Since I have been in this place I have never seen a piece of legislation that protected workers entitlements or advanced superannuation that those opposite would actually make a speech on and support. The member for Bradfield spoke in relation to job losses in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. He said that what we were doing was a gratuitous interference in the allocation of human resources. What sort of Orwellian comment is that, when people have lost their jobs?

This particular piece of legislation, the Fair Work Amendment (Transfer of Business) Bill 2012, is about protecting the entitlements of state public servants whose jobs have been not just threatened but destroyed and their lives and financial security absolutely badly damaged by LNP state governments in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and elsewhere. The member for Mayo is here. The illustrious leader of his party in South Australia, Isobel Redmond, in what had to be a brain-snap, actually said she was going to cut 25,000 public servants in South Australia. It is a miracle that she won the leadership ballot by one vote; I cannot believe that she actually did it. But the member for Mayo did not say a word about the 25,000 Public Service jobs that would be on the line under the Liberal leader in South Australia.

Let us look at the people who are going to be protected. Under this legislation, the transfer-of-business provisions protect workers whose jobs are effectively outsourced. The proposed amendments make sure that the transfer-of-business provisions in the Fair Work Act actually cover circumstances where a state government outsources work or sells assets to the private sector and a national workplace relations system employer. The provisions are based on the new employer, not the state government, to ensure that they are valid. Effectively, if your job is outsourced by a state government to another employee doing the same sort of work, your entitlements are going to be protected.

For the benefit of those opposite—the member for Bradfield and the member for Mayo—I am going to list and talk about those human resources, those real people, those families and individuals who are actually going to lose their job. The Queensland Council of Unions estimates that 900 jobs have been lost in Ipswich in my electorate as a result of the Campbell Newman government sacking public servants and those whose community organisations were funded by departments such as the Department of Community Services in Queensland. The Campbell Newman government has effectively ripped $68 million out of Ipswich—and, according to the Queensland Times newspaper, the state member for Ipswich thinks six jobs have been lost! When we put on a jobs workshop in Ipswich, and there were about 70 people at that workshop, people were still coming in when I was talking. When I was talking about the fact that there were public servants who have lost their jobs in various departments—and I started listing the departments—people at that workshop were nodding their heads because they have lost their jobs. We are providing $850,000 to help those people and a workshop in Ipswich and a skills and jobs expo in Brisbane on 26 October and in Logan on 15 November. We are providing help to those people who have lost their jobs. Not a word, not a whisper, has been uttered by those opposite about the fact that we have put up $850,000 to support jobs in that area.

We also supported jobs in the community sector as well. There are 23 tenancy advocacy services around Queensland employing dozens and dozens of people and providing tenancy advice to 80,000 Queenslanders a year. Those jobs would have been lost. They are not the 14,000 full-time equivalent public servant jobs lost in Queensland that were declared by Campbell Newman; they are other people in the public sector who would have lost their jobs. But this federal Labor government stepped in and saved them. There were six jobs saved at IRASI in Ipswich, a service that supports 150 tenants in court and provides 600 phone calls and attendances a month. That would have been gone entirely if Campbell Newman had his way. We are making a provision to make sure that that tenancy advice continues and those jobs are saved by the intervention of the federal Labor government.

I am going to talk about the human resources that have been 'reallocated', according to the member for Bradfield. This comes directly from the budget papers in Queensland under the LNP state government. At the Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Multicultural Affairs there were 15 jobs lost. At Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry there were 450 jobs lost. I have spoken to a person in that department who came to see me. She was not a full-time equivalent effectively. She was answering the phone on the front line. She saw me at a mobile office at Yamanto.

The Department of Communities, Child Safety and Disability Services is another. These are front-line services that help kids in distress, in need of protection from neglect, abuse and family violence, and 385 jobs will be lost. In the Department of Community Safety there will be 345 jobs lost. In the Department of Education, Training and Employment 450 people have lost their jobs. In the Department of Energy and Water Supply 135 jobs have been lost. In the Department of Environment and Heritage Protection 220 jobs have been lost. In the Department of Housing and Public Works 1,425 jobs have been lost. In the Department of Justice and Attorney-General 510 jobs have been lost; in the Department of Local Government, 15; in the Department of National Parks, Recreation, Sport and Racing, 130; in the Department of Natural Resources and Mines, 360; and, from the police, 215—so much for public safety.

In the Department of the Premier and Cabinet—you can build a Taj Mahal in the executive building in the middle of Brisbane—only 45 jobs will be lost. In the Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts 110 jobs will be lost. In the Department of State Development, Infrastructure and Planning there will be 145 jobs lost. In the Department of Tourism, Major Events, Small Business and the Commonwealth Games, 15 jobs will be lost. In the Department of Transport and Main Roads 1,450 jobs will be lost. In Treasury and Trade 85 jobs will be lost.

But the biggest job losses will be in health, with 4,140 jobs lost—doctors and nurses, front-line services in Queensland including, as the member for Moreton mentioned before, 45 nurses in Townsville. I wonder what the member for Herbert thinks about that. In my electorate in the Ipswich and West Moreton region, we have also seen front-line health services go. These are people who help in cases of domestic violence, who help on the front line when people have been sexually abused. That is what they do. Ask the Ipswich Women's Centre Against Domestic Violence what impact the job losses there have had on our community. In the Ipswich and West Moreton region $17 million is going to go from health. If they do not sack people, if they do not get rid of that $17 million this year, another $10 million is going to go. So much for Lawrence Springborg, the Minister for Health in Queensland. So much for Campbell Newman.

But what do those opposite say? This is what they say about those people, those 'human resources'. The Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Treasurer are incredibly supportive, of course. This is what the Leader of the Opposition says about the state governments in relation to the job losses, the service cuts and the funding cuts in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria:

… I respect the job that they're doing, I work closely with them as far as I can, but they are dealing with their problems at the state level …

That is what the Leader of the Opposition thinks jobs are—they are problems. He continued:

… I will seek to deal with federal problems at our levels.

The coalition are on the public record as saying they are going to sack public servants here in Canberra. We know they have a $70 billion black hole in their budget. We are not making that statement up. The shadow Treasurer said it on public TV. He said it and he has repeated it—$70 billion. The age pension, Medicare, family tax benefit and disability assistance will be gone for years. That is worth $70 billion. It is not an academic figure. If they are going to cut those services, the public service in Canberra and the public service around the country, particularly in regional and rural Queensland, is going to be at risk. The transfer-of-business provisions here are so critical in protecting jobs. They are absolutely front line.

These cuts in New South Wales, we discovered overnight, were unnecessary because, miraculously, the water turned into wine, the Red Sea parted and the loaves and fishes took place. They found $1 billion in the New South Wales budget. We could not believe it. They found $1 billion. So what they did was they sacked people and they cut $1.7 billion out of the New South Wales education budget, effectively gutting services in New South Wales. It is an incredible failure from the New South Wales colleagues of those opposite. They could not get the calculator out and work out how much money they had. It is simply bewildering.

Those opposite would do the same. I mentioned before the $70 billion black hole that they have, and that is what they are going to do. It is an absolutely extraordinary set of circumstances that those opposite refuse to comply with what they had said previously in terms of the costing of policies. Thank goodness the Independents insisted that there be proper accounting of their costings after the last election, when there was an $11 billion black hole. We know that they have a $70 billion black hole because it has been said before, not just by the shadow Treasurer. The shadow finance minister has made that crystal clear as well.

So at the next election the choice is going to be pretty clear: a choice between a Labor government that believes in fair work and those opposite, who believe in Work Choices. Those opposite never saw a bill that protected workers' rights that they did not want to vote against. We think we got the balance right, in the sensible centre, in the Fair Work legislation. The pendulum went way out to the right when Work Choices was introduced.

There is going to be a choice at the next election about a party on this side that wants to increase superannuation from nine to 12 per cent, that wants to step in and protect workers' jobs and that wants to make sure we have an industrial relations system in this country where workers and their employers sit down together, negotiate enterprise agreements and bargain collectively, where the unfair dismissal provisions continue to make sure that seven million Australians are protected by our legislation. That is unlike those opposite, who want to tear it up.

We want to make sure that there is enough money in people's pockets so that they themselves can invest in their education, their health and their financial security. We want to make sure that there is no slashing and burning when it comes to their pay packets and that they have jobs that can feed their families. The provisions here are critical. They are very, very critical to the future.

I think, when it comes to IR with those opposite, there is some sort of apostolic succession going on for preselection in the LNP. What happens is that they have to channel John Howard. When it comes to a preselection in the LNP, you have to be meaner and tougher and nastier with respect to workers' entitlements. Whoever is the toughest, whoever is the most right wing and extreme and the most anti-union, will get preselected. In my just over five years in this place, I have seen it with those opposite. Whenever a small 'l' liberal who might have some sort of social conscience leaves, they replace them with a hard right-winger.

When it comes to this sort of stuff, they should be on the public record supporting it, protecting jobs, protecting those people, and all those Queensland LNP members should be at the forefront, standing up for their constituencies and standing up to Campbell Newman. Stand up for jobs, stand up for services and stand up for those community organisations in your area that deliver those services to your constituents. Stand up for Queensland. Stand up to Campbell Newman. I commend the legislation to the House.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The previous speaker on the Fair Work Amendment (Transfer of Business) Bill 2012 was talking about the Liberal Party, but you do not want to throw stones if you are in a glass house. His area is a railway area. I will give you the figures on the railways in Queensland. In 1979, there were 22,000 railwaymen employed in Queensland. When the Bjelke-Petersen government fell, there were 21,000 railwaymen employed in Queensland. In other words, there had been no diminution whatsoever, in spite of computerisation being introduced in those 10 years, when really 3,000 or 4,000 jobs became surplus to requirements. But still we did not sack anyone or put anyone off.

I say to the previous speaker: you want to be careful, because when we handed over government there were 21,000 employees in the railways; within seven years, under the Labor government, there were 12,000 employees in the railways. Those men had believed in the Labor Party and backed the Labor Party all of their lives. My old state electorate was very much a railway electorate. Every single person in my last state election that handed out how-to-vote cards for them was a railwayman or associated with the railways. I never held it against them. They were traditional Labor men. In fact, a lot of them I liked very much. But, of course, now no railwaymen hand out how-to-vote cards for the ALP.

In Queensland, on this issue, the Labor leader of Queensland was asked to leave the dais where she had pushed her way in. I thought I might sneak in there too, but they did not have me up there either. But they were not going to state that the ALP were on the side of the angels, because in Queensland they most certainly were not.

Now, in this place, they are on the side of the angels here. The minister is attempting to do something to help out in what is a callous and vicious situation in Queensland. The previous speaker's remarks about the people on my right are, unfortunately and sadly, very true. There can be no other reason why the Premier of Queensland would want to sack those people. You can get rid of people by a process of nonreplacement.

I had a department which was a First Australian—Aboriginal, if you like to use that word—department, and it was composed entirely of whitefellas. All the people employed were whitefellas, when their jobs were supposed to be looking after blackfellas. They called it the 'browning' of the department when, over a period of about 3½ years—I think these statistics are pretty right; you have to be careful when public servants hand you statistics!—almost all of that department became blackfella, not whitefella. But we did not sack anyone.

It was a decision cold-bloodedly taken by the cabinet. In the cabinet, Premier Bjelke-Petersen said, 'Bob, how long will it take if you go nonreplacement?' We had a big turnover. I said, 'In 3½ years, Premier, just about everyone should be replaced.' He said, 'How much extra will it cost?' I said, 'About $7 million or $8 million a year, but I've got a budget of about $240 million, so it's not going to break the bank.' He said, 'Boys, we don't sack.' There were a couple of girls at the table, but he said, 'Boys, we don't sack.' And everyone said, 'No, we don't sack.'

It was the toughest and most brutal government. Everyone knows the history of the stand-up when the lights were turned off in Brisbane. We could be as tough and as brutal as any government in recent Australian history, and in fact in that case we were. We went much too far, as far as I was concerned, at the end, after the lights were turned on. I did not think it called for any action then—but, anyway, that is a story for another day.

We were a tough, brutal government, but we never sacked anyone. We thought it was a wrong thing to sack people. Our leader was a very, very Christian person, in the sense that he had been a preacher in his younger days. His father was a full-time preacher in the Lutheran Church, and Bjelke-Petersen had been a missionary up in North Queensland. We as a group of people did not believe that it was a civilised thing to do to go sacking people.

When you sack people, they lose their car. Mr Deputy Speaker, how would you like to lose your car, have it taken off and repossessed? How would you like to be kicked out of your house because you cannot afford the rental in that house anymore and have to look for social welfare housing? In 20 per cent of cases, you lose your family. How would you like to lose your family, Mr Deputy Speaker? In two per cent of cases, you suicide. How would you like to suicide, Mr Deputy Speaker?

I mean, why did they do this? I cannot come up with any statement other than what the previous speaker said—that they are trying to prove they are tough. We never had to prove to anyone we were tough. Our backgrounds clearly indicated that we were tough. When you have to prove you are tough, there is something seriously wrong with you. And when you have to prove you are tough by breaking the hearts of 15,000 families in Queensland, there is a name for that and it sure ain't tough.

The Liberal and National parties think government is about cutting spending. They do not have very good intellects but really, you have to be pretty simplistic if you think that government is so simple that you simply cut spending. In the Great Depression, they advocated a cut in spending in this place. They are on record as criticising the government for spending. They got wise because they were kicked around the place by a lot of intelligent people in Australia. By the time they had taken three months of kicking, they modified their position and stopped criticising the government spending money and then said the government had spent the money the wrong way. That was not the original thrust; the original thrust was that the government should not be spending money when the collapse hit the whole of the world.

Of course you spend money. That is exactly what you do in a recession. That is exactly what you do in a depression. That is what Takahashi did in Japan. That is what Galbraith did in the United States, or Eccles. That is what John Maynard Keynes did in Great Britain and that is why every country on earth never had much of a depression except Australia. America did it very late in the piece and they had a terrible depression, but nowhere near as bad as Australia. Unfortunately, the conservative viewpoint was prevailing at the time and that was the outcome.

My son Robbie Katter took a different line from Shane Knuth and from me. He is quoted on the ABC Queensland news as saying that to have a massive cut in spending in a post-GFC environment—Mr Deputy Speaker, I know that talking in this place is a farce, but to have the three frontbenchers at the table all talking to each other and laughing I find a little bit over the fence. Would you mind giving them a little bit of a kick, please?

John Murphy (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Let me assure you, Honourable Member for Kennedy, that I am listening to every word you are saying. I always find you an engaging speaker. I draw to the attention of the House that the static is impeding your address.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. My son said, 'In a very fragile post-GFC environment to have a massive cut in government spending is very dangerous policy indeed. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it's extremely irresponsible policy.' Then he went on to say that those people who are out there cheering and saying, 'Beauty, we're getting rid of all these bludging public servants'—because a lot of the business class see public servants as bludgers—are exactly the same people who, in four months time, are going to be checking their cash registers and whingeing, crying and howling that they are in serious trouble and are going to want to leach the Queensland government. On this one, my son was wrong when he said four months because it was four weeks. I met with two of the biggest retailers in North Queensland and they said, 'Mate, he's driven us straight through the floor.' One of them is a rabid LNP supporter. He would die before he would vote for me or for any KAP people, but he was in terror. His figures have just collapsed.

We went to a motelier at one of the most successful motels in Northern Australia and also one of the biggest. Their figures are down a third. They just got a telephone call to cancel all government bookings for the next 12 months. The lady involved said, 'I didn't take much notice because they'll ring me up next week and say "Can you book four". They'll do it on a piecemeal basis. In the last two months, I doubt whether we had a single government booking.' I said, 'What would it normally be?' She said that 20 per cent to 30 per cent of all her available accommodation is taken by state government officials.

We have had the longest outage in Charters Towers history. I went away there to boarding school in 1959. So I am familiar with my family's home town. They went there before there was a Charters Towers. Since 1959, we have never had an outage like this. Maintenance has not been done in the electricity industry since before the sacking of 500 Ergon workers. So I leave it to your imagination how much maintenance is going to get done in the future, because these corporatised industries are being price gouged by the former ALP government and now by the current government.

We praise and thank Minister Shorten for what the government are doing today. I have discussed this with the minister because there is some worry on the part of some of my public servants that, if they have to be paid the same rate after this legislation comes in—'If you employ a public servant to continue to do that job, they have to be paid the same rate'—they will sack us and put someone in who can be paid less. The whole idea of going to contract work is that workers will be paid less. I would hate to think that the state government is doing this just to look after their crony rich friends. I am sure they are not doing that. The idea is that the price is going to go down because workers are going to be paid less. If they cannot pay workers less, they will get rid of those workers.

From lengthy discussions with Alex Scott—and we appreciate his time—and Ben Swan in Queensland from the AWU, and, particularly, the Together union's Belinda Johnson in North Queensland, they are not going to be able to sack, for example, all the laundry workers in the hospitals. They cannot just go in and sack all of them.

So, for the time being anyway, what the government is doing is going to be very helpful, and we appreciate the government's and the minister's involvement, and we back the initiative being taken by the government in this area. We would like the minister to keep an eye on the situation in Queensland and give any other assistance he could provide, until—well, clearly, if the government keeps going the way it is going, it will not be the government; please God, we will be. So I would like the ALP, the government of Australia, to be nice to us and listen to us. Any further assistance it can give to the people under attack in Queensland would be very much appreciated, and we thank very much the minister and the government for the initiative.

Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Financial Services and Superannuation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to acknowledge the contributions of members in this debate on the Fair Work Amendment (Transfer of Business) Bill 2012—in particular, the contributions of members who are supporting the government legislation, including that of the member for Kennedy. He did say something about railway people no longer supporting Labor. My family worked on the railways, and I can guarantee that they are still supporting Labor, if that is of any consolation to him, which it may or may not be.

Turning to the summing-up: on Friday, 21 September, I announced that the government would introduce an amendment to the Fair Work Act. The amendment would protect the entitlements of state public servants threatened by job cuts announced by state governments. This bill delivers on that commitment. The Gillard government does not accept that employees should be worse off, or that they should have their entitlements put at risk simply because their jobs are outsourced.

I want to be clear, for the assistance of the House, about what this bill does and what it does not do. First: this bill does not create a new concept. There are already transfer-of-business provisions in part 2-8 of the Fair Work Act. I repeat: this bill does not create a new concept. What we are trying to do is to extend a nationally consistent set of transfer-of-business protections. It is simple: we do not believe that employees who are being employed by private sector employers covered by the fair work system should receive lower protections for the sole reason that their jobs were outsourced by certain state governments.

Second: this bill, if passed, would not provide the first transfer-of-business protections to public servants moving into the national workplace relations system. I repeat: it would not provide the first transfer-of-business protections to public servants moving into the national workplace relations system. In fact, for the information of the House, the provisions currently already apply to transfers of business between the Commonwealth government and the private sector, between the Victorian government and the private sector, between the Australian Capital Territory government and the private sector, and between the Northern Territory public sector employers and another national system employer. So all these employees already generally retain the benefit of their existing terms and conditions of employment when they transfer to a new employer as result of a transfer of business. This bill in fact simply remedies a loophole which would see Public Service employees in other jurisdictions no longer being second class, but joining the appropriate protections already enjoyed by a range of public servants throughout Australia. And this is very fair.

I would also reiterate, for the benefit of the House, what the transfer-of-business protections provide. In broad terms, the transfer-of-business rules will apply where: (1) an employee transfers to a new employer within three months of their employment terminating with their old employer, and (2) when the employee performs the same or similar work for the new employer as they did for their old employer, and (3) where the old employer transfers assets or outsources work to the new employer, or undertakes certain corporate restructuring activities such as movements to associated entities. So, wherever these conditions exist—three months, the same work, a transfer, as I have outlined—the default rule is that the transferring employee's existing workplace instrument, the essential terms and conditions of employment, will transfer with them to their new employer.

Importantly, Fair Work Australia has broad powers to ensure that these rules operate fairly to both the transferring employee and to the new employer. The reforms in this bill simply mean that the Commonwealth will establish, for the first time, a nationally consistent set of transfer-of-business protections for public sector employees when they transfer to a national system employer. The Commonwealth does not have power to regulate transfer of business within state public sectors and within state industrial systems. However, we can regulate, and we should regulate, national system employers and employees, and this bill will ensure that, for employees from some of the states who currently do not enjoy the same protections as other states, those employees transitioning into the national system from a state government, as a result of a transfer of business, retain the benefit of their existing terms and conditions in awards and agreements.

This bill does this by the following: providing for the transfer of employees' terms and conditions of employment from the old public sector employer to a national system employer where there is a connection between the two employers. This bill does this by preserving the transferring employee's existing terms and conditions of employment, whether those terms are reflected in the relevant state award or agreement, by the creation of a federal instrument containing those terms and conditions and recognising service and certain accrued entitlements such as annual leave. This bill will do so by providing for the interaction between the transferring terms and conditions of employment and the Fair Work Act, including the National Employment Standards, and other necessary transitional and technical provisions to make life simpler for employers and employees. Also, it will enable Fair Work Australia to resolve issues that might arise as a result of terms and conditions transferring.

There are a range of things that Fair Work Australia can do to help the new employer. In consulting on this bill, I have been asked, 'What happens to the employer who takes on the former public sector staff?' Just like they can do now, Fair Work Australia can make a range of orders to modify the general effect of the transfer-of-business rules, where appropriate—for example, varying transferring terms and conditions instruments to enable them to operate in a way that is better aligned to the working arrangements of the new employer's enterprise.

They can modify the general effect of the transfer-of-business rules to remove terms that are not capable of meaningful operation, such as in the new employer's business. Fair Work Australia can remove terms that are ambiguous or uncertain and change the coverage and application of transferring terms and conditions, if that is required.

When exercising these powers, the independent umpire, Fair Work Australia, is required and will be required under this bill to take into account factors including impacts on productivity for the new employer, and business synergy, as well as the impact on relevant employees, in the public interest. Now, of course, employers and transferring employees are also encouraged to bargain for new enterprise agreements that are appropriate to their enterprise. Where an enterprise agreement is made, it will permanently replace any transfer instruments at the employer's enterprise.

The transfer-of-business provisions that already exist are merely being extended to an extra group of Australian employees who are entering the national system. The evidence from the existing system we seek to extend is that the transfer-of-business provisions deliver a balanced framework that provides both fairness and flexibility to employees and employers. The recent post-implementation review into the operation of the Fair Work Act, which the government publicly released on 2 August this year, had the following things to say about the transfer-of-business rules:

The Panel considers there is a clear need to protect employees in a transfer of business situations. The alternative is to allow employees to be exploited by the structuring of businesses and contracting arrangements. On the basis of stakeholder submissions, academic advice at face-to-face consultations, analysis of cases under the provisions and an examination of the provisions themselves, the broader legislative definition succeeds in providing better protections for employees than the previous arrangements did.

The review further stated that the scope within the transfer-of-business framework 'for employers to determine the appropriate outcome for their business on application to Fair Work Australia provides significant flexibility'.

One claim that has been made is that the bill will discourage new employers from employing former state employees. This claim was bandied around, but with little evidence to support it. The claim is that the transfer-of-business provisions are some kind of barrier for new employers to hire transferring employees. As I said earlier, this issue was considered in some detail in the recent review of the Fair Work Act. It was argued that the transfer-of-business provisions reduced the employment prospects of workers. Indeed, the member for Kennedy raised this in discussions with me. However, let me assure him and others who are concerned about this that, after reviewing all of the evidence put forward, the Fair Work Act review panel was not convinced that the provisions have had that negative impact. In other words, the panel tasked with examining the functioning of the existing rules, which we are now extending to a new group, said that they were not convinced that the provisions would have that negative impact. To the contrary, the panel concluded that the evidence suggested that the existing transfer-of-business arrangements deliver a balanced framework that delivers flexibility and fairness to both employees and employers.

The government's policy in relation to the transfer-of-business provisions in the Fair Work Act has been consistently clear—that is, employees should be able to retain the benefit of their terms and conditions of employment and their entitlements where their employer changes but the work they perform stays the same. This bill maintains that policy and extends it to certain former state public sector employees to ensure that their terms and conditions of employment are protected where a transfer of business occurs between a state public sector employer and a national system employer.

In conclusion, this bill reflects existing concepts and protections in existing workplace relations legislation that already apply to national state system employees, including a large number of public servants. It is based on a policy of ensuring nationally consistent workplace relations laws in the area of the transfer of business, which in turn is based on ensuring protections for employees whose jobs are outsourced where they end up doing the same job for a different employer.

State governments criticise the bill because they want to take the low road to budget cuts by sacking hardworking public servants and taking the low road on cutting workers conditions. This Gillard government respects the work of Australia's public servants, regardless of the jurisdiction in which they work. We know how important our public sector workers are to the sort of society this nation aspires to be. The simple proposition with this bill is that we do not consider that public servants in some states should have less protection, when they come into the national system as a result of the transfer of business, than those from other jurisdictions.

I commend the bill to the House.

Peter Slipper (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the bill be now read a second time.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Speaker, because, inadvertently, someone has missed the division, I would ask that it be recommitted in accordance—

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You want to be careful!

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Leader of the House, I need to clarify: I gave my vote with the ayes to continue debate because we are on the second reading. So, if someone would like to move the motion, you do not need to recommit; you can have the vote after someone speaks further. It is like we are moving into consideration in detail of the bill. The question is that the bill be now read a second time.

Bill read a second time.