Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Hansard source

In case a number of people are listening who may be a bit confused, the Senate has agreed that the idea of being able to allow small businesses to collectively bargain on a much easier basis makes sense to everybody except, it seems, the government. It is relevant to this particular issue because people have raised it. We as a Senate have already sent the signal that we want collective bargaining, but the government are refusing to pass collective bargaining provisions that make it easier for small business. If a political party were pro small business they would do all they could to make sure that what we have all agreed here makes sense; they would not be tying it unnecessarily to something called the ‘Dawson changes’. Let us be specific here so that everybody can understand what was said here previously on this issue: the government is tying in collective bargaining with allowing big businesses to merge together. The Senate said, ‘We’ve got some questions about making it easier for big business to merge even more,’ so the Senate rejected that part and then voted for allowing collective bargaining to go ahead.

The government looked at that in the lower house and decided not to proceed with allowing collective bargaining for small businesses on the basis that they cannot get easier provisions for mergers for big business. The two are totally non-related, and I think that, if the Senate does not agree today to reinforce the message that we need to have collective bargaining streamlined for small businesses—that is what this provision does; it makes it easier for independents and small businesses to collective bargain—we are sending the wrong signals, especially when we are talking about petroleum retailing service stations. If this repealed bill goes through, it will make it even harder for independents, and we need to level the playing field with collective bargaining. Again, I appeal to senators to support this in principle and make a statement again that we are for collective bargaining.

Question negatived.

by leave—I move amendments (3) and (5):

(3)    Schedule 2, page 4 (after line 13), at the end of the Schedule, add:

4  At the end of section 51AE

Add:

Oilcode

These amendments that Family First are putting forward are to ensure that no one company owns or operates more than 25 per cent of service stations. The reason for this provision is that we know that petrol for cars is an essential item for Australian families. There is not a lot of choice. That is another issue we can talk about another day; we will get to that one somewhere else. There is not a lot of choice and so we need to do what we can to make sure that we have real competition and more competition in petrol retailing and not potentially less. What we are looking at with the Petroleum Retail Legislation Repeal Bill 2006 is that any restrictions that were placed on petroleum giants, going back many years ago, to prevent them from controlling any more than a certain number of sites across Australia were put in place for a very good reason, with both the government and opposition at the time agreeing that they made sense.

In 2006 we are realising that those provisions are not working the way they should, they are not serving the intended purpose and so it makes sense to change them. But to just throw them out and have no real regulation on how many sites certain players can have does not make sense. It made sense in principle many years ago, and so Family First is proposing to put some regulations in place that allow not only the big end, oil giants and large companies, to survive but also the independents by restricting any one company to owning or operating only 25 per cent of the market. This allows competition. It means that we do not end up like we have with the food and grocery sector, where we have two players controlling and dominating the food and grocery market across Australia. No-one believes that is a great idea, and there should have been some restrictions put in place to ensure that we did not have that situation. We have an ideal opportunity today to put some restrictions in place to allow competition.

I note that Senator Joyce has got an amendment that has merit that is looking at allowing 25 per cent of the market to be apportioned off for independents. I think our amendment works very well with Senator Joyce’s amendment in making sure that no one player can control more than 25 per cent of the market and also in allowing 25 per cent of the market to be earmarked for independents. I think our amendments are worthy of support, especially considering that Senator Joyce also has an amendment that is trying to achieve the same thing. I think that using both his and ours would serve Australia very well.