Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Hansard source

I return to the issue of the 16(3)(c) agreements that are proposed in the bill. There was discussion of these agreements by the minister, from recollection, or his representative—I cannot recall if this minister gave the second reading speech or someone else. Leaving aside Senator Murray’s amendment (2), certainly a number of the amendments—amendments (5), (7), (9) and, I think, (12) and perhaps some others—in fact deal with the employer complying with an agreement into which it has entered. If, as I would have thought, the government is propounding these 16(3)(c) agreements as the ‘great leap forward’, can the government explain why it is that it does not believe that an employer should be bound to an agreement made under that subsection? The reference to the general duty of care, with respect, Minister, really is not to the point. I assume you are talking about an employer’s common-law duty of care not to injure employees and to have a safe workplace, or however it is so formulated. But that is not what we are talking about. You are talking about a new agreement-making regime that is given a certain statutory status under the bill that is proposed. On what basis does the government say that an employer who has entered into an agreement under 16(3)(c) ought not to be required to comply with that agreement?