Andrew Murray (WA, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I think I will try to close this section of debate and put my two amendments to the vote. In closing, I will just make a couple of summarising remarks. I think the nature of the debate has exhibited exactly what I said earlier: how you define employment is indeed at the very crux of the dispute on this bill between the conservative side and the non-coalition senators. I said earlier, in my opening remarks, that this was not a debate that was political, meaning that it was not political in the sense of a daily, tactical and tit-for-tat sort of contest. It is, in fact, ideological. It is about ideas.

There is a long history of conservative ideology in this area which essentially is market orientated, which says: if you remove as many impediments as you can to the relationships which exist between people in work, whether they are self-employed or employed, you will lower the costs, you will therefore create a more efficient marketplace, and the consequences are general in that you will grow employment and grow the economy. The contrary view is that, taken to its extreme, that is a recipe for declining living standards and declining civil standards and it results in a deterioration in the social contract. Essentially, the view of those who say that employees should be determined to be so wherever they are genuinely so is that accompanying the definition or the belief in an employee status are protections that society has built around that status which are designed to ensure that society operates to the greatest benefit of the country as a whole. That approach goes back hundreds of years. It was the Iron Duke, Bismarck, who first introduced pensions to the world. We Democrats and, as you can see from the debate, the Labor Party and the Greens are of the strong opinion that we should maintain the wages, conditions and legitimate entitlements and security that attach to employee status. Our problem is that this law threatens to reduce those.

In his remarks the minister made a point that he has made before: that when the Democrats see a problem they throw up a statutory response. Sometimes that is true, but as I have done before I will remind the minister that this week we have probably had before us on the Notice Paper a couple of thousand pages of government statute. I have been here, as you know, for 10½ years. In that time there have been, I think, around 1,800 bills—