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

You see! Trade union, trade union—we will see if he jumps up. I think he had a whack at the AWU in his rant, saying that if there was a problem with Tristar we should talk to them. The question I was putting to him, and he successfully avoided it, was whether or not these provisions would protect those Tristar employees.

In the context of the Tristar agreement, I do not necessarily want to get into the employer’s mind and discern their intention, but you could take a pretty good guess at why they have all the long-standing employees still employed so that they will pass the period in which they will be entitled to receive reasonably generous redundancy entitlements, after having dismissed everybody who does not have a reasonably generous redundancy entitlement. It does set off a few alarm bells as to what the employer is doing. The question is: is the government going to allow the kind of behaviour to occur which is clearly designed to undermine the employee’s redundancy entitlements and to disentitle these employees from redundancy? The minister says, ‘Well, it is a pre-reform agreement.’ You are putting provisions into this legislation which are supposed to be about preserving redundancy entitlements. My question is: are they going to preserve these people’s redundancy? Instead of just whacking a union, maybe answer the question, because there are a few employees who have worked for this company for a great many years who might actually like to know the answer. I think those are all the issues at this point I want to respond to Senator Abetz on.