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

I am happy to explain it in very simple terms. Let us be clear that what is being put in place here is a system where an error could be made by the director that the parties are unaware of in terms of their determination as to whether an agreement is fair. There might be an error with how they have calculated something, or with what the value of a rostering provision might be, or they might have based the decision on information provided by one party but not the other. So it is quite possible under this process that, within the Workplace Authority Director, a decision is made based on an error and, because there is no requirement in the legislation for the reasons for the determination that an agreement is fair or unfair to be disclosed, that may not even be something of which the parties are aware. What is being argued for here is a situation where the determination as to whether something is fair or unfair does not have to be explained. The minister says that, because they have to tell them how to vary it, that somehow will disclose why it is unfair. That may be the case. I suggest to the minister that they are actually different requirements. You might be able to glean from what you have to change what the director has relied on for the purposes of determining unfairness, but they are not the same sets of information. But, even if we accepted your argument that that subsection does require the reasons for something being unfair to be disclosed, the question arises: why don’t you require that of an agreement that is found to be fair? You cannot have it both ways.