Mary Fisher (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Very good, Senator Kemp. Senator Marshall has realised that these two goals are somewhat contradictory and, in his words, ‘an impossible task’. Does the bill keep Labor’s promise to exempt employees earning more than $100,000 from award coverage? No. Yet Labor promised in its policy implementation plan:

In Labor’s new industrial system, employees earning above $100,000 will be free to agree their own pay and conditions without reference to awards.

It goes on to say:

Labor in Government will legislate to confine the application of Labor’s new award system to employees who earn less than $100,000 per year when the new award system commences on 1 January 2010.

Professor Andrew Stewart confirmed his view that there is nothing in this bill that achieves this objective. How can and when will the government realise its promise to exempt these workers from awards by January 2010, particularly when this is a bill that deals with many things that are proposed to have operation from January 2010?

How and why has all this come about? How and why do we have a bill that is flawed in its policy intent? How and why do we have a bill that is flawed in its drafting and sees the government failing to keep some of its promises? We have a bill for which there has been no economic modelling done. None of the witnesses that appeared before the Senate committee had conducted economic modelling of the impact of the bill and, more particularly, the government’s department has not performed economic modelling of the impact of the bill. The government has not confessed to having done any economic modelling of the impact of the bill.

Back to the department: its submission as to each term of reference is curiously thin, focusing more on the government’s assessment of the past than on the impact of the bill on the future. Where is the robust and empirical assessment of the future under the bill? The tone of the submission suggests that the impacts of the bill will be minor and will not risk major economic indicators, yet economic modelling showing significant positive effects of the bill are conspicuous in their absence. This has not stopped the Deputy Prime Minister from sallying forth in her second reading speech on the bill to promise that it will not jeopardise employment.

But let us look at the Rudd government on economic management. The Prime Minister rushed to implement a pay freeze for members of parliament. ‘There are no modellings of the savings to be realised from that pay freeze,’ the Senate estimates committee was told. Government comments were effectively that we members of parliament should lead by example, as should, they say—particularly the Deputy Prime Minister—CEOs in the private sector and senior management. The ACTU says that corporate high flyers should lead by example as well. So what of senior management in trade union ranks—what of high flyers in trade union ranks? When that question was put to Sharan Burrow under Senate committee questioning, she admitted that, when it comes to wage restraint, she and her colleagues in the upper echelons of the union movement have not even been asked to play their part. What sort of example is that? So, colleagues, there is no economic modelling and no direction to unions for appropriate high flyers in the union movement to join in wage restraint. Where has the Rudd government’s leadership gone? Faced with a choice between showing leadership on inflation or taking on the unions, the Rudd government has backed down in the face of union pressure and shown no leadership at all. It is not a good start.

But let us go back to the time frame of the Senate inquiry into this bill and the impact on the inquiry itself and on witnesses. The inquiry time frame was so short that at least one organisation—the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association—simply chose to reuse much of the submission they provided to the original Work Choices inquiry back in 2005. Let us look at some of the things that happened here with the SDA submission. For example, in 2005, they said, ‘There will be no requirement to compensate the employee for any benefits that are missing.’ In 2008 that became, ‘There was no requirement to compensate the employee for any benefits which were missing.’ In 2005 they said, ‘They are in fact the result of 100 years of continuous painstaking work by trade unions, usually in negotiations with employees seeking decent entitlements for work in a variety of industries.’ In 2008 that became, ‘They were in fact the result of 100 years of continuous painstaking work by trade unions, usually in negotiations with employers in seeking decent entitlements for work in a variety of issues’—indeed in identical terms, it would appear.

The same employees used as examples of why AWAs should not be extended in 2005 had their cases reported again to support the complete removal of AWAs in 2008. Couldn’t the SDA find anyone else in the intervening years? Such was the cut and paste job that the authors forgot to cut from their submission about the bill some of the paragraphs that they had in their submission about Work Choices in 2005. Nonetheless, they bravely corrected the record when they gave evidence in Melbourne, asking for a number of paragraphs to be deleted. They blamed time constraints for the mistake but, ironically, all references to short time frames that appeared in their submission to the 2005 inquiry seemed to go missing from mark 2 in 2008.

Maybe this apparent oversight raises some undercurrents. How could a submission about a government bill which parades as anti Work Choices be on foot for at least a while criticising the government’s bill as if it were Work Choices? How does this come about? There are undercurrents, perhaps, that the union movement sees this bill as too much like Work Choices and is struggling to toe the government line—undercurrents, perhaps, that the union movement will be on the hunt for payback in the next government round with the substantive bill. On the other hand, how many other submissions were in part cut and paste jobs from previous inquiries due to the significant time constraints given for the committee to inquire into this bill? If organisations did not have enough time to properly look at the bill and its implications, then how could the Senate?

I have mentioned Professor Andrew Stewart from Adelaide university a couple of times tonight. Today the Deputy Prime Minister indicated bemusement with coalition references to Professor Stewart. She suggested that, if the Deputy Leader of the Opposition were to ring him about the bill and ask, ‘What did you think of Work Choices and do you think this is better?’ he would say, ‘This is better for Australian working people because’—said the Deputy Prime Minister—’it so clearly is.’ If that be the case, then why won’t the Deputy Prime Minister guarantee that no individual Australian worker will be worse off under the bill? Why doesn’t the Deputy Prime Minister pick up the phone herself? Why doesn’t she pick up the phone to Professor Andrew Stewart and ask him? Why doesn’t she ask him whether the bill delivers a simpler, more certain system? Because she knows he will say that it does not. Why doesn’t she pick up the phone and ask him whether the bill delivers a system which means that individual workers will not have their individual pay packets reduced? Because he will say that the bill means they can. Why doesn’t she pick up the phone and ask Professor Stewart whether the bill means that award modernisation will leave every Australian worker better off? She will not pick up the phone and she will not ask the question, because she knows he will say the bill means it will not and cannot.

In terms of these transitional shortcomings, it is interesting to note that in the majority report the best that government senators can recommend is that problematic issues with this bill be dealt with in the substantive bill, which is to come later and is yet to be developed. Of what point is a transitional bill? Is not a transitional bill supposed to transition you to something else? What is the point of having it if you are not going to make it do the transition to that to which it is intended to transition? Why leave it all for the next step—that is, the substantive bill? Because the government wants to bury its union payback in round 2—that is why. And, the more it can heap into that bill whilst playing the charade of getting rid of individual statutory agreements, the more chance it stands of hiding its union payback next time around.

In the context of a bill which otherwise progressively limits and then ends the rights of parties to make new individual statutory agreements, the ongoing availability to parties who so wish that a mechanism to continue to apply to a stream of individual statutory agreements, subject to a safety net, is critically important. To that end, that is an important measure in the bill and an important measure, in respect of which the government must keep its election promise.