Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Let me continue on the impact of AWAs: 63 per cent removed incentive based payments and bonuses, 61 per cent removed days to be substituted for public holidays, 56 per cent removed monetary allowances, 50 per cent removed public holiday payments, 49 per cent removed overtime loadings and 31 per cent removed basic things such as rest breaks from people’s employment arrangements. Senator Mason knows this story and has accepted the mandate we have to remove prescriptive arrangements in the higher education sector that helped roll out Australian workplace agreements. Compared to a system based on individual contracts, collective bargaining offers both fairness, in that it evens up employers’ and employees’ relative bargaining power, and a framework in which employers and employees can effectively negotiate productivity gains. That is the core of our approach. That is the approach we will take not only to the workplace relations aspects of higher education but also to the governance aspects.

It is worth noting the context within which these requirements were imposed by the Howard government in the first instance. Let me paint a different picture from the one that Senator Mason painted in his second reading debate contribution. There was a general decline in the funding levels and morale in the university sector under the previous government. In its report Universities in crisis, released in September 2001, the Senate Employment, Workplace Relations, Small Business and Education References Committee noted some of the key changes in the workplace environment at Australian universities. Between 1990 and 1999, the total number of students increased by around 70 per cent. During this period the number of international students quadrupled and the number of higher degree students tripled. Yet during this period the total number of academic staff was effectively static: 34,184 in 1990 and 34,926 in 1999. And, while overall academic job numbers did not increase much at all, there was an increase in the number of part-time academic staff. As these figures suggest, this period saw a fall in staff-to-student ratios. Along with other changes in the workplace, such as increased reporting obligations and technological change, the increased workload resulted in low morale and high stress levels.

I wanted to stress these factors that have particularly impacted on the university sector in recent times, since they have made that sector particularly unsuitable to the introduction of highly individualistic, confrontational workplace relations models such as Work Choices. The requirements outlined also reflected the previous government’s relations with the university sector and were marked by distrust. Senator Mason said in his earlier contribution, ‘Trust us.’ What has occurred in this sector has been marked by a relationship of distrust.

One of the worst manifestations of this distrust and more general mismanagement of the university sector was the requirement that the universities abide by the requirements that this bill abolishes in relation to Australian workplace agreements. ‘Trust us,’ Senator Mason says, and yet it was the Howard government that introduced these arrangements involving Australian workplace agreements into the university sector. Why did they do it? I still believe they did it because they wanted to artificially pump up the number of Australian workplace agreements. It was nothing to do with good governance in the sector. These were requirements that forced universities to pursue the Howard government approach to workplace relations or suffer financial penalty.

The previous arrangements show that the Howard government thought it knew better than university leaders and staff how to run their institutions. The changes made by the bill will clear the way for the Rudd Labor government to develop healthy new relationships with our universities based on trust and mutual respect and the review I outlined earlier.