Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr Acting Deputy President Trood. It is very appropriate that you are in the chair for this debate, because I understand you have a very distinguished academic record and are very concerned about the future wellbeing of Australia’s higher education sector. It gives me great pleasure to speak on this very significant piece of legislation today: the Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008. It is quite a mouthful but well worth saying.

The bill, if passed by the Senate, will remove the Howard government’s extreme workplace relations agenda from our universities. No longer will our tertiary education sector be subjected to legislation which allows for unwarranted government interference. Most importantly, this bill clearly differentiates between the current Labor government and the former Liberal-National coalition government in the area of higher education and our commitment to the higher education sector. I think it is also timely to note that this bill is in the parliament for debate at the same time that there are, I think, 24 collective enterprise agreements in the higher education sector due for nominal expiry at the end of this month. In my life before I was a senator, I had some little involvement in negotiation of enterprise agreements in the higher education sector because I worked for one of the unions that had workers in that sector. I well know how, often, that activity in itself is very resource intensive for the universities. The last thing they need is to have additional government legislation on top of enterprise bargaining negotiations that they have to deal with. I certainly wish the sector well in its negotiations for its next collective enterprise agreements.

Earlier this year, the Rudd government set in motion the rolling back of the former government’s draconian industrial relations laws. Throughout the rest of this year we anticipate further legislation that will continue that great initiative of the government. But now it is time to focus on assisting the university sector, which was very, very hard hit by much of the previous government’s legislation. In April 2005, the former government announced a set of higher education workplace relations requirements for all of Australia’s higher education institutions. These were unheard of requirements, never before having been imposed upon the sector. They were requirements that were not asked for by the Australian public, let alone by the higher education sector, and certainly not wanted by the Australian public or the Australian higher education sector. It was another example of the former government using its Senate majority as soon as it could to impose its will on a sector that was already struggling because of the massive budget cuts that the former government had imposed on the sector.

It was an appalling day. I well remember when the first legislation was put into this parliament to impose these requirements on the higher education sector. Those requirements were referred to as the HEWRRs, as Senator Crossin mentioned earlier. In short, the HEWRRs were strict workplace relations criteria that universities had to comply with in order to be eligible for $280 million worth of assistance funding under the Commonwealth Grant Scheme. The first and key element of HEWRRs was that universities were required to offer Australian workplace agreements. As is now well known, AWAs allowed for the safety net to be stripped away from workers without a cent of compensation. Even after the belated introduction of the so-called fairness test by the former government, things like redundancy, long service leave, notice of change of shifts et cetera were not protected under the former government’s legislation.

I have cited these statistics in speeches in the chamber before but they are well worth repeating so I am going to repeat them. These are the statistics about AWAs and how they disadvantage working Australians, including workers in the higher education sector. As we know from the Workplace Authority’s own data, collected at a Senate estimates, 70 per cent of AWAs removed shift loadings, 68 per cent removed annual leave loadings, 65 per cent removed penalty rates; 63 per cent removed incentive based payments and bonuses, and 61 per cent removed days to be substituted for public holidays.