Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Through you, Acting Deputy President, that may of course be one of the other reasons why there are no opposition senators supporting Senator Mason in the chamber in this debate. It is about Work Choices, and the opposition does not know what their position is on Work Choices anymore. One day it is dead, one day it is up and running again; then there are different versions; then it has gone in name but it is there in substance. But it all comes back to the opposition not wanting to let go of forced AWAs. They just loved the concept of ‘take it or leave it’ and they wanted anything in place to suit that ideology.

It is a concern, not knowing what the opposition’s position really is with respect to these matters. Senator Mason says, ‘If we don’t retain these last elements of Work Choices we will oppose the whole of the bill.’ It comes from the problem the opposition have because of their ‘three stooges’ approach to their leadership—and it is very confusing for us all. We have got Mr Nelson, who cannot do the job as Leader of the Opposition; we have got Mr Turnbull, who cannot get the job as Leader of the Opposition; and we have got Mr Costello, who will not do the job as Leader of the Opposition. All of them have different positions with respect to Work Choices. In fact, Mr Nelson has three separate positions of his own. With all these positions, it is very unclear what position the opposition really has in relation to the very serious matters we are debating.

I want to go into some of these serious matters we are seeking to address with this amending legislation we have before the parliament today. This bill will amend the Higher Education Support Act 2003 by repealing section 33-17 to remove a requirement that higher education providers meet any higher education workplace relations requirements and national governance protocols imposed under the Commonwealth Grant Scheme guidelines to avoid a reduction in their CGS funding for Commonwealth supported places. The dreaded HEWRR part of that—the higher education workplace relations requirements—was simply a way to impose the ideological Work Choices agenda on the higher education sector. It made it a condition that, for the sector to maintain all their funding, AWAs, individual contracts, had to be offered to all their employees.

We know that, under Work Choices, AWAs could be offered with a ‘take it or leave it’ approach. We know that one of the ways the previous federal government, now the opposition, implemented its Work Choices throughout the public sector and other bodies that relied on Commonwealth funding was by tying it to funding or by making policy decisions to forcibly implement its industrial relations agenda. For instance, DEWR, the then Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, as a matter of policy—as I saw over many years through the estimates processes—made it a condition of employment that you had to have an AWA. I remember many times asking the then head of the department: where is the choice in that? Where is the choice when you are offered an AWA on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis? The response was: ‘The choice is you either take the job or you don’t.’ That is the sort of choice that the Howard government put in place in this country. It was no choice; it was a fool’s choice.

They did the same thing by tying it to funding in the higher education sector: everyone had to be offered an AWA, whether they liked it or not—there was no choice in that. If they did not do it, universities would be penalised by, I think, up to 7.6 per cent—I may be wrong about that; I will get to some of the specific detail about that element a bit later. But they would be penalised substantial amounts of funding if they did not force the government’s ideological agenda on their employees, whether they wanted to or not. We know that there was a lot of resistance to that proposal. Nonetheless, it was a condition of funding. Faced with the penalty of losing substantial funding, universities were forced to implement government policy on AWAs whether they wanted to or not and whether that was the choice of their employees or not.

Universities were also forced to negotiate directly with their staff on industrial relations matters, prohibiting union involvement. Again, where is the choice in that? If the employees wished to have their union represent them and negotiate a collective agreement, or even an AWA, they were prohibited from doing so. Why? Because if they did so universities would lose substantial amounts of funding from the Commonwealth. What sort of way is that to introduce flexibility? How do you get flexibility and productivity when you have the management of a university being forced by the previous government to impose their ideological will on its employees? That is a confrontational approach. You do not get good productivity and good flexibility out of a confrontational approach. You do not get it out of a command and control approach. You get it through negotiation, cooperation and innovation, and all those things can be fostered when you allow genuine negotiations, and genuine involvement of third parties when it is required by the employees. We reject their philosophy; we have rejected it in the past and we reject it now. And now that we are in government we are going to act to take away those ridiculous elements of the previous government’s agenda. It was a direct attack upon unions and university staff, trying to eradicate union representation in this sector and to force all university staff onto individual contracts. Senator Mason, on behalf of the whole of the opposition, who were not there to support him, argued strongly that it is not about that.