Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is very freaky! I said to my staff this morning, ‘I feel like I’m in the twilight zone!’ But I will say it: I do agree with Senator Abetz on this issue. We will come to a Greens amendment later on about the termination of the appointment of a CEO. This bill provides:

The Minister may terminate the appointment of the CEO if the Minister is of the opinion that the performance of the CEO has been unsatisfactory.

If you do not obey the direction from the minister, all of a sudden your performance is unsatisfactory. You do not need this in the act; there are other provisions for dealing with unsatisfactory performance. I find this such a blatant attempt to influence Safe Work Australia—I am surprised it has not been done in a cleverer way, to be quite frank. Again, the states and territories and the Commonwealth had a nice little cosy arrangement to come up with a piece of legislation that they did not think we could amend and that puts in place so many obvious triggers for overriding the independence and the tripartite approach of Safe Work Australia. I am actually quite astonished that it has been done in such an outright way. As I said, I would have thought they would have been a bit cleverer about the way that was done.

The Greens wanted to take a much stronger approach to controlling the minister’s ability to intervene in Safe Work Australia. Having said that, we do support the coalition amendments because we suspect that they will not support amendments which go as strongly to this point as ours do. These amendments, at least, provides some control over the exercise of the powers of the minister over the CEO and therefore over Safe Work Australia.