Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have great pleasure in rising to speak in support of the Fair Work (State Referral and Consequential and Other Amendments) Bill 2009 and the Fair Work (Transitional Provisions and Consequential Amendments) Bill 2009. These bills contain the necessary transitional and consequential changes to ensure that there is a smooth and fair transition to the new workplace relations system. Importantly, the provisions in these bills will ensure certainty as the new workplace relations system comes into operation. These bills, when they come into law, will operate with the Fair Work Act 2008. This will mark the end of one of the darkest periods in Australia’s industrial relations history.

If there is one thing more than any other that caused Australian electors to drive the Howard government from office, it was Mr Howard’s trashing of the strongly-held principle within Australian society that fairness should always be a core element of Australia’s industrial relations system. At the same time as the Howard government was orchestrating a massive deterioration in employee pay and conditions, business was experiencing record profits. In aggregate, company profits were growing at a substantially greater rate than the growth in aggregate wage and salary expenditure. In other words, there was no credible reason that could justify the then federal coalition government’s assault on employee wages and conditions. The whole exercise was a sham from start to finish. Plainly, Mr Howard’s attack on the working conditions of working men and women was driven by ideology together with a pathological and irrational hatred of unions.

Certainly for a while John Howard thought he had got away with the progressive dismantling of the employment conditions. In this endeavour he was lauded, egged on and abetted by extreme elements within the Liberal Party, especially in the Western Australian branch of the Liberal Party. However at the same time it was becoming increasingly obvious to the large majority of Australians from direct experience in their workplaces that the spin being peddled by John Howard and his ministers about the marvellous benefits that would flow to working Australians from the coalition government’s workplace policy revolution was shaping up to be a massive hoax.

While many in the workforce knew that the Howard government’s rhetoric did not match the facts, it had become strangely difficult for the broader public to find out the true extent to which standard employment conditions were being downgraded. Fortunately, in May 2006, as a result of Labor questioning at Senate estimates, information came to light about what was being lost by Australians on Australian workplace agreements. What was emerging was that employers had been provided an array of opportunities to manipulate the fine print of the Work Choices legislation to enhance their bargaining strength at the expense, unfortunately, of employees. People in lower-paid jobs found that they were encountering more and more a ‘take it or leave it’ response from their employers or potential employers as far as their conditions of employment were concerned. This is why so many employers loved Work Choices.

With John Howard and his ministers crisscrossing the country and saturating the airways and the nation’s letterboxes with Work Choices propaganda laced with fairytales and half truths, employers knew they were being given a nod and a wink to dismantle anything in Australia’s industrial relations system that they did not particularly like. As a result, the pace of the erosion and cutting of employment conditions increased rapidly. Typically this was justified by the often-made claim trotted out by many employers that employees had to be much more flexible in today’s workplaces. Workers are well aware that in today’s world we need to adapt and adjust to often rapidly changing circumstances. Families are doing this all the time. Australian workers do not need to be consistently harassed by employers or conservative governments about the need to be more flexible. However from bitter experience Australian working men and women also knew that all too often in the workplace there can be a very, very fine line between flexibility and exploitation. All too frequently, when an employee hears the word ‘flexibility’ being spouted by an employer he or she knows that bad news could be following. You know straight away that in all likelihood your duties and responsibilities are about to increase, and quite possibly your workload is about to get a lot heavier, but there will be no increase in pay—you just have to be ‘more flexible’.

The problem for the Howard government was that employers moved faster than expected in slashing and burning employee conditions and it was becoming more and more obvious to the Australian electorate that it had been badly misled by John Howard and his Work Choices minister. With a federal election looming, the Howard government attempted a number of manoeuvres to get out of the mess it had created, all of which failed miserably. The Howard government’s cover had been blown by the actions of too many employers, and Australia’s voters were not going to have a bar of it. While there continued to be an information blackout on the effects of Work Choices in workplaces, in April 2007 information was leaked to the media that revealed that 44 per cent of Australian workplace agreements excluded all 11 protected award conditions.

The Howard government’s Work Choices legislation was born in deceit and was clothed in deceit. Nothing demonstrated this more than the claims by Howard government ministers that Work Choices provided individual employees the ability to bargain productively and constructively with their employers. For the vast majority of employees this was simply never the case. In fact, Work Choices did the exact opposite: it destroyed the bargaining power of most Australian employees. The erosion of the bargaining power of employees for fair pay and conditions was a feature of the Howard government’s years in office.

Indeed, one of the most discouraging facets of modern business has been the increasing disconnect between the interests of business and those of the community and of the workforce. Unfortunately, some segments of business have increasingly put short-term gain before the long-term interests of the community. We saw this in the increasing use of outsourcing and contract labour, the deskilling of the workforce and the loss of apprenticeship positions. Despite the rhetoric, rather than building the future the emphasis by many in the private sector had been on ‘screw the present and to hell with the future’.

As well, too many in private enterprise saw that the way to ever-increasing profits was by shifting the risk of doing business from the businesses to the workers and to the community in general. It is not difficult to gain the impression that the making of the current global financial crisis was in major part due to an abrogation by elements in the private sector of the sector’s broader responsibilities. Let me say also that it is no exaggeration to state that the Howard government encouraged and effectively sponsored an increasing disconnect between businesses and their greater responsibilities to employees and to the community.

As an example of this reality, I would like to draw to the attention of the Senate the situation concerning heavy vehicle drivers and owner-drivers. Having worked previously as a heavy vehicle employee and an owner-driver, I know more than a little about this subject. The major trucking companies and, by implication, the major users of heavy transport services have persistently refused to acknowledge that there is a link between oppressively low rates of pay and return to truck driver employees and owner-drivers and serious heavy vehicle crashes and fatalities. As far as some of the major trucking companies, the Australian Trucking Association and the major users of heavy road transport services are concerned, heavy vehicle road crashes are principally the fault of the drivers.

For a number of years the Transport Workers Union has been advocating on behalf of thousands of heavy vehicle drivers for safe rates of remuneration. This effort by the TWU has been supported by mounting evidence and direct experience of those in the industry that the current payment methods and rates of pay for heavy vehicle drivers are resulting in alarming rates of death and injury from heavy truck road accidents. In the year to June 2008, there were unfortunately no less than 263 fatalities as a result of heavy truck crashes, an increase of approximately 8.7 per cent over the previous year. Over the past three years the average annual number of deaths involving articulated trucks has increased, sadly, by five per cent per year. The truck drivers’ low rates of pay are the direct consequence of the weak bargaining position of owner-drivers and of the many hundreds of small trucking businesses who have little option but to accept poverty rates from the relatively small number of major corporations who make up the bulk of demand for heavy truck transport services.

If air transport companies got up to the same devices in the way they pay their pilots that the major road freight transport companies get up to in the way they pay their truck drivers, there would be a public outcry. In order to make a respectable living, it is now often impossible for drivers to maintain safe work practices. The major trucking companies have remained adamant that nothing should be put in the way of big business to extract even lower transport costs out of the nation’s truck drivers. The result is that most of the benefits of Australia’s highly efficient and competitive heavy vehicle transport sector have been captured by the purchasers of transport services and not the front-line workers in the road transport industry.

In July 2008, Julia Gillard, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations—together with Anthony Albanese, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, and Dr Craig Emerson, Minister for Small Business, Independent Contractors and the Service Economy—jointly announced that the National Transport Commission, the NTC, would investigate and report on driver remuneration and payment methods in the Australian trucking industry and make recommendations for reform. As the minister’s media release stated:

The trucking industry prides itself on being highly competitive and efficient. However, the industry’s strength can also be its weakness, with truck drivers often finding themselves in a weak bargaining position and unable to maintain safe work practices.

I remind the Senate that this was an issue that the Howard government was happy to ignore. The results of this independent inquiry were reported by the National Transport Commission in October 2008. In brief, the inquiry, conducted by the Hon. Lance Wright QC and Professor Michael Quinlan of the University of New South Wales, found:

This Review finds that the overwhelming weight of evidence indicates that commercial/industrial practices affecting road transport—

and I want to say this very clearly—

play a direct and significant role in causing hazardous practices. There is solid survey evidence linking payment levels and systems to crashes, speeding, driving while fatigued and drug use. This evidence has been accepted and indeed confirmed by government inquiries, coronial inquests, courts and industrial tribunal hearings in Australia over a number of years.

In contrast, in its submission to the safe payments inquiry, the Australian Trucking Association had this to say:

… the consensus view of the ATA—

being the Australian Trucking Association—

is that the most effective and appropriate way to further improve the industry’s on-road safety performance is to implement and enforce the impending Driving Hours and Fatigue Management effectively and that establishing a “Safe Rates” regime is—

and listen to this, Mr Acting Deputy President—

unnecessary and would be ineffective and unsustainable.

I cannot believe they said that—it is absolutely disgraceful.

Since the release of a report prepared for the National Transport Commission it has become impossible to deny that there is not a link between heavy vehicle crash fatalities and rates of pay received by heavy vehicle truck drivers. It will be interesting to see what action the large trucking companies are willing to take to save lives on Australian roads. I raise this example because it illustrates the double talk that typifies much of what is peddled by the opposition in regard to industrial relations policy. In this example we see how, too often, private sector entities—in this case, the Australian Trucking Association—are adept at muddying the water and denying the obvious when it comes to accepting a responsibility to pay drivers fair rates. This real life example shows that the employee-employer relationship is hardly ever a balanced one, and the odds are generally stacked, unfortunately, in favour of the employer.

To the great relief of Australian working families, the federal election was held on 24 November 2007. We all know the outcome: Labor was swept into power, with John Howard suffering the ultimate indignity for a Prime Minister of not only being tossed out of government but also being spurned by the electorate he had represented for 33 years. These events showed how arrogant and out of step with mainstream Australia the Liberal-National coalition government and John Howard had become during their period of office. John Howard’s Work Choices legislation demonstrated that a Liberal-National coalition—let us not forget The Nationals; let us not forget the doormats—should never again be trusted to enact fair workplace laws.

Nonetheless, it is important for the Australian electorate to remain alert to the fact that, even though the Leader of the Opposition has declared that Work Choices is dead, there is plenty of evidence—plenty of it—that extreme elements of the Liberal Party, particularly in the state of Western Australia, retain an ideological commitment to all that Work Choices stood for. The Liberal Party did not spend 20 years to get its extreme and unfair workplace ideology into law to still not harbour a desire to do it all again. It is important for Australians to take note that Work Choices might be dead, but the Liberal Party’s extreme industrial relations ideology is still alive and well. I am sure that, if WA Liberal politicians were given half a chance and had their way, Work Choices would be brought back to life as quick as a flash.

John Howard and the Liberal Party unashamedly devalued the human side of employment contract. These bills, together with the Fair Work Act 2008, restore the dignity of the compact between the employer and the employee. That is what hardworking Australian men and women deserve and should rightly expect. The Liberal Party has shown that it does not value the high standards of performance and commitment that Australian workers give to their employers through their work. I commend these bills to the Senate and congratulate the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations for restoring fairness and dignity to Australia’s system of industrial relations.