David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I recall making some remarks last year about how the Senate component of the parliamentary Liberal Party had gone rogue on the question of climate change. It would appear that the Senate component of the parliamentary Liberal Party is now in danger of going rogue on the question of industrial relations. The senators went a-pirating and ignored the shadow cabinet and Malcolm Turnbull and pressed for an extremist, climate-change-sceptic point of view at the end of last year. Emboldened by their success, it appears they are now taking up the struggle for Work Choices.

Senator Cash has gone a-pirating. In this Senate we have listened to another tirade about the glory days of Work Choices and the terrible sins of bargaining. But when one looks at the case cited—the MUA’s industrial action in the oil and gas industry—and when one looks at the detail of the circumstances there, two things ring true. The first is that not even Senator Cash, not even the coalition, would in all seriousness suggest that the government should easily, swiftly and decisively intervene in industrial action as a matter of course. The second is that not even the previous Work Choices legislation would have enabled Senator Cash to embark upon the course she has tried to advocate today.

It is well known to all that, in constructing the present industrial relations regime, the government consulted very, very widely indeed—not, as you would have it, Senator Cash, simply with the trade unions but very, very widely, with not only the trade union movement but employer representatives, employer organisations and so forth. One issue rings true from those consultations, and that is that all employer representatives—not some, not most, not many but all—said that Fair Work Australia should not be able to arbitrate an outcome except in the most exceptional of circumstances. They said that disputes should remain in the control of those directly affected—employees and employers. If Senator Cash is true to her industrial relations obsession, she would know that the old tirade against the industrial relations club was precisely the accusation that arbitrators overregulated and overinterfered.

Nonetheless, undeterred by precedent or previous ideological belief, Senator Cash has today articulated the notion that the government should freely and swiftly intervene in the agreement-making process between employer and employee parties. Remarkably—notwithstanding the revolution that you are apparently trying to conduct inside the coalition on IR policy—we on this side hold the view that agreement making between the parties should be just that and that outcomes should only be arbitrated in the most exceptional of circumstances.

The government agrees that the test for ending industrial action is based on significant harm to the national economy. That is generally in accord with how that provision read in the previous act and the form in which it has existed since 1993. That test has a very high threshold. An employer’s loss of profit is not enough to trigger it. Employees losing wages in a lockout is not enough to trigger it. There must be significant harm to the national economy. It was open to employers in this particular matter to make an application on that ground, and for various reasons that did not happen. So it is disingenuous for the opposition to claim that, as a minister, the Deputy Prime Minister should have exercised her power to end the action instead. That is to say, they are asking the Deputy Prime Minister to intervene in a dispute when they themselves have not made an application to trigger the intervention on the basis that it was causing significant harm to the national economy. The minister’s office did make an offer to the AMMA to act as a broker to establish a consent arbitration process with the union, but this offer was refused. (Time expired)