Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for School Education and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

Perhaps I will close off on the last set of questions from Senator Abetz by making the point that Fair Work Australia has sought to make administrative changes for quite sensible reasons, and the government has responded to those requests.

Fair Work Australia understand that they need to absorb the costs of those arrangements and, other than the issues that the opposition is now raising, I am not aware of any concerns about them needing to do so. Senator Abetz may want to wait until the next round of estimates and explore this issue further, but there has been no evidence before me that there is an issue for Fair Work Australia in absorbing the costs associated with the changes that they themselves have sought.

With respect to every piece of workplace relations legislation, Senator Abetz wants to test me within the recent period of workplace relations. He knows as well as I do that workplace relations law is a constantly evolving issue. I think back to the various waves of workplace relations law, and were I to ask a similar question during a period of the Howard government it would possibly have had a response which was even more so. But I take the Senate back to the context of my summing-up speech, where I indicated and, indeed, Senator Cash highlighted—and I think that even Senator Abetz has used this language too, but I might be wrong there—that this is the first tranche of amendments, the matters that are generally agreed in response to the review of the Fair Work panel.

The first tranche are those matters which we think have general agreement and which can be moved forward fairly speedily. That said, the government has indicated that we have an open mind to further amendments that may be required in response to the other recommendations of the review panel. Some of those recommendations may cross some of the amendments that we are dealing with here so, no, Senator Abetz, I would not be in a position to say that there will not be a requirement for further amendments in the matters that we are dealing with now.