Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to also take note of answers from the Minister for Employment to questions from Senator Cameron on the Fair Entitlements Guarantee and the government's election promise that Work Choices was dead, buried and cremated.

Firstly, on the Fair Entitlements Guarantee: I want to begin with an endorsement of the current system, an endorsement by none other than the federal Liberal member for Braddon, Mr Whiteley, in the other place. In June this year when a large Tasmanian electrical company went into administration and around 100 Tasmanians lost their jobs, the Liberal member for Braddon said of the current Fair Entitlements Guarantee that it is 'a comprehensive government support system'.

You know what? He is actually correct, but I want to add one qualification—that is, that it is currently a comprehensive government support system. The proposals that Minister Abetz has released will leave the FEG as a shell of its former self. And why? Because Minister Abetz seeks to follow the Commission of Audit's recommendation and cap the maximum redundancy payment at four weeks pay per year for a maximum of four years—that is 16 weeks pay—when a worker may have worked at a company for a very long time.

Everything this government does is attack workers, conditions and productivity. Indeed, even as late as July last year, Minister Abetz had been assuring hardworking Australians that 'you can be satisfied that there is no risk to your entitlements'. As it predictably turns out, Minister Abetz was not being truthful in his letter to Mr Rout, an autoworker from Victoria. Minister Abetz noted in the letter that it was the Howard government that introduced the previous General Employees Entitlement Redundancy Scheme.

I want to remind those opposite that it was the closure of National Textiles, a company whose chairman was the brother of the Prime Minister, that triggered the previous GEERS system—hardly pure motives. The GEERS scheme was always insufficient, and I was proud to be part of the Labor government that enshrined the protection in legislation and enhanced that scheme. The initial scheme only guaranteed redundancy payments up to eight weeks pay, depending on an employee's length of service. This was despite many jointly negotiated workplace agreements that outlined redundancy payments well in excess of that.

Importantly, the average span of unemployment after a redundancy is much higher than two or four months. Many retrenched workers end up as long-term unemployed. I note that Minister Abetz's flagship program in our home state of Tasmania for long-term unemployed, the Tasmanian Jobs Program, has been an absolute failure. The latest figures released in August show that only 80 jobs have been created by this program. This is despite the minister announcing in December last year that the Tasmanian Jobs Program would create 2,000 jobs within two years. Eighty jobs in eight months is an abject failure and I note that, at this rate, it will take over a decade to reach the 2,000 jobs promised.

It is clear that instead of demonising hardworking Australian workers and breaking personal commitments, the Abbott government should be getting on with articulating a plan for creating jobs, because the current programs of this government are not working. Before too long, this government will heed the calls of it backbench. It will heed the calls of some in the business community and seek to bring us back down the road of Work Choices.

Every time we mention Work Choices, Minister Abetz tries to claim that the concept is dead, buried and cremated. Despite the obvious logical flaws in something being dead, buried and cremated, the public just aren't buying it. The public remember the horrors of individual contracts that wreaked havoc across this country from small towns to the big city—individual contracts ripped away hard-won and fair workplace entitlements and were an ideological pursuit to lower costs for business masquerading as productivity improvement.

Of course productivity is improved by achieving more with what you have got. It is not a concept that is necessarily related to cost. Workers are more productive when they receive quality training, when they are supported at work and when they receive adequate remuneration for their efforts. In some respects, Work Choices is the opposite of a productivity improving reform, because driving down wages and conditions only drives down effort and equality.

Australian workers are often the first to suggest productivity enhancing innovations in their workplace and they deserve a government that will look after their entitlements, if their company goes under, not a government that wants to pursue a race to the bottom. (Time expired)