Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's always a pleasure to speak on these matters of reference put forward to the chamber by the Labor Party. Unlike the other speakers, I won't concentrate a lot on what the problems are, because I've got a solution. I think we should form—and I'm talking about the penalty rates—an independent commission. That's what we should do. We should form a commission completely independent of government. No government influence or input. Sit this commission way out of arm's reach of government. We'll allow them to make the decisions to meet the national interest tests and the industry tests. They can make the decisions around workers' terms and conditions, particularly around the application of penalty rates.

Of course, unfortunately for me, someone else thought of that before I did. The Australian Labor Party formed an independent commission at arm's length from government. There was no interference from government, either their government or the current coalition government. In 2009 the former Labor government put together the Fair Work Commission. That was their solution to this problem. Of course, as is the case with most things, when you've had a change of chairs, from opposition you will criticise the government of the day over these issues even though you were responsible for the architectural framework that was put in place to deal with such matters independently and completely at arm's length from the government.

When I realised that this wasn't an original thought, I thought I need to come up with another solution. Of course Labor's solution is to make Prime Minister the Leader of the Opposition in the other place, Mr Shorten. Surely to God he'll look after the workers. Surely to God he'll make sure that penalty rates and terms and conditions are looked after. I thought I didn't capture it with my first thought, but I've captured it with my second. Surely having Mr Shorten put in charge of terms and conditions for workers, particularly around penalty rates, will get bipartisan support. Alas, when I raised that with my staff and advisers, they said: 'Hold on a minute, big feller. There's a problem with that too.' I said, 'What's the problem with that?' They said that the last time Bill Shorten was in charge of things like enterprise bargaining agreements—and Labor senators who take an interest in this should google 'Bill Shorten 1998 enterprise bargaining agreement'—