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

I rise today to speak against this appalling bill brought before us under the guise of ensuring integrity, the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Ensuring Integrity) Bill 2019. There is ''no integrity'' about this bill or the government bringing it before us. This government has little regard for ensuring integrity, workplace safety, protecting the rights of workers or the devastating consequences that this bill will have for Australian workers—particularly those most vulnerable in insecure, low-paid employment—if it ends up becoming law. I want to take this opportunity to call on those sitting on the crossbench to protect and uphold the rights of Australian workers by rejecting this legislation. This bill represents yet another politicised attack on working people and the role of unions by this coalition government.

I have a long and proud attachment to the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and the union movement in Tasmania. My involvement with the union began back in 1979, when I worked at Simplot in Ulverstone, in their vegetable-processing factory. In 2004 I was elected as the first female state secretary of the AMWU in Australia. After serving in my union for almost 30 years, I was elected to this place, where I now have the great privilege of holding those opposite me to account when they try to attack the rights of every working person in this country.

As I said earlier, in 1979 I commenced work at the Edgell-Birds Eye factory at Ulverstone, now Simplot. I worked afternoon shifts so my husband, Graham, could care for our four-year-old twins after his day at work. After a time I was encouraged to become a union delegate for the Food Preservers Union. That was the union at the time. Ten years later I became an organiser with that union, which later amalgamated to become the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, or AMWU. You see, in those days union amalgamations were regular occurrences. In the early 1990s, they were even encouraged by government. Now there is a pervasive and inaccurate conservative fear campaign about the insidious creation of super-unions. There is no justification for preventing amalgamations. If the members of two unions vote to amalgamate, that's up to them. This goes to the heart of the democratic principle of freedom of association. In many cases, it also goes to the matter of creating a more efficient administration that can deal with the increasingly onerous burden of reporting and red tape constantly being dumped on them by this government so that they can continue to represent their members.

For many years, I worked to represent food workers, metalworkers, print workers, vehicle workers and technical workers. I regularly clocked up over 50,000 kilometres a year. I became the first female state secretary of the AMWU in 2004 and held that position until 2010. I loved my job—really, it was a way of life. The AMWU has a strong history of representing the rights of its members and of setting the progressive agenda for all workers as a driver of innovation. It was one of the first unions to develop a plan for low-emissions industry and technology development in Australia. During my years in the trade union movement, there was a huge change in workplace culture in many areas of the Australian manufacturing industry. We worked hard to get permanent positions for women, who had traditionally never been given permanent jobs. I worked with an amazing bunch of delegates to see workers' skills formally recognised so that they were transferable and to develop fair and humane drug and alcohol policies that were based on work health and safety and wellbeing principles. I worked with those delegates who campaigned hard for improvements to health and safety, which has seen a reduction in injury rates. We supported women who worked and wanted to work in areas that were traditionally male dominated, like forklift driving, and we fought hard for equal pay, not pay based on gender.

Nationally, we began a huge battle to have the harm done by asbestos to the lives of tens of thousands of Australians recognised and compensated. And, on a nationwide scale, we campaigned with hundreds of thousands of Australians to see the end of the disgraceful Work Choices legislation that was introduced by the Howard Liberal government in 2005. This legislation was specifically designed to make it harder and harder for unions to represent their members and negotiate decent wages and improvements in safety and conditions. Work Choices was also designed to ultimately dismantle and rip away the award safety net—that's Australia's industrial awards system. I take this opportunity to remind those opposite and the crossbench of the fact that tens of thousands of Australians and their unions worked so hard to fight Work Choices and bring down the government that introduced it. Without their efforts, we would not have the awards system that we have today that sets the minimum wages and conditions in this country. Without that battle, wage theft would now be the absolute norm in Australia because the safety net would be gone. Workers would have nowhere to go to find the minimum rates and conditions for their industry, and employers would have free rein to exploit. And out there right now, tens of thousands of union members, delegates, organisers and officials continue to work harder for better workplaces, harder for safer workplaces, harder for sustainable jobs, harder for fair pay rises, harder for job security and against the exploitation of vulnerable workers.

I made my first speech in this chamber in 2011, and in it I said:

The term 'union boss' is flung around by parts of the media and those on the opposite benches as some sort of a negative . Well, I am proud to have been a union boss. It is a job that is hard work, but it is also extremely satisfying. I have spent many bitterly cold Tasmanian mornings and late nights at work sites, providing information to members, listening to their concerns and then bargaining on their behalf. I have held positions on both the ACTU and Unions Tasmania executives, as well as on Tasmanian industry councils. In these roles my focus was always on protecting and strengthening workers’ rights and long-term jobs growth for our future. I am and will always remain a proud member of the AMWU.

What have I witnessed since 2011? I've witnessed an increasing attack from the conservatives opposite and an increasing demonisation in the conservative press of the very idea of unions—the idea of people working together to improve their lot in life and democratically electing people to help organise and advance those interests.

After a momentary retreat post the end of the Howard government, we have seen this creeping anti-union agenda pick up again. We have witnessed waves of attacks on workers' rights and on the union movement. We've seen attempts to tie unions up in huge amounts of red tape, to deny them even basic access to their members and to demand far, far higher standards of governance from unions than are expected of many companies and in the big banks. And all that time Australian unions have continued to play a pivotal role in workplaces across the country, ensuring that employees receive their fair wages and entitlements, despite these attacks and despite a government intent on making it harder for them to do their jobs.

On top of that work, unions have worked nationally for the benefit of all Australians, union members or not, for the introduction of necessary progressive reforms such as a national paid parental leave scheme, domestic violence leave and mental health awareness, and for the prevention of work related cancers, to name just a few campaigns. We have seen, time and time again, in this year alone, millions upon millions of dollars in wages stolen from workers by their employers. Who was it who stepped in to ensure that those workers got their wages? Was it this government? No, of course it wasn't. It was their unions.

It is the unions that have been at the forefront of making workplaces in this country safer. This bill seeks to undermine that, at the expense of workers' physical, mental and psychological safety. The damages and actions taken against James Hardie that finally secured compensation for asbestos victims would be considered unlawful under this bill, and the AMWU and others would be likely subject to deregistration, so the actions of an employer that ultimately caused the death of hundreds if not thousands of Australians—and is still causing deaths—would have gone unpunished under this bill. How can any member of this chamber sit there and say that this bill isn't political, that it is about the economy and improving economic conditions? We all know the truth. This legislation is purely political. It is a further attack on alternative voices and views.

We've already seen Attorney-General and industrial relations minister Mr Christian Porter intervene and appeal to the High Court to overturn a landmark legal decision by the full Federal Court which granted shiftworkers an appropriate amount of sick leave. Workers at the Cadbury factory in Tasmania, who I once represented, legitimately won the right to receive 12 hours of pay for every sick day—the same number of hours that they were rostered on for, for each shift, instead of the 7.6 hours per sick day that they were being paid by their employer, Mondelez International. The Morrison government intervened to support this company's case against its employees and in support of cutting personal leave entitlements for shiftworkers. Cadbury employees work ordinary hours of 12-hour days, which means they should have access to 120 hours of paid personal leave per year to cover the hours of 10 work days. The company argued that workers should receive only 76 hours of personal leave under the NES, based on 10 days of 7.6 hours work each. This was an appalling attempt by a very, very profitable multinational company, supported by the Morrison government, to rob its workers of the leave that they were entitled to.

I have looked far and wide at this government's legislative agenda, but no; that is going too far. You need to look far and wide because there is nothing far and wide about it. It is dismal and thin. In fact, I go further: it is narrow, stagnant and blinkered, stuck in the past. There is a paucity of any kind of vision or plan. There is no plan to tackle stagnant wages or wage theft or worker exploitation. The only sign, the only faint flicker of a plan, is the constant resuscitation of a sad and worn-out union-bashing mantra written on the back of a dog-eared program from the HR Nicholls Society conference in 1992. And I note that Tasmanian Senator Abetz delivered the keynote address to that conference in 1992, where he chuckled gleefully that the newly elected Liberal government of Tasmania had managed to slither through the campaign with no apparent industrial relations policy, and so, in his words, had 'demonstrated brilliant "political speak"', leaving the door open for the major attack on the rights of working Tasmanians, their pay and conditions, and unions, as their representatives, that occurred in the 1990s. Now here we are with a Prime Minister who is a master of 'political speak' to the extreme; an ad man who writes off legitimate questions as gossip and who grins and goofily avoids questions on his government's apparently primal need to shut down alternative views and voices.

As the ACTU president put it: 'If unions are shut down or silenced, who will stand up to the powerful, make sure workers get their rights and fight to improve workers' rights?' The Morrison government has overseen raids on journalists and is now attacking working people's freedom to run their own unions. Regardless of any tweaking that has gone on, this bill represents a politically motivated attack on workers' ability to organise and be represented, to run their own unions and to determine who leads them. Working Australians should get to choose who represents them—not Mr Scott Morrison, not Senator Abetz and not any of their union bashing, intellectually stale cronies.

Labor will not support a bill that makes it harder for workers to get a fair pay rise. We will not support a bill that could leave workers without the representatives that protect them from wage theft, superannuation theft and dangerous workplaces. The purely political nature of this bill is demonstrated by the fact that it is far more extensive and extreme in the regulation of unions than what exists for businesses or politicians. This is about silencing working people and making it harder for all workers to win pay rises. These laws are fundamentally unfair. If they applied equally to corporations, we would see banks, multinational pizza chains and the restaurants of celebrity chefs closed down for repeatedly breaking workplace laws and we would see their top executives sacked. That is not being proposed, because it would be outrageous. It is also outrageous for unions. The bill has been amended since it was first introduced in the last parliament, but those changes are not substantive and simply do not address Labor's central concerns with this anti-worker bill.

Let's also have a look at the potential economic impact of this bill. This bill seeks to further limit the rights of Australian workers to collectively organise and bargain with employers and will undoubtedly have an adverse impact on the country's economy. At a time when wage growth has stalled, jobs growth is stagnant and wage theft is at an all-time high, this government must keep its promise to Australian workers when it insisted, in yet another example of Senator Abetz's political-speak during the election campaign, that it had no plans to reduce workers' rights. We now see this was simply another untruth. Instead of focusing on attacking working people, this government should be acting to tackle low wage growth and penalty rates being further whittled away.

By restricting and interfering with union activity, this bill will accelerate income inequality and insecure employment. Opposition to this bill because of its effects on the economy is widespread and not limited to only the Labor Party; community groups, academics, churches and religious organisations, and the bipartisan Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights all oppose this bill because of its inhumane consequences for workers and the devastating effects it will have on the Australian economy. Dr Jim Stanford, Director of the Centre for Future Work, an independent economist with over 25 years of economic policy experience, summed up the effects of this bill best when he stated:

I cannot possibly see a circumstance in which any of these amendments would have any measurable economic and labour market impact: whether on productivity, on wage determination, or on employment. At best, these proposals constitute a distraction from those more urgent labour policy matters.

After all these years and all these relentless waves of attacks on unions and the work they do, I am now of the view that it is time to step back from this old, charred, shot-out and splintered barricade. It's time for our politicians, most particularly those on the crossbench here, to go out and spend a few days with a hardworking union official or two, to understand the complexity of the task, to attend a fiery delegates meeting where union delegates, who are volunteers in their workplace, give up hours of their time to engage in a battle of ideas, and to work to try to find a way through to a position that improves the lot of them and their co-workers without jeopardising the viability of the enterprise they work for.

Unions are part of the heart of our community. They are grassroots democracy in action. Without them we are poorer, not just in money terms but in our spirit—our ability to interact with our country, find our voices, express our views and be the country of the fair go. Our democracy is fundamentally eroded if the union voice is diminished to a whisper. I urge my fellow senators to say no to this bill. Step away from this rickety old barricade and look to the future—a good future. (Time expired)