Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Ensuring Integrity) Bill 2019. Every day, millions of Australians struggle to make ends meet as they front up to one job, maybe two jobs or maybe three jobs. A quarter of Australians feel uncertain about the future of their current job and they feel uncertain about whether they'd be able to get another job if the one they're in right now finished. Housing is ever more expensive and households are loaded up with debt. But, instead of addressing the many issues that are facing our economy and holding us back, the government have decided to pursue an ideological agenda—an ideological attack against working people and their unions, not grounded in good policy but grounded in blind hatred. These laws are fundamentally unfair. They would not apply to business. They would certainly not apply to the big banks, whose ethical misconduct has been on display this week. The Morrison government are pursuing these laws because they lack an agenda, but, even worse, they're pursuing them because they lack a heart.

In a recent survey, more than half of young workers were victims of wage theft. It is a shocking figure and it is a national crisis. Today I met with a group of young workers—young men and women on the front line—who are dealing with the bald-faced, shameless behaviour of employers who are willing to steal wages from young people whose only desire is to use their talents to contribute to our community.

One woman spoke to us today about the sense of worthlessness, and her voice wavered as she told her story. She talked about working for a small family enterprise. She talked about what it meant to give everything to that enterprise and then turn up to find that, without warning, her shift had been cancelled and she was no longer required. She talked about how that made her feel. She said, 'It made me feel without value.'

Another woman told her story about how her employer, a food manufacturer, short-changed her $15,000 in just two years. Incredibly, she was not so concerned about herself. Her main concern was the other workers—her co-workers who, with limited English and a limited ability to understand their rights, were exploited even more cruelly by this employer. This young woman, owed $15,000 by her employer, was thinking about others; she was not thinking about herself but thinking about the people she worked with and how she could help them.

The third was a young man from the hospitality sector who said that people often ask: 'When did you find out you were being underpaid?' He said, 'I knew from the first day. I knew from the day I started in that job that I was being underpaid, but there was nothing I could do about it. I had no hope that there was any part of this system that could fix this problem.' But then he lifted a little and said, 'But I found hope. I found hope when I met the union organiser. They explained to me that, in other industries where the union is present, where people are allowed to organise, they have better conditions. They have better wages, they have better job security and they have safer workplaces. I realised that was a path that I could follow, where I could be a leader in my workplace. I could show my colleagues how we were going to change the circumstance that we were in.'

I wish that the government would sit down and meet with these young people. They are so out of touch that it would not hurt them to spend just a little bit of time with some of the people actually experiencing life in the economy that, day after day, Senator Cormann instructs this chamber is going so well. It would not hurt them to listen, but that would be a triumph of hope over experience, because this government is not actually interested in listening to the experiences of ordinary people.

This bill is emblematic of everything that is wrong with this government. Bereft of a plan, bereft of an agenda, bereft even of a unifying ideology that could explain what being a coalition government is for, this government resorts to union bashing. It is the only thing that unifies them. The only thing that can bring that crowd together is a project that is about destroying the ability of working people to organise for themselves, to have a say in their own destiny, to argue for dignity in their own workplaces. And why is that? Well, you have to conclude that it is because the idea of ordinary people, working people, organising their own affairs is an affront to their sense of entitlement. When you look at the provisions of this bill, it points to exactly this, because this bill is designed to frustrate the ordinary business of trade unions. It is designed to frustrate the ordinary processes of working people organising together. It is designed to obstruct the human right of people to associate with one another and to choose their own representatives.

This bill is not supported by policy; it is a political attack by the Australian government on workers and their representatives. There is no policy justification for this bill. No independent research or inquiry recommended these amendments. The royal commission set up to attack trade unions didn't make recommendations for these amendments; this is something the government came up with all by themselves. They certainly didn't consult with anybody. They didn't consult with the Australian union movement, despite the fact that the International Labour Organization recommends that governments meaningfully consult with unions on legislation that directly affects them. And why not? Because that is a group of people who basically believe that unions have no place in the Australian society we live in and no place in Australia's future. They spend all of their working days attacking the union movement instead of trying to better the conditions of ordinary Australians.

It is not just unions that are concerned about this bill; from all sectors—academics, civil society groups, churches, not to mention the bipartisan Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights—there has been concern. The amendments go far beyond anything proposed by the Heydon royal commission. The truth is that there is an existing effective scheme that requires unions to act democratically and transparently, and in our very long history it has proven more than adequate to resolve the issues in the past.

The government claims that this bill will apply the same regulatory standards to industrial organisations as apply to corporations. That's not right. It's either a naive thing to say or a deliberately misleading and untruthful thing to say. This bill will work by subjecting tens of thousands of union volunteers to stricter and more punitive regulations than the CEOs of the companies they work for. Because this crowd don't know very much about workplaces where people work hard, they don't know very much about how unions actually work. The truth is that unions rely on people who are not paid, people who stand up, like the young man I referred to earlier, and say, 'I am going to be a leader in my workplace.' When the government talks about, disparages and derides unionists they're actually disparaging principled, honourable men and women who simply wish to represent their colleagues in difficult questions about their rights and entitlements.

It is not fun to stand up to an employer and say, 'You're underpaying me.' I've done it. It was something that happened to me very early in my working life. I was working for a university. When I looked at it, it became obvious to me that the many, many hours of additional work that full-time workers are required to perform over the enrolment period weren't being paid properly. I went to my union and said, 'Listen, I think we have a problem.' They said, 'Does anyone else in your workplace think it's a problem?' I said, 'I could talk to them about it,' and I did. I had a conversation with the other people—there were probably only 15 or 18 of us, all women—and said, 'Listen, I know this is going to be hard, but I think we should raise this; I think they owe us quite a lot of money.' The truth is we did it together. We had advice from our union. They took us through the enterprise agreement and showed us what we were entitled to have, but we had to go and say to management, 'This is what we're owed.' They weren't happy; they were pretty annoyed with us, actually, and it's not pleasant to be in that kind of conflict. But it's not fair to expect an entire workplace of women to subsidise your business operation by underpaying them. That wasn't fair in the mid-nineties, which is when that story dates from, and it's not fair now.

As far as I can see, this problem about underpayment is growing in size. Every week we see another employer fess up about underpayment. Who will stand in their way? Who will assist employees to get the money that they are owed—the money that's been stolen from them? The only credible answer to that question is the union movement. A serious government would be focused on that question. A serious government in receipt of advice from the RBA and from a whole lot of market economists about the problems in terms of slow wage growth would be asking: is underpayment contributing to flatlining demand in the Australian economy? Is underpayment contributing to the lack of consumer confidence? Is underpayment contributing to some of the worst retail sales performance that we've had in decades? They would be important questions to ask if you were a government that was serious about economic management—if you were a government that a plan for the future. But that's not what we get; we get this bill, a piece of nonsense designed to crush the only institutions that stand in the way of this criminal and negligent behaviour by a handful of employers—some of them very big employers.

This bill will make it possible for third parties to get involved. It will make it possible for government ministers or disgruntled employers to shut down unions for minor civil infractions, like submitting paperwork late or holding a stop-work meeting without an employer's permission. If Scott Morrison submits a form late, he doesn't face a fine—and I should call him Mr Morrison; my apologies. If Alan Joyce submits a form late, he doesn't face a fine. But the same mistake would see a union shut down or a union volunteer disqualified from being elected to represent members. How is that fair? How is that reasonable? How is that consistent with a commitment to civic participation? Unions are not corporations; they are fundamentally different. They are built on the labour of volunteers. They are not profit-making firms; they are industrial organisations, with standing, that represent working people to ensure fair pay and fair working conditions.

This bill is profoundly antidemocratic. It's inconsistent with international human rights law. It would allow the government to interfere with democratically-run organisations. We already have some of the most restrictive laws in the world, and this bill goes well beyond the laws of other comparable countries. Schedule 1 of the bill, as I mentioned earlier, significantly extends the grounds on which an office holder in a registered organisation can be disqualified. The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights reported that these disqualification provisions would likely be incompatible with the right of freedom of association.

There are a number of heroic individuals on the other side and in the other place who have been pretty excited in the last few weeks to stand up and fly the flag for the civil liberties and the democratic rights of the protestors in Hong Kong—and I salute them for that. But I ask this question: where are you when the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights says that provisions in this bill would likely be incompatible with the right of freedom of association? What kind of Liberals are you that you stay silent? In fact, it's worse: you're not silent; you're baying for blood, baying to shut down organisations which simply represent that most basic of democratic rights—to associate with one another and express a political view or an industrial view.

Debate interrupted.

Senate adjourned at 21:00