Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Hansard source

Cremated, I'm sorry! It's been a long day. But, zombie-like, Work Choices is back. But, this time you've got a bit smarter. I have to give him credit: Prime Minister Morrison is smarter than John Howard. He's much more cunning and much more deceptive. He's going to do this in two stages. First of all, he's going to destroy the ability of the unions to do the work that their members pay them to do: get them wage rises and improve their conditions. He's going to tie them up in red tape and tie them up in court action, with unions using union members' money to defend the organisations, and, once he's done that, back he comes with Work Choices mark 2. That's when he really hits the workers.

As I say, Prime Minister Morrison is much smarter than Prime Minister Howard. Prime Minister Howard just went straight for the jugular when he got a majority in 2004. In 2007, not only did he lose the election but he lost his seat. In fact, I suppose you could argue that we should let this legislation go through, because we will see what happens when workers finally realise what this government is all about and what its real objective is. It's to destroy the unions that defend working people in this country, and then it's to go after the wages and conditions.

You might remember this, Senator Lines: Australian workplace agreements. Do you remember those? Workers lost all of their entitlements, all of their penalty rates and all of their access to leave and were reduced to four single terms of conditions. They weren't theoretical ideas. They were real contracts of employment that were introduced and foisted upon Australian workers.

We're not going to let this legislation go through. We're going to block it. The Greens, of course, are very supportive of us, but we want the other crossbenchers to understand that this government is simply not serious about any equivalence between workers and the managers that supervise them and that it isn't serious about trying to create an equal workplace. We know from Work Choices that it's all about totally destroying the balance between workers and managers. The idea that a 15-year-old shop assistant signing an AWA under Work Choices mark 1 had any equivalence of bargaining power with an employer was just preposterous. That's what we're going to be leading to here. You destroy the unions; you destroy their abilities.

The thing about Work Choices was that Prime Minister Howard didn't come after the unions in that same way. The unions were there to protect the workers. They were there to argue against Australian workplace agreements and, of course, ultimately they were there to ensure that that legislation was repealed—as it was under Julia Gillard. Julia Gillard was the industrial relations minister, and, of course, she was successful in removing that terrible legislation.

I've spoken about the equivalence argument, and I've still got some more questions on that, but there is another issue that needs to be addressed by the minister. It's on the issue of retrospectivity. It's custom and practice in legislation not to introduce retrospective legislation. That's always been the objective of any piece of legislation. If you introduce a new law that imposes new responsibilities and obligations on people, you don't go back and look at what they were doing before that legislation passed. You start afresh, and so if you are imposing penalties on past actions then it is not appropriate to have that sort of provision in legislation. You look forward rather than looking backwards. That is a pretty standard term in all legislation, be it federal legislation or state legislation. Parliaments by and large, of either persuasion, Liberal or Labor, have always been reluctant to look back and say, 'No, we are going to impose an obligation on something that we have previously done.' However, it would seem that there are retrospective aspects to the legislation.

Could you please explain, particularly to all the people and a few schoolkids who are sitting up there in the gallery listening very patiently—they could have gone over to watch the House of Representatives, but they have very sensibly come here to the Senate; we have far more interesting debates, I might add—why are the provisions of schedule 3 and 4, in particular, retrospective?