Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (NT, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

We hear a lot from this government with their concern for everyday Australians, yet they can't seem to come up with a plan to reduce the cost of living for everyday Australians. Instead, we have a rushed piece of legislation. What does rushed legislation look like? It looks like inaccurate bargaining costs. It looks like a government that cannot demonstrate it is able to produce accurate costings, for small and medium business, using its own formulas. Is it $75,148—already an expensive cost for medium business—or, more accurately, more than $80,000 for medium business?

What else does a rushed legislation look like? It looks like google is a research tool, for relying on shamans to strategists, psychics to sales reps, healers to homemakers, Buddhists to businessmen, and meditators to mediators, to develop its policy on the run, and a minister that is clearly prepared to throw his department under the bus when he's called out for his unreliable research tactics.

We're hearing a lot of accusations of scare campaigns and scare tactics, and terminology such as 'frantic' and 'frenzied'. There are businesspeople out there who are very concerned about what the impacts and the cost of this legislation will be for them. They say this legislation is about supporting workers. Don't we have to support the businesspeople that employ workers to ensure the businesspeople can appropriately support their employees? Otherwise, these individuals may well be without a job in the end. We're hearing from small to medium businessowners that this legislation may impact them to the point where they have to lay off some of their workers or close the doors entirely on their businesses. So yes, there is for concern, and this government have to recognise that this is the case.

This is not an exercise about increasing wages; this is an exercise about handing over workplaces to the unions. The mining industry—which every single one of us rely on everything to do with our everyday lives, not to mention to support the rush towards renewables by this government—is certainly an industry that impacts the people of the Northern Territory, where I come from, in many ways. It needs to be understood that the industry already delivers average annual pay rises of more than the CPI, with some companies increasing salaries of employees by 7.8 per cent above state inflation rates. These proposed workplace changes are a radical shakeup of Australia's industrial relations system.

If we want to look further into what it means for the mining sector, there is concern that this is going to lead to widespread strikes within the mining industry. It has the potential to relate to the similar strikes we saw in the 1970s. It threatens the mining industry, which earns over $413 billion in exports, employs over 277,000 Australians in high-paid jobs and contributes $43.2 billion in taxes—and this was in 2021. This is an industry that supports Australians across the board. In the last 20 years, employment in mining has tripled and wages have doubled, benefiting hundreds of thousands of Australians, especially in regional areas. The mining companies are saying these changes will slow down Australia's energy transformation, which we need for lithium, batteries, more copper for solar panels and more cobalt for electric vehicles. They don't need more uncertainty and risk that will simply chase away investment to our shores.

Question agreed to.