Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Small Business Redundancy Exemption) Bill 2023, the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Strengthening Protection Against Discrimination) Bill 2023, the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Asbestos Exemption and Eradication Agency) Bill 2023 and the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (First Responders) Bill 2023. As Senator Lambie and Senator Pocock have noted, these bills split out four parts of the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill 2023. In fact, the Senate's Education and Employment Legislation Committee has a public hearing scheduled for tomorrow right here in this building. It is highly unusual that there would be an attempt to pass parts of a bill through the Senate before a Senate committee has even finished reviewing it.

The justification given for the need to split out these four parts of the bill now is that other reforms require more time. Let's examine that argument. We have an exceptionally comprehensive inquiry. Tomorrow we will have the sixth public hearing. We have travelled to Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, Launceston and Rockhampton and finally we'll hold a hearing in Canberra tomorrow. We have heard from workers, unions, employers and employer groups, academics and advocates from around the country. In fact, by any metric this has been the most comprehensive inquiry into any piece of industrial relations legislation since the first Fair Work Bill in 2008. We've had more hearings, heard more hours of testimony from more witnesses and received more submissions than any IR inquiry since the Fair Work Bill.

Even before this inquiry was launched, the reforms in the bill had been extensively discussed in the public domain and in private consultations for years. In February 2021, 2½ years ago, then opposition leader Anthony Albanese announced Labor's Secure Australian Jobs plan, which included 'rights for gig economy workers through the Fair Work Commission', 'casual work properly defined in law' and 'a crackdown on cowboy labour hire firms to guarantee same job, same pay'. These were all publicly announced 2½ years ago. There were consultation papers on these reforms released on 7 April, months and months ago. I struggle to remember any reforms which have been subject to such extensive and lengthy consultation and public scrutiny as these.

So here's the truth of the matter: the big business groups who oppose the bill today opposed the reforms the day they were announced in February 2021. The Australian Industry Group put out a media release that very day, saying:

Taking away the flexibility that labour hire businesses and their clients need would reduce jobs and investment and threaten the jobs of hundreds of thousands of labour hire workers.

The release made similar ridiculous statements about the casual and gig reforms. If the Ai Group, the Business Council, the Minerals Council and the Master Builders all opposed these reforms the moment they were announced, then I can guarantee you that they will oppose them tomorrow, they'll oppose them in February and they'll oppose them until their dying breath. It doesn't matter how many months this inquiry takes, how many hearings we have or how many workers and academics say they are wrong: they aren't going to change their minds. All these big business groups want is more time to run misleading and, frankly, ridiculous advertising campaigns.

The Minerals Council have admitted that they have spent tens of millions of dollars campaigning against this bill and plan to spend $24 million. Just this week, we saw media coverage in the Australian, supposedly of Restaurant and Catering Australia complaining about the impact on casuals in cafes. But, if you actually read it, it says:

Restaurant and Catering Australia … has joined forces with the … Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) to reject the AHA-government deal.

It goes on to say:

Legal advice released by the MCA, prepared by Corrs Chambers Westgarth …

How many suburban cafes and restaurants do the Minerals Council represent? The answer is none. BHP and the Minerals Council are bankrolling and astroturfing this campaign. This is the same Minerals Council that spent years running big propaganda campaigns claiming that climate change didn't exist and opposing super profits taxes.

I know that Senator Pocock is a consistent critic of the tactics of the big mining lobby when it comes to climate and energy policy. I know that both Senator Pocock and Senator Lambie are consistent advocates for greater transparency and less corporate influence in this building. I know that both senators have also raised concerns about the influence of Qantas on federal governments, and I support them on all these initiatives, but we need to recognise that what is happening with this bill is the exact same thing. Splitting this bill is an early Christmas present for the Minerals Council, Qantas and others like them. By passing this bill in full, we'll be standing up to those big corporate interests on behalf of working families across the country.

I'm not being dismissive about what has been raised about the comprehensiveness of the bill, but what creates complexity in our workplace laws is when some employers spend millions upon millions on lawyers and consultants to find loopholes. That is true for our tax laws, it's true for our environmental laws and it's true for our workplace laws. Our tax laws are complex because we have giant consulting firms like PwC who exist to find and exploit tax loopholes. Qantas splitting its workforce across 38 companies is complex.

The way some employers engage casuals and engage in sham contracting for years at a time is complex.

The least complex thing we do is just tear away everyone's workplace rights and let them fend for themselves. There are many in the Liberals and Nationals who actually support that approach. We are already tired of that 19th century view. We had slavery. That wasn't complex. We had the Hungry Mile on our wharves and workplaces. That wasn't complex. In a utopian world, we could get rid of our workplace laws, employers would just do the right thing and people would make enough to feed their families and have a dignified standard of living. But, unfortunately, that's not the world that we live in. In the real world, bad employers find and exploit loopholes to rip off people and compete unfairly with good employers, of which there are many.

We have heard from many victims of these loopholes in the inquiry. Last week in Rockhampton, we heard from a mineworker, Brodie Allen, who works for BHP's internal labour hire company Operation Services. Brodie said:

I work for BHP Operation Services. I've been coalmining and in the industry for seven years. I've been labour hire the entire time, so I go in and do the same job as everybody else, but I'm paid $40,000 less a year to do the exact same thing.

Who's going to tell Brodie that he has to wait to get fair treatment at work so that they can let BHP and the Minerals Council spend $24 million on an ad campaign?

In Launceston, we heard from Peta Chesshire, an aged-care worker in northern Tasmania. Peta said:

I've been an aged-care worker for 24 years … The bulk of our casual staff are working two to three jobs … We need to take away the casual role. We need more permanent staff. We're such a low-paying industry we can't entice anyone anymore into aged care. If you take away the permanency … there's nothing to make people work in … aged-care … There's nothing there, and it's not safe for us. It's not safe for our residents. We need more security.

Who's going to tell Peta and her colleagues they have to wait for a permanent job because the Minerals Council need more time to campaign against the bill?

We've heard from Sarah de Wilt, a Qantas flight attendant who did not even know she wasn't directly employed by Qantas until four months after she started flying. Sarah said:

It's … disheartening … confusing, a little bit demoralising, knowing that you're there on the cart doing the same thing … You are cleaning up the vomit on the floor alongside somebody else. You were doing 19-hour duty and … keeping each other awake the same as everyone else, wearing the exact same uniform … and then just to accidentally find out.

Ms de Wilt and her labour hire colleagues earn as little as $50,000 per year while their directly employed colleagues on the same flight doing the same job start at around $90,000. It's not fair and it's not safe. How long do they have to wait for fairness?

The premise of these bills is that these four provisions are not contentious and the rest of the bill is contentious. It's an arbitrary distinction. The Senate inquiry into the bill has not reported yet. There may be amendments required for these four parts of the bill as a result of the committee process. How can we pre-empt possible amendments by passing these provisions now?

It's not correct to say that the rest of the bill is controversial. Take the wage theft criminalisation provisions, which have been supported by a clear majority of organisations at the committee. It's so non-contentious that those opposite almost legislated it 2½ years ago. Even the Liberals and Nationals supported criminalising wage theft—heaven forbid! Take industrial manslaughter provisions, which have wide support across the community, or the road transport provisions, which are supported by the Australian Road Transport Industrial Organisation, the National Road Transport Association, the National Road Freighters Association, the Australian Trucking Association and, of course, the largest small-business organisation in Australia, the Transport Workers Union, not to mention many major road transport employers and other employer organisations.

How can you possibly write these reforms off as too contentious to pass when every major industry stakeholder supports them?

Take the gig reforms. This morning we saw Uber, Menulog and Doordash announce their support for these reforms. Through the committee process we heard other gig companies, including Hireup, Sidekicker and Humdrum, support these reforms. To say that those reforms are contentious is, again, not giving the complete picture of the broad support they have.

As you go through each part of the bill, you'll see there is significant support for much of it. Where there is opposition, often it's from organisations who are opposed to anything that gives working people more rights and protections and lifts wages across the community, like the Minerals Council and those on their funding teat, or the other organisations who have been misled by the scare tactics of the Mineral Council campaign. The committee heard from witnesses, put onto the program at the request of the opposition, who were nominally opposed to the bill but clearly didn't actually understand it. Lynas Rare Earths CEO Amanda Lacaze is an example. She has been in the media complaining about the labour hire reforms. At the hearing, when it was put to her that they don't even have an enterprise agreement and so wouldn't be covered, she said:

I do accept that today, potentially, there is no effect on the business.

We had similar evidence from two labour hire companies that the opposition hand-picked to appear at the same hearing, and we've seen the Australian Hotels Association come out in support of the casual reforms. We've got entire parts of the full bill which are broadly supported and not being split out. Where there are so-called contentious parts of the bill, the employer groups can't even agree on whether they impact them or not.

How can we stand in this place and, on such flawed reasoning, leave behind hundreds of thousands of people like Brodie, Peta and Sarah? Most importantly of all, the working people these four parts of this bill are designed to protect don't even want the bill split. Earlier I quoted evidence from Scott Weber, from the Police Federation of Australia, and Simone Haigh, a paramedic from Tasmania. Both pointed out the importance of the parts of this bill being put together. The people on the front lines—our cops and ambos—are telling us we need the bill passed as a whole. This is a massive bank of evidence that tells us that insecure work is a safety risk. It's our police officers and paramedics who, quite literally, are left to pick up the pieces.

Emeritus Professor Michael Quinlan from the University of New South Wales told the Senate:

… the major 'negative health and safety outcomes' associated with insecure work arrangements, compared with full-time permanent jobs, are:

(1) Higher incidence/frequency of injuries, including fatalities

(2) Poorer physical and mental health …

(3) Poor knowledge of and access to regulatory employment rights and less willingness to raise OHS concerns.

Labour hire mine workers are at greater risk in our mines. Truck drivers and gig workers are dead and injured on our roads unless we pass the full bill. First responders are left to pick up the pieces. These bills fail to deal with the complex ways in which fat-cat employers make our workplaces more dangerous and more deadly and unfairly compete with good employers. That's why the Minerals Council— (Time expired)