Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam President. I respect the chamber and the way it engages in these issues. We on this side know that, when it comes to reforms as part of our closing loopholes legislation, there are inevitably a great many issues on which we and those on the opposition side will disagree. Quite naturally, that puts the crossbench in the spotlight as to where these reforms are headed. So it's perhaps not surprising that we should be a little concerned that the crossbench have just plucked up the baseline of issues upon which this chamber can agree, when, in our view, there are other issues just as important to the future health, prosperity, workplace security and safety of Australian workers.

In looking at the provisions of these bills, I can say that yes, on the one hand they're simple and straightforward. On the other hand, are they a panacea for workers who are made redundant and miss out on their workplace entitlements? Will they fix the loophole whereby a business can downsize into a small business and then, when it's found to be insolvent, escape paying its entitlements? No, they're not really a panacea for these issues, and I'll explain why.

The simple fact is that these days most of these entitlements are paid out by government under the Fair Entitlements Guarantee. In these situations there is a problem for people who are made redundant when, over time, an entity goes from being a big business to being a small business and downsizes along the way. It's actually quite uncommon for that big business to have paid out on everyone's redundancies along the way and to have missed the boat on just the few people who remain. That's because, frankly, these days there's a mode of economic operation whereby a big business, when it's about to go insolvent and is working through those issues, does its best to offload its redundancy liabilities onto the government as early as it can, because that's how it can maintain the equity in its insolvent business as it moves into those stages.

I've got plenty of examples where that has proven to be the case. Take, for example, the case of Ovato's printing division. In situations like this, you see big business exploiting the Fair Entitlements Guarantee. You can also see big business abusing the Fair Entitlements Guarantee. You also see businesses applying to the Fair Work Commission to have the amount of redundancy pay already reduced in order to keep their business as a going concern.

The point I want to make to the crossbench is: yes, there is a little loophole here that needs to be fixed for when a big business becomes a small business, in that those people in those small businesses will no longer have the same entitlements under the Fair Entitlements Guarantee that they would otherwise have had. It's not the big business not paying them out; it's the government under the Fair Entitlements Guarantee paying them out. These are all things that flow down through this legislation that actually need to be looked at holistically in the context of our IR reforms. That is because our businesses negotiate agreements with their workers, especially a big business that might turn into a small business later on. They find plenty of other loopholes to get around these things, believe you me! We will close this one loophole, but big businesses get away with doing things like cancelling an award They cancel the award so that the redundancy entitlements disappear overnight, so that the 13 years of redundancy entitlement you might have accrued in a workplace like Ovato mean nothing. It's not because they've gone from being a big business to a small business; it simply means nothing because big business has found a loophole inside our employment laws to do workers out of their entitlements.

We've debated these issues over and over again. Do you remember when we amended the Corporations Act? We amended the Corporations Act to say, 'Big business can't restructure itself and trade away someone's redundancy entitlements.' We amended the Corporations Act to ensure that that be the case. Those provisions of the Corporations Act to prevent business from doing that have never been used because they're completely ineffective. There was a big song and dance: 'We will never let this happen again.' But, time and time again, we see workers done out of their hard-earned entitlements, and we see government now legislated to pick up the pieces under the Fair Entitlements Guarantee. Government is picking up the pieces after big business did over workers. At the time the Fair Entitlements Guarantee came in place, big business just happened to be mates of the former government, and they didn't want the stain on them of being seen to be walking away from workers.

So here we are today in this place. Sure, this will pass. It's probably a good thing, but I really just want to remind the crossbench that we need to continue to work through these issues in good faith and not leave people behind on all the other mounting and important issues.

We've got a much bigger job to do here, and that will take our time and attention. Sure, let's do the low-hanging fruit, let's do the easy things that are no-brainers. But let's not lose sight of what's really going on here and who this really panders to in terms of the labour dynamics in our nation. We need workers to be able to come home from work safely and take home a decent pay packet for a fair day's work because we have big problems in this area. We have big problems because the bargaining table is not fair. There are so many other loopholes that we must fix in order to achieve the outcomes we need. We are not going to fix redundancies and unfairness in entitlements in these uncertain economic times when and more businesses are likely to go bankrupt. These bills don't fix those things. We need comprehensive, holistic industrial relations reform to put our nation on the right footing.