Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition (Social and Community Affairs)) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I rise to contribute to the debate on the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007; recognising that the fairness test proposed is flawed and ultimately will not protect low-income workers. The vain hope is that this bill may protect some workers and provide limited benefit. Following the introduction of Work Choices there were many examples of the impact of new industrial laws on individuals, families and groups. Initially the focus of the impact of Work Choices legislation was on the most vulnerable, but it is becoming much clearer now through academic research that the loss of basic protections is both widespread and substantial.

Over the past two decades there has been a massive encroachment of work into family time. Increasingly, workers are juggling the demands of work with their family commitments. Families struggling to meet rising costs of living and higher levels of household debt have not been well served by an economy and a labour market that have produced an increase in highly casualised jobs that are now low paying, insecure and involve irregular hours. Studies by the Relationships Forum Australia and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission show that after 15 years of economic prosperity many Australians are disappointed with the results and feel overworked, stressed out and unhappy. We are among the most overworked nations in the world, with a very high rating among 18 developed nations on key indicators of work intensification. With 22 per cent of the workforce working at least 50 hours a week, Australia’s average working hours run second only to Japan’s. Almost one-third of the labour force regularly works on weekends, making Australia second only to Italy. It is revealing that around two million Australians work on Sundays. Around 27 per cent of Australian workers are in casual employment, making us second to Spain in work that is often characterised by irregular hours and, as a result, an enforced dysfunctional family life.

For some workers, flexible working arrangements are a benefit. For many, however, the rhetoric of family-friendly workplaces has not been realised. This is particularly true for workers in the retail, hospitality and service industries, which historically have had the most unpredictable hours. Workers are often low paid and have little power to negotiate hours and conditions. This is a real problem for families with young children and those with caring responsibilities for elderly family members. People caught in the dilemma of having to work longer and harder in jobs that constantly disrupt and upset normal family routines are entitled to ask, ‘Where are the promised benefits of workplace flexibility?’

The studies confirm what many have experienced during two decades of labour market deregulation—that is, the demand to work longer and more irregular hours has upset the balance. There is less time for family functions, there is difficulty in maintaining networks of friends and there is little time for religious worship, community events and recreation. More alarming, though, is the direct damage to the family unit in the form of high levels of depression and stress; drug and alcohol problems; strained relationships, leading to separation and divorce; and reduced child welfare.

The Catholic Church in Australia has voiced concerns about workers’ rights and conditions under the Howard government’s Work Choices laws. In a pastoral letter issued for the Feast Day of St Joseph the Worker, 1 May, Bishop Christopher Saunders, Chairman of the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council, has called on the government to regularly release data on the terms and conditions of Australian workplace agreements. In a letter headed ‘Keeping time—Australian families and the culture of overwork’, Bishop Saunders said that over the past two decades there has been a massive encroachment of work into family time and that an increasing number of people are juggling the demands of work with their family commitments.

If Australia is to move forward and prosper as a nation, we need a modern industrial relations system that balances the flexibility required by business with the security needed by employees and their families. The government’s extreme industrial relations system has tipped this balance too far against working families by removing things such as overtime, penalty rates, leave loadings, rostering protections and redundancy pay for many. The amendments contained in this workplace relations amendment bill will not restore that balance. They will not restore sufficient basic conditions that Australian families rely on. They will not restore the faith of the Australian people, lost by a government that did not even see fit to consult them on its industrial relations laws at the last election. Work Choices is at the heart of why people no longer trust the Howard government.

There is nothing in these amendments that diminishes Labor’s resolve to repeal Work Choices and replace it with a system that delivers an appropriate balance between the flexibility needed by business and the security needed by employees and their families. A sensible and modern industrial relations system takes a middle path that balances the flexibility needed by business with the security needed by employees and their families. This bill does not achieve that—it goes nowhere near the middle path put forward by the Labor Party in this parliament. If we are to build prosperity into the future, beyond the mining boom, current policies need to be directed to lifting productivity and harnessing the talents and abilities of all our people. The government can dress up its industrial relations laws in all the taxpayer funded spin and propaganda that it likes but this will not alter the fact that the government’s Work Choices industrial relations laws will do nothing to boost productivity, which has gone backwards in relative terms on this government’s watch.

The government has been led by a narrow ideological agenda, and it has been increasingly forced to rely on desperate arguments to justify the benefits of Work Choices. The first of these desperate economics arguments that it puts is that Work Choices has been responsible for our recent jobs growth. This is one of the great cons of the Howard era.

The workplace laws were examined at a hearing last week into whether they comply with the international labour standards. A list of 25 alleged international labour rights offenders, including the Howard government’s workplace laws, was considered in Geneva by the International Labour Organisation, a special agency of the United Nations that monitors labour standards. It is the third year in a row that the Howard government’s workplace laws have been examined. The Howard government failed to provide information requested by the ILO within the required time frame last year and consequently the issue has now been referred to the ILO conference for further hearing.

Australia is a signatory to the international convention on fundamental labour rights and someone should be asking the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations why his government’s workplace laws do not comply with international human rights laws to which it is a signatory. The Howard government is being taken to task because it is one of the few governments among advanced countries whose workplace laws are alleged to breach freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining. This is Australia we are talking about. Australian working families already know that the Howard government’s Work Choices laws are grossly unfair, and they now should know that the unfairness of the laws has not escaped international attention.

The Prime Minister’s claim that the new industrial relations system is no different from the previous no-disadvantage test is incorrect. The latest changes are much weaker and provide fewer protections for workers than the previous no-disadvantage test in key ways. There is no role for an independent umpire to scrutinise workplace agreements. At least under the old system the AIRC was required to scrutinise all collective agreements in an open hearing, and AWA individual contracts could be referred to the AIRC if there was any uncertainty about whether it passed the no-disadvantage test. Under the new system, however, individual workers who are dissatisfied with the compensation they receive for losing their penalty rates, overtime and other conditions are forced to go to the High Court.

Changes to the government’s Work Choices industrial relations laws currently before parliament require the Howard government’s new Workplace Authority to rule whether each new AWA individual contract signed since 7 May this year passes the government’s new so-called fairness test. The Employment Advocate admitted that his office made a ‘cursory perusal’ of AWAs but has done no real analysis of the data.

Since November, Labor had asked the Office of the Employment Advocate—now known as the Workplace Authority—142 questions on notice, none of which have been answered. The Office of Workplace Services, now known as the Office of the Workplace Ombudsman, has received 149 questions on notice and none have been answered. The government has employed 600 new officials to administer the changes and scrutinise the 1,000 AWAs that are being registered every day under the new IR laws.

Around 2½ million workers are not covered by the new fairness test and receive no protection. Unlike the no-disadvantage test, workers are not covered if they are on already registered AWAs and individual agreements, if they earn more than $75,000 a year, or are award free. The new fairness test does not take into account the full list of protected award conditions when determining the amount of compensation for the loss of award conditions. Redundancy pay, paid maternity leave and a say on rosters for workers were previously taken into account in the no-disadvantage test but are now not protected and can be abolished with no compensation to employees.

Under this new system AWAs are checked only after they start to apply. This means that workers lose their award conditions first and the fairness test is applied later. With the no-disadvantage test, workers were at least protected from the start and only lost award conditions after the test had ensured that they would not be disadvantaged.

The fact is that the Howard government’s IR changes do not give workers adequate protection from losing penalty rates, shift allowances, overtime or other award conditions, and the only way a worker can question a ruling on their AWA individual contract under this new fairness test would be to lodge an expensive appeal to the High Court.

As Darryl Kerrigan, the character played by Michael Caton in the famous film The Castle surely would say to revelations that workers would be forced to go to the High Court to challenge a compensation ruling under the new fairness test, ‘Tell ’em they’re dreaming.’

The Sydney Morning Herald reported last Wednesday that the Prime Minister ‘dares to dream’ and, from a leaked document, the ‘government has commissioned economic modelling to gauge the effect of extending its Work Choices legislation to cover all employees’. The government—if by chance it is re-elected—clearly intends to extend Work Choices to the 15 percent of the workforce not covered by the legislation. This figure accounts for 1.5 million workers including nurses, police, teachers and firefighters who, with the exception of Victoria, are currently on state award systems. The Australian Nursing Federation is seeking a guarantee from government that health funding in the 2008 Australian health care agreements will not force nurses onto AWAs since it learned of the revelation that the government is engaging in this economic modelling. The ANF is seeking a core guarantee that funding for hospitals will not be linked to AWAs, as has already occurred in the university sector.

The What women want report released recently by the National Foundation for Australian Women shows that under the Work Choices industrial relations system women are worse off in pay terms compared with men. This is so regardless of their occupation or education status and includes professional and managerial women as well as those in lower paid, less skilled work. The impact is worst for young women, with fewer bargaining skills, and for all women living in regional and country areas away from mining developments. The impact on Indigenous women and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds was also very negative.

The What women want report provides evidence that individual workplace agreements result in a growth in the gender wage gap. The gender wage gap is worse in casual and part-time employment, where wage levels have stagnated in sectors such as retail and hospitality, where women predominate, and women in professional and managerial occupations are also doing less well than their male counterparts.

The implementation of the Howard government’s wide-ranging policy and legislative changes in industrial relations, combined with its Welfare to Work reforms, is expected to further intensify the challenges faced by working families in balancing work and family life. If the Work Choices legislation is as good as the Howard government says it is, why did the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Mr Hockey, visit car-parts manufacturer Tristar to ensure that a dying employee was not denied access to a redundancy payment? Surely not because there is a problem with Work Choices? It is clear that Work Choices is emboldening employers to take mean and capricious action against their employees. Not all companies do it but many more do it now because Work Choices makes it possible.

Tristar was looking for ways to minimise the costs of its redundancy program. It would not agree to provide a payout to its account manager of 43 years, John Beavan, who was battling terminal cancer. Tristar rejected Beavan’s application for redundancy late last year after he acknowledged that he was ill with liver and bowel cancer. When his treatment by Tristar became public knowledge, voice of reason Alan Jones attacked the decision. This is what it took to get John Howard to take action to redress the indignities that John Beavan confronted at the end of his life.

The workplace relations minister at the time and the Prime Minister were missing in action when unions sought to meet them to seek a resolution to the Tristar dispute affecting Beavan and 30 or so other workers. The sad reality is that it took Alan Jones to make the Prime Minister listen. Just days after the announcement of the payout, John Beavan died. His fellow workers at Tristar are still waiting for their redundancy payments. What will it take to ensure that they get fair treatment?

The hardship that John Beavan and his fellow workers have faced at Tristar is not simply a product of corporate immorality; it is a manifestation of the Work Choices system, which fails to recognise that equality of bargaining power between individual workers and companies is illusory. The Tristar case illustrates this harsh reality. The Work Choices legislation enabled Tristar to put in place new arrangements that significantly reduced the level of redundancy entitlements available to employees under their enterprise agreement. The unilateral termination by Tristar of the agreement meant that redundancy entitlements were cut from four weeks pay for every year of service, to a maximum of twelve weeks pay.

Work Choices stripped away the capacity of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission to arbitrate and resolve the case in a fair way. It took intense media pressure on the government to persuade it to intervene. Any industry anywhere, especially in regional Australia, faces the same treatment. Workers in regional areas do not have the luxury of readily available alternative employment. What will the ‘fairness test’ do for these individuals?

Employees in industries like manufacturing feel the pressure of Work Choices more intensely because, unlike workers in the booming resource sector, they are experiencing the downside of the emergence of China and India as industrial giants. A shortage of skills in the mining sector has boosted the bargaining power of mining workers, enabling them to command high salaries despite Work Choices. In other sectors, like manufacturing, the story is different. That industry is under intense global pressure from low-wage manufacturing countries relocating factories offshore and laying off thousands of workers. Car, whitegoods, textile, clothing and footwear manufacturing in Australia faces the threat of extinction over the next decade.

Workers’ bargaining power is greatly diminished. Under Work Choices they face a significant reduction in their entitlements if collective agreements expire or are terminated and replaced by inferior individual agreements. The choice for employees in depressed sectors is often to sign or resign. We have heard about that over the last couple of days in this debate on the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007. The manufacturing sector is a microcosm of what it might be like for the majority of Australian workers under Work Choices during an economic downturn.

The Work Choices policy landscape is a Darwinian one. It encourages manufacturers to compete on a low-cost rather than high-quality basis with low-wage countries. This is a competition that Australia cannot win and should not even enter. It represents a race to the bottom over wages and conditions that ultimately will undermine our living standards and decimate our manufacturing sector.

The reality is that Work Choices is undermining the working conditions of thousands of Australian workers. The federal government’s Office of the Employment Advocate undertook a survey last year of 250 Australian workplace agreements lodged under Work Choices in April 2006. The survey revealed that the agreements excluded important protected award conditions—63 per cent excluded penalty rates, 52 per cent excluded shift loadings, 46 per cent excluded public holiday pay and 40 per cent excluded rest breaks. Professor David Peetz from Griffith University has demonstrated that this actually understates the problem because the number of AWAs that modified or reduced conditions has not been taken into account. Taking this into consideration, the proportion of AWAs that cut overtime rises to around 82 per cent.

The Howard government is swimming against the tide of community opposition to the Work Choices legislation. The industrial relations legislation is deeply unpopular according to a recent Newspoll undertaken for the Australian newspaper. Around 48 per cent of those polled described the changes as bad for the Australian economy, and around 45 per cent said that they were bad for creating jobs. One-third said that they would be worse off as a result of the changes while just 14 per cent said that they would be better off.

I conclude by saying this: Work Choices has to go. Even as amended by this bill, it is still a gross unfairness for Australian families. (Time expired)

Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to debate on the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007. I will begin by saying that on 3 April this year, the Prime Minister stated on ABC radio:

These workplace relations changes are very important to our economic future. That is my belief and that belief won’t change.

Yet here we are, two months and a string of negative polls later, debating amendments to the very legislation the government was so determined, two years ago, not to alter. The statement I just quoted was made prior to these proposed amendments. The Prime Minister was of course referring to Work Choices—dare I say that name publicly again?—in its original form or, in the new term that we now know, workplace relations. It seems that the government has reverted to a tried and true brand name, seeing that the terminology ‘Work Choices’ has had such negative reaction from the voters. The Prime Minister made this statement on ABC radio on 3 April. Just four weeks later, on 4 May, he announced amendments to the act that he believed in so much. This was followed by a $5 million advertising blitz heralding the changes and an announcement that these changes would come into effect on 7 May, with the specifics only reaching parliament barely two weeks ago. So these amendments have been in force for six weeks, and they are not even law yet.

The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Joe Hockey, said in his second reading speech:

It was never the intention that it may become the norm for protected award conditions such as penalty rates to be traded off without proper compensation.

That idea, coming from the minister for industrial relations, is not laudable; in fact, it is laughable. When you do not put protections in place, there will be the odd rogue employer that will abuse their new-found powers. Since the Work Choices laws came into effect 14 months ago, hundreds of thousands of Australians have lost award conditions that are supposed to be protected, a promise that the Howard government failed to keep. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that Australians were being forced onto AWAs that stripped them of supposedly protected award conditions, this government refused to back down, time and time again, and declared that it would stand by this draconian legislation.

The aim of this backflip—very much a minor backflip, I have to say—is not to put in place an additional safety net to protect Australian workers, as the Howard government would want you to believe. These amendments have a sole purpose—that is, to protect the Prime Minister’s job. It is interesting that the government chose to use the words ‘simpler’ and ‘fairer’ in the propaganda they initially bombarded the Australian people with to promote Work Choices. Employers complained about the difficulty in implementing AWAs and abiding by the Work Choices legislation, originally over 1,000 pages long. Now, with an extra 100 pages to abide by, name changes, an ambiguous and fake fairness test that has been in place for six weeks without legislation detailing it, and no time line as to when AWAs would be assessed for the said fairness by the Workplace Authority, it seems that the Howard government need to be educated on what the term ‘simple’ actually means.

This whole debacle is indicative of the Howard government: tired and sloppy. No matter how much money you spend on advertising propaganda, no matter how many superficial amendments you make to this legislation, it is still an absolute shambles and absolutely unfair. A bandaid cannot cover a bullet hole, and that is what this latest amendment bill is attempting to do.

There is an alarming amendment in this legislation in regard to the fairness test. The proposed amendment, as it stands, is that the Workplace Authority will have the power to decide whether an AWA is fair, based on what has been traded off, and, if need be, can use information about the employee’s personal circumstances in order to make this decision. This in itself is an outrage. How is a bureaucrat in Canberra supposed to properly assess the personal circumstances, briefly noted on a piece of paper, of, for example, Mr X in Tennant Creek? How can they justify a loss of penalty rates because Mr X prefers to work weekends and public holidays so that he is available to look after the children during the week while his missus is at work?

Do Australians really want details of their personal lives, from family and childcare arrangements to details of personal relationships and financial situations, to be put on paper and handed to their boss to be forwarded on to a bureaucrat somewhere in this country, probably in Canberra? Employees such as Mr X, whose availability to work is restricted due to family responsibilities or in other situations, maybe related to personal circumstances, may be deemed to have no entitlement to penalty rates or other protected award conditions under this legislation, even after having their private lives on display for bureaucrats to pick over. It is absolutely appalling that it has reached this stage in Australia—that an employee’s personal life can be on display for complete strangers to analyse in order to decide whether or not a loss of a protected award condition is fair.

This also poses another question: how is the fairness test to be assessed? How does one assess the monetary or non-monetary value of a protected award condition? It appears that the government sees this as a minute detail, since there is no provision in this amendment bill for the Workplace Authority to provide reasons as to how they assessed the monetary or non-monetary value of whatever was provided to an employee. The Workplace Authority are under absolutely no obligation to give reasons for their assessments, whether an employee’s personal circumstances or work situation were even relevant in assessing whether or not the Australian workplace agreement passed this so-called fairness test—just one more thing that this government feels the Australian public does not need to know.

One step back from the fairness test itself—and I am sure this has been pointed out, but it seems to be falling on deaf ears, so I will reiterate it—is: what is the definition of ‘fair’? This government has not proposed a definition in the amendment bill before us, probably to give itself room to further rip off workers while waving around the term ‘fair’ in front of their faces. The term ‘fair’ is subjective. How can the Australian public trust that the person reviewing their AWA in accordance with the fairness test provisions will have the same view of ‘fair’ as they do? If these amendments are as fair as the government is claiming, why is there a need to employ a further 600 Work Choices policemen to stop workers from being ripped off?

The government has already failed in this so-called fairness test, and it is not even law yet. In what way has it failed? It has failed to protect and compensate those workers already on AWAs lodged prior to 7 May 2007. Those hundreds of thousands of workers have already signed unfair Australian workplace agreements which exclude award conditions such as penalty rates and overtime that were apparently protected under the original legislation. Workers such as the casuals at Darrell Lea, who were given AWAs that stripped conditions like penalty rates without the hourly rate being increased by even a single cent over the life of the AWA, have received no compensation that any office or authority has deemed ‘fair’ and will receive nothing from this legislation.

There are also those whose important award conditions—rostering predictions, redundancy or long service leave entitlements—will be affected because the government feels those conditions are not important enough to be protected. Try telling a single mother of two who works in a hotel that rostering predictions are not important. This mother would have seven days notice of her roster under the Northern Territory’s current hotels and motels award. Such notice is sufficient time for her to organise child care for her children. Yet, under this so-called fairness test, rostering predictions could become a thing of the past, and this hardworking mother of two would not be compensated. It has been pointed out by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in their report entitled It’s about time: women, men, work and family—final paper 2007 that employees with families would be most at risk under the Work Choices legislation and that the fairness test is only serving to highlight how unfair the Work Choices laws and their amendments really are.

These latest amendments still do not address the issue of unfair dismissal and how it is completely balanced in favour of the employer. On 14 May 2003, the Northern Territory News reported the case of a Darwin employee who worked for a small local business and was sacked when she returned to work following time off for a work related back injury. She was a full-time employee and, while she was having time off, her employer made her full-time position redundant and replaced it with a casual position. This hardworking woman was offered the casual position upon her return to work. She argued that her boss did not have the right to replace her full-time job with a casual one and filed a dispute notice with the Industrial Relations Commission. In the meantime, she took up alternative employment at a service station and worked night and early morning shifts to make ends meet, earning $9,000 to the end of March 2003. The Industrial Relations Commission ruled that her termination was unjust, harsh and unreasonable. However, based on the legislation that the Howard government had put in place, the commission is prohibited from awarding the maximum six-months compensation in cases such as this because it must take into account any income an employee earns from alternative employment. The legislation forced the IRC to take into account the $9,000 amount and reduce the compensation that could have been awarded to the worker. The commission ultimately awarded her only $3,200 in compensation. This is just one of the many examples of the Howard government failing to support workers with its farcical industrial relations laws.

The Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the rest of the coalition delight in quoting the unemployment figures across Australia. They say that these figures are directly related to the Work Choices legislation, while conveniently ignoring the fact that Australia has been enjoying its 16th year of economic growth, coupled with a resources boom. Would the government also like to take responsibility for the fifth consecutive monthly increase in unemployment in the Northern Territory? Last week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released figures showing that unemployment in the Northern Territory is higher than the national average and is currently sitting at 4.6 per cent. The monthly unemployment figure climbed 0.3 per cent in May alone.

David Johnston (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Justice and Customs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Johnston interjecting—

John Watson (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Senator Johnston, it is disorderly to interject. As a minister, please desist.

Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President. I will take that interjection, Senator Johnston, because it is a classic example. While unemployment is going down, as it is around the rest of the country, you say: ‘We’ll take all the glory for that. The Howard government and Work Choices will take a big gold star for that, and that will be the way that we push this ideology on the rest of the country and make people believe that we are actually responsible.’ But when you look at the Northern Territory, where unemployment has gone up for a number of months and is sitting at a level higher than the national average—unemployment climbed 0.3 per cent in May alone—you say: ‘It’s not our fault. That’s not Work Choices. Things are bad in the Territory, so it cannot be us; it must be the state government’s fault.’ I see: when unemployment goes up, we blame the states; when unemployment goes down, it is our responsibility.

You have no responsibility in the Northern Territory. Is that correct? You have turned your back on the Northern Territory. Clearly, it is a major hole in your argument that unemployment figures are going down in this country as a result of Work Choices but in the Territory the unemployment figures have gone up—and we could have a massive debate about why that might be. If you look at the intersection of the import of 457 visa holders and what is happening in the industrial relations arena, you might arrive at some answers about that figure in the Northern Territory. Just as the Howard government takes credit for low unemployment in Australia, so too must it take responsibility for five consecutive monthly rises in unemployment in the Northern Territory. The government’s argument hits a seriously massive hurdle in terms of credibility when we apply it to the Northern Territory.

I notice the member for Solomon, Mr David Tollner, did not speak on this bill in the House of Representatives. Could it be that he does not believe in it? This would be a likely reason, as he stood before the people of Solomon and declared his pride in orchestrating the original Work Choices legislation. In fact, he said at a public forum that his fingerprints were all over it. He even agreed to a public debate on Work Choices in March this year. I clearly remember him saying outside his office that he would be happy to debate Work Choices with Ms Sharan Burrow, the President of the ACTU, in July of this year.

However, Mr Tollner has since backed down, for reasons known only to himself—although I notice in today’s Northern Territory News he cites that he would rather wait to have such a debate until the actual election starts so that we can hear from the minor parties. I never thought that the Greens and the Democrats would be on the mind of Mr Tollner when he wanted to justify his fingerprints being all over the Work Choices legislation. It could be that, no matter how proud of Work Choices he is, he is aware that it is a liability to his being re-elected later this year. I put it to you that that is more than likely the real reason.

Very possibly this is also the trend we are seeing with this government and is the very reason for the fake fairness test, which is a lame attempt to bring the Australian public onside prior to the federal election by creating a perception of fairness. Any reasonable person could not help but think, ‘Crikey, is it election time already?’ As with previous election years, we are seeing a flurry of activity from the Howard government, particularly this year, as it sees its pollsters returning negative feedback on the government’s beloved Work Choices legislation.

It was revealed in Senate estimates two weeks ago that the cost of the Howard government’s industrial relations advertising campaign is $4.1 million, averaging $585,000 per day or $25,000 per hour. This is above and beyond the call of informing the public of legislative changes; it is an outright public relations campaign to aid the government in getting re-elected later this year. Senate estimates also revealed that the full-page advertisements, which trumpeted these latest amendments and appeared in national newspapers on Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 May, cost taxpayers $470,000. The Prime Minister claims that the ads were to inform the Australian public of changes to the legislation. These advertisements appeared in national newspapers less than 24 hours after the Prime Minister had announced such changes, before the details of the amendments had even been written—before, I suppose, the ink was even dry on the paper. Advertisements such as these are nothing more than blatant party political advertising under the guise of government advertising and are designed to protect only one job—the Prime Minister’s.

The bill before us today is farcical, to say the least. It seems that the government either is fascinated with name changes or has so many ideas for names within a department that it feels it must give each suggested name a turn in the spotlight. We had the Office of the Employment Advocate, now known as the Workplace Authority; there was the Office of Workplace Services, now known as the Workplace Ombudsman; and there was Work Choices, which is now being referred to by the government as workplace relations. One can only imagine how much money and effort will be put into changing the stationery and the business cards alone. But this matters not. We have already established that it is an election year, after all, and it seems that taxpayers’ money is no object when it comes to protecting the Prime Minister’s job, let alone the jobs of Australians in this country.

Linda Kirk (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to join my colleagues in expressing my concern about the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007, which adds yet another sad chapter to the sorry saga of Work Choices. We have before us today a bill that is a slippery concession by a worried and tired old government. In the same manner as the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Ms Gillard, in her speech in the other place was struck by a sudden sense of deju vu, so too am I; I am painfully reminded of the comments I made when debating the original Work Choices legislation here in the Senate in November 2005. It was my intention then as it is today to highlight the obvious injustices and inequities that result from this extreme legislation and, in particular, the deceptive nature of this cumbersome amendment.

This bill, like the original Work Choices legislation, is, as I stated in 2005, a stab in the back for Australian workers. Labor’s longstanding opposition to this attack on workplace conditions has not diminished over time. But with this bill we see that the Howard government remains out of touch with the difficulties facing Australian families and that its disregard for Australian workers has only intensified. We are confronted here today by a bill that not only is fundamentally flawed in its operation but also is a clear testament to this government’s disregard for the workers of Australia. It highlights the government’s obvious attempts to manipulate and trick its way into winning the next federal election.

The focus of my remarks here in the Senate in November 2005 was that, under the Work Choices legislation, employees are placed in a take it or leave it situation—a situation where there is no choice or negotiation of workplace conditions, no practical consensus and no respite for disadvantaged workers. There is an inherent and deep imbalance in any workplace negotiation of an Australian workplace agreement. Under Work Choices, there is a lack of protection for the most vulnerable of Australian workers and, most damagingly, there is an incentive for employers to take advantage of these laws and cut the conditions of Australian workers.

That is where we stand under the existing Work Choices regime: there is no protection and no equity for Australian workers. Instead, there is an incentive to create inequity and there is an absence of workplace protections. This is the core of the Work Choices legislation and it has created a backlash in the Australian working community. But it is a backlash that has been ringing in the ears of the advisers and pollsters in the Prime Minister’s office. It is this backlash that has prompted the government to introduce this bill into the parliament. Maybe this is a good development. We might ask, ‘Shouldn’t the government listen to the people of Australia and legislate in accordance with their wants?’ The answer is that obviously it should. However, two problems arise in the current situation.

The first is that it is not as though there has been a sudden outcry from the community about the unfair and unjust nature of these laws. The workers of Australia did not wake up one morning and say, ‘Hold on—I don’t think we like these laws anymore’, when up until then they had welcomed their existence. No, this was not the case. The overwhelming injustice of these laws has been felt by Australian workers for the past 15 months, but it is only now that the Howard government is sitting up and taking notice. I should add that it is taking notice only in an election year and only a handful of months away from election day. Secondly, in my view, the most grievous problem with this reactionary legislation is that it is not a true reflection of what Australian workers are seeking. It is, as I mentioned before, a slippery concession, but it is clearly a concession that the government did not want to make and has not truly made.

Let me focus the Senate’s attention on some of the instances in this bill where the government has made changes but has not altered the fundamental inequity of Work Choices. I will begin first with the title of the legislation—‘Work Choices’. ‘Work Choices’ is now apparently an unspeakable name. Here we see the first of the government’s tricky ploys to confuse and disguise the injustice of this legislation. The Prime Minister himself, when asked in question time on 22 May this year by the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Rudd, whether the official name of the legislation was no longer ‘Work Choices’, responded:

The relevant piece of legislation is called the Workplace Relations Act.

It seems that we have to remind the Prime Minister that the Workplace Relations Act existed before the implementation of Work Choices and that the relevant legislation for this particular unfair system is in fact titled the Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act. Through this devious word play, the government is trying to distance itself from the injustices that it knows are associated with its own legislation, formerly known as Work Choices.

Let me return to the particular bill before us today. I would like to reiterate an important point that was made by my colleague Mr Simon Crean in the House of Representatives debate. Mr Crean began his speech by noting that this bill is called the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007 and pointed to the absurdity of the title of this legislation, particularly ‘A Stronger Safety Net’. These words imply that there was a reasonable safety net in place to begin with. The whole purpose of this legislation is to allow employees to have their conditions removed without the protection of a no disadvantage test and without the advantage of having any bargaining power whatsoever. Yet we see the government claiming that all it is doing is filling in some gaps in the legislation to correct some unexpected consequences. The consequences that have flowed from this legislation are not unexpected ones. They are in fact the purpose and the unavoidable impact of this fundamentally unfair legislation.

The so-called fairness test has been promoted by the government as being about ensuring that workers will not receive anything less than fair compensation for the loss of working conditions. Yet, when one closely examines the bill, there is in fact no guarantee that this will always be the case. What is known as the exceptional circumstances clause in proposed section 346M(4) of the bill provides that, where it is deemed that an unfair agreement is necessary to the business, it becomes fair. Proposed section 346M(5) provides an example of a short-term economic crisis and dictates that the stripping of conditions is fair when it is a ‘reasonable strategy’. When can it be reasonable to impose on a worker an unfair agreement? How does the Workplace Authority, which is designed to uphold the fairness of workplace arrangements, determine that fairness means when it is advantageous to the employer? This is where the real attitude of this government to Australian workers and its disregard for them shine through. This bill is about giving the impression of a concession to Australian workers by way of changes to this legislation, but in reality it is no more than a slippery attempt to avoid giving any real relief from these laws to working Australians.

As has been stated many times by the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Mr Hockey, the compensation is paid in lieu of the condition lost, generally as extra take-home pay. This does not protect conditions of workers; it only serves to compensate for their loss. Take for example an employee who wants public holidays off included in their agreement, which is quite a reasonable request. The employee asks their employer or potential employer, ‘May I have public holidays off as part of my AWA?’ The employer, knowing that there may be many times when they want the employee to work public holidays, could well respond, ‘No. We do not have public holidays off here. Do you want the job or not?’ An employee in that situation knows that public holidays are a protected condition, but they also know that if their salary is slightly adjusted with ‘fair’ compensation paid to them then they cannot argue with the employer. They may want public holidays off to spend time with family instead of receiving the small extra amount of money that might be paid to them as compensation, but this employee is in a situation where they will not get the public holidays off because of the inequitable position they find themselves in where the employer is able to offer what is described as fair compensation in lieu of the time off for public holidays. This simple example highlights the slippery nature of the government’s concession that this bill represents. Conditions will continue to be stripped and workers will continue to find themselves in a ‘take it or leave it’ situation. There is no real change to the inequity of Work Choices as a consequence of this bill.

I will now discuss in more detail the operation of the so-called fairness test that is a central feature of this bill. How does the newly established and financially pumped Workplace Authority maintain Australian workplaces as fair and equitable? Looking at this bill, it becomes difficult to see how the government expects the Workplace Authority to remain consistently fair in its operation. Section 346M of the bill outlines the considerations that the Workplace Authority may—and I stress ‘may’—take into account. First is the monetary and non-monetary compensation that the employee has received in lieu of the protected award condition; and second is the personal circumstances of an employee, particularly family responsibilities. The authority may inform itself in any way it considers appropriate. When these provisions are examined, we see that they become very murky rather quickly when put under the spotlight. The definition of ‘non-monetary compensation’ is something:

(a) for which there is a money value equivalent or to which a money value can reasonably be assigned; and

(b) that confers a benefit or advantage on the employee which is of significant value to the employee.

You do not have to think for very long to realise that this definition covers just about anything under the sun. How is the Workplace Authority expected to attach value to every possible thing that may be put forward by the employer as fair compensation? By this definition, the compensation does not even have to be provided for directly by the employer. In fact, if one stretches the bow to its greatest extent, it could even be office space with a good view paid for at a high price in Sydney, for example, and so therefore easily connected with a monetary value and as conferring a benefit or advantage on the employee. I am certain that a nice view is of some value to some people—and I am sure that former Senator Vanstone in her new residence in Rome will have a very nice view which she will regard as being of significant value—but should these sorts of things be considered as bargaining chips to be weighed against basic workplace terms and conditions? In my view they should not. They are too vague and too operationally difficult for the Workplace Authority to be expected to consider and to assess.

However, it does not stop at this. We also see the real possibility that personal circumstances will be paraded around in order to determine whether the stripping of a certain condition is fair. There are some disturbing consequences of this practice. Firstly, the information is provided by the employer and not the employee—so there exists an immediate conflict of interest. Secondly, is it fairer, for example, that a mother with two children has her vacation time rate more highly than a mother with one child? How does the Workplace Authority, this bureaucratic engine, make these determinations? There are serious concerns that need to be addressed in the creation of a body with these kinds of discretionary powers. Many of my colleagues have described the Workplace Authority as a secretive organisation. I would like to add my own description of it: a black box into which one places a personal question, and then, by necessity, it spits out an impersonal response.

A similarly disturbing problem with this new regime was highlighted in the Senate Standing Committee on Employment, Workplace Relations and Education’s report on this bill. In light of the length of AWAs now being five years, it is unrealistic to assume that personal circumstances, such as that of one’s family, will remain the same over such a long period. The example given in a submission to the committee illustrated this well. An employee has their child care paid in lieu of a removed condition; however, the child over a period of five years grows up and enters school. As a consequence, the child requires less or even no child care at all. The relevant AWA remains in effect, unchanged, without the condition that was removed for the remainder of the five year period. This example highlights again the inequity that is inherent in a bureaucratic body that makes judgement calls on personal circumstances, on a one-off basis, and without sufficient information. It is a testament to the reactionary nature of this bill and the ways that Australian workers will still lose out under this Work Choices regime.

I will conclude where I began by expressing once again my feeling of deja vu. I was disturbed by this legislation in its first incarnation and I am disturbed by its amendment as contained in this bill. At the time that Work Choices first appeared, many found it difficult to believe that such a fundamentally unfair law could have been introduced by this government. Personally, I thought that the government would stand by its legislation, especially considering that the bill reflects the very essence of the government’s insensitive workplace ideology. But, as we have seen, this is a government that is willing to even undermine its own core philosophies for short-term electoral gains. The Australian people will not be fooled by this deceptive semi-back-step from the extremism that has characterised Work Choices. Labor is optimistic about the future of this country. We do not define Australia by its past but look to how it may define itself in the future. Because of this optimism we will support this bill on the chance that it may help just one worker or their family, but we condemn the core of the now illusionary Work Choices and the government who created it.

Michael Forshaw (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Here we go again—another piece of amending legislation introduced by this government to correct a problem created by previous legislation. Since this government came to power in 1996 they have been seeking to change the workplace relations system in this country. Once they obtained an absolute majority in the Senate after July 2005, they proceeded to do that—but to do it in a way that destroyed the concept of fairness and equity in the Australian industrial relations system.

I recall the many debates that I and other senators have participated in over the years. There were always two consistent features of the government’s legislation. One of them was that it was bad for workers and their families. The other feature was that they always tried to dress it up with a title that in reality reflected the opposite of what the legislation did. I remember they introduced the ‘More Jobs Better Pay’ legislation and then they introduced a bill dealing with unfair dismissals that was called the ‘Fair Dismissal Bill’. Here we have it again. We have this amending legislation that is entitled the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007. This bill should really be entitled the ‘Workplace Relations Amendment (We Got it Wrong We Lied to You and Told You it Was a Fair Piece of Legislation but Now the Public Has Found Us Out and We Need to Fix This Problem in a Hurry Because We Don’t Want to Lose the Next Federal Election) Bill 2007’. That sums up precisely what this bill is about. It is a last desperate act by the Howard government to try and turn around the public outrage, the public condemnation and the public rejection of Work Choices. The hide of this government and their hypocrisy is that they are now going to spend millions more dollars of taxpayers’ funds in an attempt to persuade the public that this piece of legislation will undo the problems that the previous legislation created, on which they also spent millions of dollars trying to convince the public that it was in fact a fair system. They have no shame, they have no scruples, because they are desperate to try and hang onto the levers of power at all costs.

Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

At all costs to the taxpayer!

Michael Forshaw (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

At all costs to the taxpayer, Senator Polley—thank you for that accurate interjection. The original legislation that this government introduced made dramatic and far-reaching changes to the industrial relations system. But that first round of legislation was under the conciliation and arbitration powers. There was at least a retention of the concept of public interest, of fairness and of a no disadvantage test that had been introduced by the previous Hawke and Keating governments. However, that no disadvantage test, as we know, disappeared with Work Choices. And of course Work Choices was legislation that was based upon the use of the corporations power of the Constitution rather than the industrial relations or arbitration and conciliation powers. The Prime Minister, the minister for industrial relations and the government all assured us that no-one would be worse off—that no worker in this country would ever be worse off under their changes. In fact, they went so far as to say they would be better off. They have constantly used this mantra. They also said that their legislation was simpler, more flexible and would introduce much needed deregulation and a simple process for employers and employees to bargain over their wages and conditions. Mind you, that same legislation that was supposed to be simpler, fairer and more flexible was in fact much longer than the legislation that it replaced.

Here we have today further legislation, the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007, that itself runs to 80-odd pages with a lengthy explanatory memorandum. If it were the case that this was just a problem of perception, a misunderstanding or a loophole in the law that needed fixing, then why would we have this substantial amending bill before the parliament? The truth is that this is a major, major problem within the Work Choices legislation. In fact, it is a problem that cannot be solved by a simple amendment or even a bill containing 83 pages of changes; it can only ultimately be solved by throwing the legislation out and introducing a system that does incorporate fairness and flexibility for Australian workers and Australian employers.

These problems have come to light over the last 12 months or so—the classic cases of what happened at Spotlight, what happened and is still happening with Darrell Lea, what happened to the young workers of the Pow Juice company. They are all examples of where employees were either stripped of their award rights and conditions and placed on AWAs or terminated and re-employed on AWAs at a significantly reduced standard. As Senator Kirk said in her contribution earlier, it was the real purpose of the legislation to encourage that situation to occur, to provide those opportunities to employers and companies to do just that. I think it is to the credit of a lot of employers and companies in this country that they did not do that. But we also know that there were many who have done it and are increasingly being encouraged to do it—that is, to take advantage of legislation that enables them, without any real restriction, to take employees off award rates and conditions and place them on individual AWAs at reduced levels of entitlement. That is public knowledge. And there is a great fear out there in the community, a great concern, that left unchecked this will continue to be the norm.

I have spoken at a number of community forums, where I have heard mums and dads who have said, ‘It may not necessarily have happened in my workplace, but it’s happening in the workplaces of my children in the retail sector, and it’s particularly being used against younger workers or workers with very little if any industrial bargaining power.’ We have seen situations, of course, where employees were terminated one day, supposedly because of operational reasons, and then offered their jobs back the next day at a lesser standard. This government have sat by and only acted when it finally got to a point where they could not do anything but act because of the public outrage and the demonstrated unfairness of this system.

We also had the change to the unfair dismissal laws, where a business with up to 100 employees is not covered any longer and hence is free to terminate without reason or just cause. That change went well beyond what the government’s own proposal originally was, which is that unfair dismissal laws should be exempt for small businesses of up to 20 or 25 employees.

The very fact that this government has had to introduce what it calls a fairness test is in itself an admission that the current system is unfair. We could cut all of the speeches in this parliament back to that one simple proposition—it has overwhelmingly been demonstrated that the current system is unfair, so the government proposes to introduce what it calls a fairness test. We said it from day one; we told you this was the case. We said both in this parliament and publicly that this was unfair, un-Australian legislation, and we were proved right. But, of course, we have been attacked and pilloried from one end of the country to the other and told that we were just scaremongering or exaggerating and all the rest of the opprobrium that was heaped upon us. Well, we were right. Now this desperate Howard government is floundering around in a last-minute attempt to grab the life raft and try to save itself from the Prime Minister’s ideological obsession.

I want to discuss a couple of aspects of the bill. As has been said, we are supporting this bill because any improvement is better than none. As minuscule as it is, any improvement is better than none for this current system, but ultimately the only solution for the public is to throw this government out and elect a Labor government, which will fix the problems. This bill establishes two new statutory offices—a Workplace Authority and a Workplace Ombudsman. It also results in the employment of up to, I think, 300 extra staff or contractors to monitor the changes. That is a substantial change to introduce these two new statutory offices and an extra 300 staff to try and ensure that AWAs are fair. If that does not tell you that there is a major problem with the current legislation, then, frankly, you do not want to be convinced. And, of course, it demonstrates that the previously established machinery—the Employment Advocate and all the other fancy titles that the government has picked—have singularly failed to do their job. Maybe I am being a bit unfair to them. Maybe they were doing their job, but their job was not to find the problems, not to test the AWAs and not to apply fairness to them but to turn a blind eye. It cannot happen any longer, as the government itself acknowledges.

It is too little, too late. The bill may provide some marginal benefit in that it at least recognises that there are fundamental problems in the system, and it may help in some situations. However, the fundamental problems and the inherent unfairness of the Work Choices regime remain. For instance, these changes do not fully protect award conditions. The fairness test is limited to a small range of protected award matters, being those very few conditions of employment that this government legislated should be protected as award matters. These changes do not really do anything about ensuring that workers do not lose other conditions of employment that they are entitled to but that are not listed as protected matters under the legislation.

Furthermore, the changes only apply to employees earning less than $75,000 a year. Obviously, then, not all employees are covered by the amending legislation. There are problems with the definition of what is deemed to be fair compensation and there is no definition of what is meant by the term ‘exceptional circumstances’ when it is considered by the Workplace Authority Director. The process remains secretive and it is not subject to review. The Workplace Authority Director does not have to provide detailed reasons for a decision. So there are many areas, and I have named just a few, that this legislation does not even touch. They are areas where the Work Choices legislation is still manifestly unfair.

I refer to an advertisement that I saw in the newspaper the other day. At first I was shocked. It said: ‘Collective bargaining—making it easier to do business.’ It is an ad run by the Australian government Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources. I thought, ‘My god, the government has actually decided to promote collective bargaining. What a change that is!’ But then I saw that the ad read:

Collective bargaining: making it easier to do business, whatever the size of your business … Collective bargaining enables businesses of all sizes to work together co-operatively. Small businesses can benefit by joining together to negotiate with a larger business, who is their common customer or supplier. Larger businesses can find it more efficient to negotiate directly with a group of small businesses rather than each small business individually.

I thought: ‘My god, this is amazing!’ Then I wondered: ‘If you took out the word “businesses” and used “workers”, would that ad be published? No.’ I quote again:

Recent Australian Government reforms to the collective bargaining processes under the Trade Practices Act have established a new notification process. This will make it simpler, quicker and cheaper for small businesses to engage in collective bargaining.

What sheer hypocrisy! Your government is out there advertising and promoting to small businesses—maybe a range of small business suppliers—the opportunity to collectively bargain with larger businesses. It is okay for them to do it—and I do not object to that; I think it is a good idea, because very often it is the small businesses, the subcontractors, that get screwed by the contractors when it comes to what they are able to charge for their services—but it is apparently not good enough under this government for workers to have the same right. The right to collective bargaining is enshrined in ILO conventions and has been understood and accepted as a fundamental human right for a worker since the beginning of the industrial age. Workers should have the right to collectively bargain, but this government has done everything possible to discourage and take away those rights and to promote the concept that workers should negotiate individually. That is your mantra; that is your ideological position—that workers should be forced to negotiate individually with businesses whether those businesses be small or whether they be BHP. But at the same time you are out there advertising that small businesses have a need to band together to get some strength to negotiate with big business. You are promoting that but you are denying the same right to workers. What other shame and hypocrisy can this government show in that regard? As I said, this legislation is too little, too late, and it is going to be too late for the Howard government whenever the next election is called.

Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007. I have been amazed at the arrogance of my government colleagues throughout this debate. In fact, it never ceases to amaze me how out of touch and arrogant they are, particularly on this issue and the effect it has on Australian families. I see that the Howard government is up to its usual tricks trying to spin and spend as soon as it sees an election around the corner. Months out from an election, it is interesting to see the government scrambling to convince the public that these changes are something more than a distraction from the inherent unfairness of the Work Choices legislation. The central question is: if Work Choices is not broken, why does it need a fairness test? I am yet to hear a satisfactory explanation for this from the government. It is almost as if it were saying, ‘It is bad legislation but we are trying to make it a little less bad.’

We all know that this amendment is truly a reaction to the polls and to the prospect of the government finding out at the next election just how unpopular Work Choices is. It has been 13 months since Work Choices was introduced, and it has taken the government till now to realise that workers have been asked to trade away protected conditions. When it does react to the polls, it comes up with something that lacks substance—another example of a cynical government trying to distract the Australian public by offering something that sounds good but in reality offers nothing. A fairness test, indeed! The government has realised that Australians have seen Work Choices for what it is—an unfair and unbalanced industrial relations system that weights the system in favour of employers at the expense of workers. We have seen in the last 13 months many examples of this.

The changes in this bill do little to restore the balance that has been lost under the extreme Work Choices legislation. These changes do nothing to protect redundancy or long service leave. They are just another example of clever and cunning politics by this government. We in the Australian Labor Party think that the Australian public deserve better than that. We believe in a truly fair industrial relations system that gives everyone, both employers and employees, a fair go and the ability to work in a reasonable environment. It says a lot about the priorities of the Howard government that the fairness test this bill is supposed to implement does so little to fix the system that the government itself created. Make no mistake: Work Choices with all its unfairness is exactly what the Prime Minister intended, and it is imperative that we point out how unfair and unjust the system is to all Australians. But the government has been trying to hide the substance of Work Choices with spin; trying not to call its own legislation by the name he gave it: Work Choices. We all know what this unfair industrial relations system stands for. What else can we expect from John Howard? After all, he said, ‘Australian families have never been better off.’

I turn to some of the problems with this bill. I have noticed that this bill is called the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill. What an ironic title. There is no safety net under Work Choices, and the government is well aware of that, so I do not quite know what the government means by titling this amendment bill ‘A Stronger Safety Net’. It is just another example of its cunning and the tricky politics under the Prime Minister. The government obviously thinks it can again mislead the public into believing that it is strengthening something in Work Choices, when the sad reality is that it is just more clever Howard government window-dressing. The central point that must be made is that Work Choices is inherently unfair legislation. No number of fairness tests and fake safety nets can change its nature. Australians can see that this government is not interested in making the legislation truly fair, or even in looking after ordinary Australians. If it were, it would do more than wheel out these cosmetic changes with an election around the corner. It would implement a truly fair and balanced industrial relations system. All the government is interested in, as the Prime Minister himself puts it, is ‘pulling a rabbit out of the hat’ and playing election-year politics.

This is unacceptable when we are talking about the rights of Australian workers. We all know, at least on this side of the chamber, how Work Choices has failed Australian families and, in particular, Australian women. A close look at this bill shows that the so-called fairness test the government is trying to slip past the public is nothing more than a sham. It does nothing to fix the government’s hated Work Choices legislation. The only way Australians can be sure of restoring balance to the industrial relations system is by repealing the Work Choices laws and implementing the Labor Party’s industrial relations platform, dealing fairly between employers and employees.

This amendment is intended to help Australians on AWAs who trade away conditions, but it does nothing for those who are already on workplace agreements and have already traded away their conditions. Is the government going to do anything about those who have already lost their rights under Work Choices? Of course not. This government is forgetting about those workers and allowing them to continue to work without their protected conditions.

While we are talking about Work Choices let us remember that it is hardly a system in which an employee has a great deal of choice. If an employer decides not to bargain in good faith then they do not have to. The core of Work Choices has always been about taking away basic conditions such as penalty rates, overtime and shift loadings from workers. The Prime Minister can talk all he likes about fairness, but the cold, hard reality is that this attempt to hide the true nature of the Work Choices legislation has failed.

Once again the government resorts to advertising and spin to try to fool the Australian public into thinking that the system has changed, but they will not be fooled. The government has disowned Work Choices, but it continues to refer to it as the great hope of the labour market. We all know how extreme and unfair Work Choices has proven to be in practice. This government has no qualms about using taxpayers’ money to the tune of $4.1 million in order to tell everyone how fair this amendment is, but that is only the tip of the iceberg with regard to the advertising budget. Of course there was the $55 million spent in 2005 to explain to Australians that award conditions were protected. The proof that this was not the case is evident in this amendment. This legislation spends even more money though—more than $350 million of new money has appeared from nowhere to sell this amendment. This government, I have found, is very fond of names, and this amendment is no exception. Nearly everything is changing its name—from the Office of Workplace Services to the Office of the Workplace Advocate—all at the taxpayers’ expense, of course. But the substance of Work Choices stays the same. Once again, spin over substance.

I understand from reading the amendment bill that the government is going to employ hundreds of new staff to police these new changes. These contractors will be required to implement the so-called fairness test the government is proposing. This massive increase in both staffing and funding in the industrial relations sector represents a huge bureaucratic increase. According to forward estimates, the total additional funding will be a massive $1.83 billion—an enormous expenditure that the government has incurred in implementing and advertising Work Choices, but money that could have been put to better use designing and implementing a fair and balanced industrial relations system.

In my own state of Tasmania many working families are already struggling. Work Choices represents a further weakening of their bargaining power. Some are losing award conditions, like the workers taken over by United Petroleum in 2006—a case that is just the tip of the iceberg. ACTU research shows that Tasmanians on AWAs earned almost $100 a week less than their friends on collective agreements. There is no fairness in that. Labor’s approach to this amendment is that if it does no harm and if there is a possibility, as slim as that may be, that it makes a difference to even one worker then we will support it. If a worker is offered an AWA that strips away all 11 of their protected award conditions then this bill might prevent that AWA.

Of course we may never know because the mechanism on which the government is proposing to judge Australian workplace agreements is secret and non-renewable. That is what this bill does: it sets up a secret process under the Workplace Authority to determine whether an agreement is fair or not. The authority does this unilaterally without having to provide reasons for its decisions. It does not have to explain how it values the services provided by the employee, or the non-monetary value that it assigns to something provided by an employee. It does not even have to explain how it reached its decision and why it considers an agreement to be fair or unfair. There is also no scope for either side of the agreement—the employee or the employer—to make their feelings known. Is that fair? Of course it is not.

This bill also has something else that I find worrying—that is, a section that allows employees’ personal circumstances to be used when determining the industrial conditions that are offered to them. Surely an employee’s personal circumstances are just that—personal—and should not be used as a basis for determining their entitlements. This is truly worrying and once again proof of how the government’s rhetoric about fairness does not match its actions. Is it fair that an employee’s personal circumstances can affect their awards and entitlements? Of course, the government does not want to talk about these aspects of the bill.

Let me turn to the credentials that the Labor Party has on this issue. I would like to add something more about the Prime Minister who seems determined to bring up Labor’s economic credentials, and it is something that I think is worth pointing out. When John Howard was Treasurer in the Fraser government, all the way back in 1983, interest rates were high, inflation was 11 per cent and unemployment was 11 per cent. If we are going to talk about economic credentials, let us at least be fair about it and talk about the Prime Minister’s background on the subject.

The Labor Party, when it came to power in 1983, worked hard to rebuild the Australian economy and laid the basis for the sustained economic prosperity we have today. We did this partly by developing a fair industrial relations system, and working hand in hand with employers and employees to ensure that the best outcomes were achieved for all Australians. Sadly, Work Choices cannot be said to be doing the same.

In conclusion, it is a system and a process that John Howard has ripped up and changed in order to implement his own extreme industrial relations Work Choices legislation. This government does not believe in the conciliation and arbitration system. It does not believe in fairness. It does not believe in a balanced system. Work Choices exposes what the Prime Minister believes in—an unfair, extreme and unbalanced system that does nothing to deliver fairness at all.

Paul Calvert (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time for this debate has expired.

Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr President, I seek leave to have the remainder of my speech incorporated in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The incorporated speech read as follows—

He believes in a system where workers lack the real power to negotiate with their employer, where it is worker against worker, and conditions are something that are not guaranteed. The government is trying to be too clever by half. They cannot have it both ways; you cannot implement an unfair system and then try not to call it by name hoping that no one will notice. That is the action of a cunning and desperate government. Let us also not forget what the Treasurer said when asked—words to the effect that everything can change after the election. After the next election all bets are off for this government. Let us not forget Work Choices when that election comes around, and make this government accountable for failing the people of Australia.

In the end, this is the story of the Howard government. It is not, and never has been, about a fair go for ordinary Australians. It is about keeping power for as long as possible and using taxpayer money for its own ends. Not only does this government take away workers rights, but then it uses their tax dollars to tell them how much better off they are. That is what this government thinks of fairness. Australians should not make the mistake of thinking that this government cares about workers’ rights, and should send that message home to the Prime Minister through the ballot box at the next election. It is time for a fair system, it is time for balance in IR and it is time for Work Choices to be consigned to history.

Debate interrupted.