Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When I was last speaking in this debate, on 17 September, I was making the point that on the day that the bill was introduced Senator Leyonhjelm made a contribution which I think expanded on some of the mythology around this critical issue of penalty rates, which is at the heart of some of the points that many contributors to this debate will make. There is always an assumption in public conversation that it is young people who will be affected by this, that young people who are getting their first jobs should almost work for nothing, for the privilege of having a job, and once they have the skills they will transition to a proper wage in a proper way. This is a myth that simply needs to be called for what it is. It is not a reality. This piece of legislation sets up a structure for the underpayment of wages and attempts to put in place an absence of fair wages in the Australian context.

We should make no mistake that this bill absolutely represents a race to the bottom for workers' rights and employment standards in this country. The bill clearly wants to keep unions away from the bargaining table, going as far as undermining a worker's right to organise and be represented by a union. The bill wants to do away with penalty rates, which will have a devastating effect on regional and rural economies. It will certainly erase any discretionary spending from the equation when it comes to the family budget. The bill further promotes casualisation of the workforce, and the knock-on effects of that for job security and even workplace safety, as we heard in evidence provided by nurses at the Fair Work Taskforce hearing in Gosford in recent weeks, would be very significant.

One of the things that have happened in the interim, between the last time parliament sat and our return today, was a very important hearing of the Senate Education and Employment References Committee, chaired ably by my colleague Senator Lines, who is here in the chamber at this minute. Senator Lines chaired a hearing into the 7-Eleven disaster—the absolutely disgraceful set of business practices in which there has been systemic exploitation of an entire group of people working in those stores. It is so bad that in evidence received by the committee the Fair Work Ombudsman herself indicated that she would not be purchasing her bottles of water at 7-Eleven stores because she could not be confident at all that the people who were serving her were being paid fair and adequate wages.

On the afternoon that this bill was presented, I heard in the chamber a colleague on the other side, a Nationals senator from New South Wales, Senator John Williams, who is a man of great heart for the people of this country, restate another myth that has come to be part of Australia's business practices with regard to wages. I think he quoted John Laws and said, 'Eighty per cent of something is better than 100 per cent of nothing.' It is that entrenched attitude that seems to be applauded in some business circles—that you can underpay your wages and that that is okay, that that is an acceptable practice. It is so acceptable and so embedded in the conversations of this nation amongst unethical businesspeople that we are even having that mantra stated here in the federal parliament. What we should be having is people who are underpaying their staff being reported to authorities. People who are underpaying their staff should not be applauded as successful and good businesspeople.

Clearly, running a business and making a success of it are a vital part of the economy and the economic growth of our nation. Small businesses, particularly in regional areas such as where I live on the Central Coast, are the heart blood of our local economy. There are no big employers. It is all small business. Small businesses that care about their employees are paying them very well—very ethically. In my remarks on 17 September, I was able to speak about a wonderful, local, ethical employer. Instead of saying, 'Penalty rates, penalty rates; that's the thing that's making my business go under; I can't open on Sundays and Mondays,' which is what we are hearing over and over, an ethical businesswoman—and there are many of them who are speaking to me—came forward and said that the percentage of the income that she needs to spend on penalty rates amounts to two per cent of her turnover. There are much more significant items involving the cost, for example, of internet connection. That is something that would have been advantaged by the proper NBN getting to the people of the region of the Central Coast to make the cost to do business, using technologies, much better. That was a federal initiative that could have helped our local businesses, but instead what we see is this bemoaning of paying people fair wages and safe wages.

There are businesses around this country that should be acknowledged. There should be stickers going up on the door saying, 'I pay fair wages.' I am looking over here at a senator who has been a businessman in the course of his life. Businesses only grow when you look after your employees and when you pay them a fair and decent wage. When we are working on Saturdays and Sundays in this place, in this chamber—when the work of the parliament starts to happen on Saturdays and Sundays—then it will be time to get rid of penalty rates. Before that, it is an unethical call to ask of people who are giving time away from their families and away from their connections with other people through broader participation in the community in sport and in doing those things that we know are dedicated to the weekend. The need for rest and recovery and the mental health benefits are things that are well documented. But, regardless of that, we have senators advancing in this place legislation that would diminish the capacity for good people to just balance the books of their family budget—they are just balancing them—by being willing to sacrifice that family time for a period of their lives to be able to advance their life as a family and get a little bit more income to make it possible.

The hearings that we had with the Fair Work Taskforce across this country have been very significant in documenting exactly why we need to have proper union representation. Can I say that, if the unions had been able to get into the 7-Eleven stores, we would not have seen the disgraceful behaviours perpetrated by that company and its franchisees, who were complicit in, educated in and implicated in an unethical business model that could only stand on the exploitation of the labour of the people they were employing. I use the word 'employing' loosely, because they were not really employing people. They were putting people in their stores and coercing them by really manipulative means and then paying them way underneath the award wage—not only $12 and $15 an hour but down to $10 an hour, and in recent hearings we have been able to discern $6.85 an hour and claims of even $5 an hour.

The unions have a vital role to play for small businesses in their being able to go and have a look on a website to find out what a decent and fair wage that has been negotiated at a large workplace is. Small businesses use that information all of the time to pay wages that are fair to their employees. Small businesses that care about the sustainability of their business make sure that they look after their employees, because once you have somebody trained, and once your customer base is used to working with an individual that you have trained and got well prepared, you want to keep them there. You want to pay them fairly. What I fear for small business because of the sort of ill-advised legislation that we have before us here in the chamber is that we will see the further erosion of the kinds of conditions in which small business can genuinely thrive and grow. They are being undercut by unethical employers who are exploiting their own workforce.

The harshest aspect of the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014, and there are many dimensions to it but perhaps, arguably, the harshest aspect, was identified by Senator Lines and Senator Tillem, who said in earlier commentary on this legislation that it unfairly targets low-paid workers, workers with limited access to formal education and other vulnerable groups of workers who are left unrepresented at the mercy of informed employers. In short, that is a return to Work Choices.

There are people of a particular age in this country who well and truly understand the Liberal's mantra about taking away safe and secure employment, taking away the rights of good people who are working and undermining small business by not upholding the rule of law and fair wages within a legal framework. But there are young people who do not know about Work Choices. They were still in school when that campaign was run and they are entering workplaces now where this piece of legislation would make them more vulnerable than they already are, and we are seeing exploitation on an unbelievable scale. We know that the 7-Eleven scam that has been going on is being described as the tip of the iceberg. Multiple other franchises have been, by contagion, affected by the model that they have seen with 7-Eleven. As people have pointed out to me, the other petrol stations like United Petroleum—

Senator Marshall interjecting—

I appreciate the trigger from my colleague the Deputy President. The petrol stations, including ones like the United chain, are situated in sites that are more vulnerable even than the 7-Eleven petrol stations. How are these businesses able to continue without the model of exploitation that has been the signature for them? If the unions had been in there, there would be education of young people, of vulnerable people, of people who might have limited literacy and language skills who are great workers but do not understand everything about the industrial relations law of this country. And, maybe, when they get home, instead of looking up the website to find out what they are supposed to get, they get on with their community life. That is a vital role that the unions play. They provide a powerful educational role to help workers understand what their rights are and they help great employers understand what their responsibilities and rights are too so that the two can work together to advance lifting the workers and making businesses successful, profitable and sustainable. This is a much more sophisticated conversation that we can and we should be having. We should not allow this piece of legislation to go ahead because it will entrench disadvantage for the most disadvantaged.

I am really concerned that this piece of legislation before the Senate has been a true revelation of the attitudes of this government. Sadly, we know that so many of the Liberal members of this parliament are only there for their mates at the top end of town. We have a new Prime Minister, Mr Turnbull, who was a merchant banker in his former life—very, very different from the lives of the workers that I have been talking about today. The workers of the Central Coast region have had a chance to tell it like it is and it is a platform that this government certainly has not given them.

While the Productivity Commission is touted as being the body that is looking into these matters in workplaces, the reality is they have not bothered to take themselves to any regional areas across this country other than to Geelong. Regional economies vary significantly. As a senator for New South Wales, having been out in Broken Hill, Wagga, Hume and the other seats around this great state, the variation in the way businesses and local economies operate is really significant. But this government have not seen fit to go out and take the evidence on the ground. Instead, they are doing a wave-by tour of the Productivity Commission in the cities of this country. Regional Australia needs a voice. Regional workers are very, very vulnerable. This piece of legislation will make regional workers even more open to exploitation. I absolutely reject so many of the premises that underpin the methodology that has created the context of this bill. I urge senators to reject it if they believe in fairness for this country. (Time expired)

Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Isn't it good to be back. It is Monday morning and the Senate is back in session so there must be an attack on workers underway by the Liberal government. When I first came to work in this place in 2005, it was for Senator Rachel Siewert when she was our industrial relations spokesperson. I can very well remember the night in November 2005 when Work Choices passed this chamber. At the time, the trade union movement, the Labor Party and the Greens said, 'We will repeal this, no matter how long it takes.' Whether it is Prime Minister Howard, Prime Minister Abbott or Prime Minister Turnbull, the man in the suit may change but the message is the same. I do not know what it is in the coalition's DNA that has them come back time after time seeking to further erode the power imbalance between workers and employers, but here we are again.

The Senate has twice rejected the two pieces of legislation that formed a major part of the coalition government's attack on people's rights at work. The smoothness of the segue, the transition, from Prime Minister Abbott, whose loathing for the trade union movement and for working people generally was worn heart on sleeve for every minute that he was Prime Minister, may be that the sales pitch has improved but the legislation is still here. First order of business for the new sitting week under the new government, that new prime ministership, the new frontbench—the same legislation. What does that tell us?

I hope that the Senate rejects this Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014 as it has done to those that have come before it. But, right now, obviously we are very concerned that behind the scenes arms are being twisted and the crossbenchers are negotiating some kind of deal with the coalition to get this bill through. Like most on this side of the chamber, the Australian Greens have amendments circulated and our position on this bill is very clear: we oppose it. What the crossbenchers may or may not be able to hack together with the government over the course of the next few hours is yet to be seen because amendments are yet to be circulated. So it may not pass in its full current form, but it is possible, as we are standing here this morning, that some of the worst parts of this legislation could remain if the government talks the crossbenchers into opposing this bill.

One of our main concerns with the bill, as colleagues Senator Rice and Mr Bandt, the member for Melbourne in the other place, have made very clear is what it seeks to do on greenfields agreements—new sites, areas where new agreements are being formed. I wonder whether crossbench senators or those listening to this debate from outside the building are aware of what this legislation proposes to do. If it passes, there are changes here that will deny workers on big projects, new projects, greenfield sites, a voice on their own wages and conditions. These are the workers on new projects, whether they be mines, ports or LNG processing plants—greenfield sites around the country. In essence, it will mean that employers will be able to bargain with themselves and unilaterally determine the wages and conditions that workers on these projects receive without having to negotiate with trade unions or with the workers themselves. Think about that for a second; that is the very definition of a one-sided agreement—one which an employer negotiates with themselves.

It actually goes beyond this; it allows employers to choose which union they want to be their negotiating partner. Usually, it is the workers who get to choose who represents them—which union is involved in the negotiation—but this legislation goes against this and allows the employers to choose. Why would that be? Not only do employers get to pick the wages and conditions for workers; they also get to pick their own negotiating partners—who they will face-off with at the negotiating table.

This goes vastly beyond the recommendations in the Productivity Commission's draft report into workplace relations. The PC's draft report recommended, in fact, that the Fair Work Act be amended so that if an employer and a union have not reached a negotiated outcome for a greenfields agreement after three months, the employer may—and there are a couple of choices, 'continue negotiating with the union, request that the Fair Work Commission undertake last offer arbitration of an outcome by choosing between the last offers made by the employer and the union', so as far as the two negotiating parties were able to get it to, or 'submit the employers proposed greenfields arrangement for approval with a 12-month nominal expiry date.' That is bad enough, but this piece of legislation would not even allow this degree of compromise. Instead of employees and unions negotiating a decent, settled agreement on wages and conditions that work for both parties, as has been happening in this country for 115 years, this legislation would see employers be able to just wait it out for three months, or potentially six months if rumoured crossbench amendments pass, and they can then ask the Fair Work Commission to accept whatever they put on the table in an agreement negotiated with themselves—giving employees and unions no say at all. It is workplace unilateralism. The Greens think that workers are entitled to share in the wealth of this country, but this legislation appears to be about letting employers and companies earn even more profit from their projects and sidelining the people who actually do the work.

We have not heard many reports of projects not getting off the ground because of difficulties negotiating under the current legislation—I have not heard of any. What is the problem that this legislation is designed to solve? It is not an attempt to get more projects up. We have just gone through the greatest commodities boom in the history of this country—we had labour shortages; we had the dollar pushed up; we had skills shortages, and the desperation of employers to import workers from overseas rather than training them here. The economy has expanded at a ferocious rate. What is the problem that this bill is designed to solve? You would have to say that it is simply an attempt to give employers a greater share of the profits coming from agreements by shutting out their own workforce and those their workforce might choose to represent them for negotiating wages and conditions. That is what is going on here this morning.

We have, on behalf of Senator Janet Rice, our own amendments to the bill that would give workers better control of their work-life balance and more negotiating leverage as they negotiate their pay and conditions. I encourage the crossbench in the strongest possible terms to support these amendments to give people control of their work-life balance, rather than simply following along with the government's rush to remove the ability of workers on these big projects to take control of their pay and conditions and, indeed, their working lives.

The bill was first put forward by a government and a Prime Minister on a crusade to slowly but surely strip away the rights of Australian workers, and it seems that under this new leadership nothing has changed—maybe some of the language has changed; maybe the attitude has changed; maybe people are wearing better tailored suits, but the underlying dynamic is identical. It is done now with an undertone of fear and resentment because of the backlash and the sustained campaign that followed the decision to ram the Work Choices legislation through the Senate, as I can recall and my colleagues can recall. It has become a political truism that the Howard government was undone not just by that legislation but by that sitting fortnight in which the laws of terror, the welfare to work legislation, the Work Choices legislation, a bill to abolish compulsory student unionism and a bill to dump radioactive waste in regional Australia went through in one single sitting fortnight. Political historians consider that fortnight to have undone the Howard government—that overreach. The Greens and I were part of the campaign to roll that legislation back against the newly departed Kevin Andrews, whose political career appears to have been one catastrophic disaster after another. Now the coalition is a little gun-shy, and they are not front and centre pushing the same kinds of policies as they did under Work Choices—it is subliminal; it is a drip-feed; it is a bit at a time; an attack here and an attack there, and that is what we are seeing this morning.

This is a bill from a government that is continuing to put the profits of big business ahead of the rights of vulnerable Australian workers, because it is those very large corporations—some of them local and some of them offshore—that pay for their preselections, election campaigns and TV advertising. It is that end of town that bankrolls the Liberal-National Party, as it has been for time immemorial, and so it is a fairly easy dynamic to understand. What it results in, what it ends with—the final result, the final outcome—is a bill like the one that we see today. The bill that is about changing those minimum standards. It is not about giving people more flexibility unless it is the flexibility of being unemployed, the flexibility to be paid less, the flexibility of having your conditions traded off, and the flexibility of not being able to choose who represents you in negotiations that affect the rest of your life and your paying conditions in your workplace. That is not flexibility at all; that is something else.

When one looks through the provisions of this bill, you can see the government has gone back to the previous Fair Work review and cherry picked the nasty bits of it—the things that work to implement one side of the ledger, to shift the balance further in the direction of employers and away from fairness and away from workers; there is nothing here to balance that out on the other side. It is a hideously lopsided piece of legislation. We see the obsession of the government about employees having access to their union representatives at reasonable times. What on earth is wrong with that? How is that possibly controversial?

In many workplaces, often the only way that workers find out about what their entitlements are are from their union representatives. These are the people who study legislation, such as this, and who make it their life's work to stick up for people in the workplace. These are the people who can come into a workplace and say: 'No, there are laws to protect you. You are entitled to be paid properly as a member of the Australian community.' Yet what we see here, in this legislation, is the winding back of the provisions that would allow someone to come in and give that explanation.

We know that what some unscrupulous employers do at the moment, or certainly have done on many occasions in the past, is to say: 'Sure, you low-paid worker, you can find out what your minimum legal rights are, but I'll tell you what I'll do: I'll put the union representative, when they come during your lunch break, in the room next to my office. I'll sit there, with a clipboard, making a note of who comes in to get advice about what their minimum conditions are.' Not all employers, maybe not even most, but there are enough of them out there that we have to retain the role of the trade union movement in advising people of their workplace rights and entitlements, so they do not find themselves stigmatised or victimised or singled out for that. That is a workplace right that is as old as the Commonwealth of Australia. It is one of the things that has made this country, although we are suffering from growing inequality, and its egalitarian tradition such an important part of the prosperity of this country. We owe it to those organisers, workers, researchers and activists in the trade union movement that this government has worked so hard to demonise, whether it be through a ridiculous royal commission, or at the thousand little comments and sleights that even have taken their place in the course of this debate.

The law currently says that you cannot victimise workers for seeking the advice of a trade unionist, that you must strike the right balance between not disrupting the workplace and allowing people to find out what their minimum entitlements are. That is what the law says at present. And that is abolished under this bill. When you think about this from the perspective of a vulnerable worker, who may not even have English as their first language, who may not have another job to go to, who may not understand the complexities of our industrial relations system—how are they going to find out what their workplace rights are? Whose advice will they seek? The risk is that they will not seek advice; that will be the practicality of it. And that is not an accidental or an inadvertent or an unfortunate side consequence of this bill—that is what this bill was drafted to achieve: to prevent people from seeking that advice.

I note that there have been a number of amendments to the bill, and, most notably those proposed by members of the crossbench. It is important that the crossbenchers who have proposed these amendments in this chamber are aware of what these amendments do; particularly, if all we are trying to do is to polish this thing, which should not or could not be polished. I am saying that, obviously, in the context that these negotiations and this arm-twisting that is still going on in back rooms, even as this debate proceeds; I am certain of one thing: the final form of the amendments has not been circulated and made available to the chamber. This is not even really something that we should be debating; while senators on all sides—apart from those undertaking the negotiations and who are busy hammering out its final form—would not even know what the final form of this bill is going to be.

The amendments, which, as I understand it, are obviously subject to change as the debate proceeds are designed to remove part 2 of the bill, which says that if you happened to accrue annual leave loading and other reasonable measures during your time at work and it turns out you get sacked before you have the chance to take them, you will not get a full payout of your entitlements; you are only going to get part of it. That would be one possible marginal improvement—if part 2 is gone.

The proposal to take out part 3—and who drafts this stuff?—would remove the right of employees to take or accrue annual leave while they are receiving workers compensation. While the Greens welcome the removal of these provisions, if that is where this debate is going, we still cannot support the bill. The deal that the crossbench appears to be in the process of doing takes out some of the nasty provisions that the original bill contained but goes nowhere near far enough to protect the rights of vulnerable Australian workers. What the crossbench deal does not appear to remove from this bill are the provisions that would take away employees' rights to industrial action. This will tip the scales in favour of the employer during negotiations. The leverage is all on one side. The employer can say, 'There are plenty of others like you out on the street—if you do not like this, take your negotiations and find another employer.' The balance of power in these negotiations is frequently so asymmetrical—that is why it is important that we retain the right of workers to bargain and organise collectively and to have them in their workplaces with a full understanding of what their rights and entitlements are.

Industrial action is a part of that. It may be an unpopular thing to say in this day and age, but the right to organise collectively and the right to withhold labour are the reasons we have weekends, the reasons we have penalty rates and the reasons we have workplace safety laws that stop people from getting killed in their workplaces. These things were not all entirely negotiated patiently across a negotiating table. When push comes to shove, industrial action needs to be taken when employers threaten to walk away or to lock their workforce out. That is how these conditions of reasonable pay, reasonable conditions and workplace safety have been negotiated over the last few decades. Imagine going to your employer with a legitimate request for better pay or conditions and having the employer being unwilling even to have a conversation with you about it. You the employee have no legally protected course of action to make the employer come to the bargaining table.

Under this bill an employer gets to be the sole decision maker on what legislation and minimum standards apply in their workplace—it removes the negotiation element of bargaining and allows an employer to sit there, with their arms folded, and say 'Take it or leave it—we refuse to engage in discussions about an enterprise agreement'. It is deeply offensive that this bill will take away an employee's only power in this situation, which is to take industrial action. Under existing laws, if employers refuse to negotiate with their employees then the employees are able to commence stop-work meetings or even go on strike. When these options are taken away, so will be any semblance of constructive negotiation in the workplace. Why would employees even come to the table?

The Greens have amendments to this bill, which Senator Rice will speak to at the appropriate time, that will genuinely make work fairer. Our amendments propose to give workers more job security and allow working Australians to have the flexibility that works for them, so that they can have the time off to pick up the kids, to drop them off at school or to look after a sick grandparent. The average full-time working week in Australia is 44 hours, the longest in the Western world. Dr Richard Denness and his colleagues at the Australia Institute have documented over a period of years the additional vast hours of unpaid overtime that workers put in, unless they are working to rule—which so few people do. We perform $72 billion in unpaid overtime each year.

Just over half of all Australians want to change their hours of work. We have chronic unemployment and underemployment on the one hand and chronic overwork and a massive amounts of unpaid overtime on the other hand. We need to connect the dots. Surveys show that, on average, full time employees would like to work about 5.6 hours less per week, while part-time workers would like to work on average another four hours per week. We can see where this is going. Research shows that working hours are impacting on wellbeing, with poorer health and greater use of prescription medications. It affects people's personal and family lives. Sixty percent of women feel consistently time pressured and nearly half of men also feel this way. In this country we need to better match the hours people want to work with the hours they actually work—on both sides, with some people demanding less and some more. If people want to work different hours or work from home so that their life is better, then the law should allow that, provided it does not unduly impact on their employer. That is what negotiation is for—but they should not be one-sided negotiations. In fact, allowing workers more flexible hours will be a productivity boost for the economy—as many employees have shown.

Business will benefit from the reforms in these proposed amendments that the Greens have circulated. Good employers are already promoting work-life balance. This will not be news to those thousands of ethical employers around the country who already make this a part of their business practice. In this parliament we should be working to improve and protect the rights of Australian workers and not passing bills that see those rights eroded day after day in bill after bill

Jo Lindgren (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014. This bill will deliver on key aspects of our election policy and does not go any further. Indeed, on union workplace access, individual flexibility arrangements and the removal of the ability to strike first and talk later, we are delivering on specific policy promises that were made by the Labor Party prior to the 2007 election but that Labor deliberately broke.

The coalition's Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014 gives effect to a number of commitments in our policy and further restores balance to the system. The bill does this by improving the process for the negotiation of greenfields agreements to ensure that unions can no longer frustrate bargaining for these agreements through unsustainable claims and delays, which can then threaten investment and delay the commencement of major new projects that are crucial to our prosperity;    restoring union workplace access rules to those in place prior to Labor's unbalanced amendments and dealing with excessive right of entry visits by union officials; improving workplace productivity and flexibility by enhancing the scope for employees to make individual flexibility arrangements that meet their genuine needs as determined by those employees;·closing the 'strike first, talk later' loophole in the good-faith bargaining rules, which Labor refused to address; and maintaining the value of unclaimed wages recovered for workers by the Commonwealth. This bill also enacts a number of recommendations from the Fair Work Act Review Panel in its 2012 report commissioned by the now Leader of the Opposition, Mr Bill Shorten.

The Fair Work Amendment Bill will address the current imbalance in union workplace access rules. Our changes will fairly and sensibly balance the right of employees to be represented in the workplace if they wish to be with the right of employers to go ahead with their business without unnecessary disruption. The coalition government sees right of entry as a specific statutory privilege to which conditions ought to apply. Regrettably, some union bosses do not.

In 2007, the Labor Party promised on multiple occasions that there would be no changes to the union right of entry laws. Many businesses face excessive workplace visits from unions, even when their employees are not union members and have not asked for union presence. The problem has been exacerbated in some workplaces by unions competing to represent employees at the workplace. The problem was highlighted by the former government's Fair Work Act Review Panel, which noted that the Pluto LNG project received over 200 right of entry visits in only three months. BHP Billiton's Worsley Alumina plant faced 676 right of entry visits in a single year. Our changes will reduce the capacity for unions to deliberately harass and disrupt businesses in this way. A recent case featuring CFMEU National President Joe McDonald has underlined the urgent need for these reforms. In this case, where Mr McDonald and the CFMEU were fined $193,600, he ignored the consultant's request to leave a Citic Pacific Sino Iron Ore project site in Western Australia. This type of vitriol has no place in modern and fair workplaces.

To be clear, these amendments will enact Labor's publicly stated promise prior to the 2007 election—a promise that was not honoured. Given that the Labor Party in opposition, with the strong support of the union movement, supported this 2007 policy platform, we expect that these amendments should not be contentious. Most union officials will find these changes are not impacting their sensible approach to their right of entry activities.

Currently, right of entry for discussion purposes can only occur when the relevant union is entitled to represent the industrial interests of the employees at the workplace. This means unions can enter and hold discussions even if they have no actual members at the workplace and no-one has sought their presence.

The bill will amend the provisions so that the ability for unions to enter a workplace is tied to either the union's recognised representative role at the workplace or employers at the workplace having requested the union's presence. A union will only be entitled to enter a workplace for discussion purposes if they are covered by an enterprise agreement or they have been invited by a member or employee they are entitled to represent.

If the employee who would like the union to come to their workplace wishes to remain anonymous, the union will be able to apply to the Fair Work Commission for an invitation certificate. The Fair Work Commission must issue a certificate if it is satisfied that a worker who performs work on the premises and whom the union is entitled to represent has invited the union to the workplace to hold discussions. The certificate will not identify the employee who has made the request. This will restore the balance in the right of entry regime so that it is similar to what it was prior to the commencement of the Fair Work Act, consistent with the bipartisan consensus at the time of the 2007 election.

This bill will also provide effective mechanisms for the Fair Work Commission to deal with disputes about excessive right of entry visits for discussion purposes. The previous government's amendments to the Fair Work Act in this area were drafted in a way that renders them largely ineffective and only able to be used in extreme circumstances, where there has been an unreasonable diversion of the occupier's critical resources. These amendments will remove this restriction to ensure the commission has the power to properly deal with the excessive right of entry visits—for example, by suspending, revoking or imposing conditions on an entry permit.

Additionally, the amendments provide that the Fair Work Commission can take into account the combined impact of visits by all unions to the workplace, reflecting that in some circumstances an employer will be subject to visits by multiple unions. The bill will also repeal the government's amendments made in 2013 that expanded union right of entry rights even further by allowing for uninvited lunch room invasions and requiring employers to pay for union boss joy-rides to remote worksites. Those amendments give unions the right to insist on addressing workers in their lunch room, even when the workers have not requested their presence and are not union members. This is unfair to the 87 per cent of private sector workers who are not union members and to all workers that just want to eat their lunch in peace.

This bill will restore the sensible arrangements that were previously in place, whereby union officials must comply with a reasonable request by the employer to hold discussions in a particular room. Employers will continue to be prevented from nominating locations with the intention of intimidating, discouraging or hindering employees from participating in discussions. The former government had also introduced obligations on employers at remote worksites to provide union officials with transport and accommodation to enable them to access those sites. We will repeal this costly and onerous piece of regulation and instead reinstate the previous approach, where unions and employers can reach their own arrangements in these circumstances.

This bill will remove the effective union veto power over greenfields agreements which has enabled them to frustrate the making of these agreements by seeking exorbitant wages and conditions, or refusing to agree at all. As the former government's Fair Work review noted, in somewhat understated language, these practices 'potentially threaten future investment in major projects in Australia'. They have already delayed major resource projects worth billions of dollars. This is bad for jobs and bad for the economy.

The bill will extend good faith bargaining to the negotiation of greenfields agreements to improve standards of bargaining conduct. This will mean that employers and unions will be required to, for example, attend and participate in meetings with each other, and consider and respond to proposals in a timely manner. To ensure that greenfields agreements can be made in a timely manner, the bill will establish a new, optional three-month negotiation time frame. The three-month time frame will apply where appropriate notice is provided by an employer to the relevant union or unions. If an agreement cannot be reached in this time frame, the employer will be able to take its proposed agreement to the Fair Work Commission for approval. The agreement will have to satisfy the existing approval requirements under the Fair Work Act, including the better off overall test. The agreement will also have to satisfy a new requirement that it provides for pay and conditions that are consistent with the prevailing standards within the relevant industry for equivalent work. Consistent with the existing framework, the Fair Work Commission must also be satisfied that the union or unions to be covered by the agreement are able to represent the majority of future employees.

The amendments to the greenfields provisions will help to unlock new investment and prevent needless delays to new projects. This will provide confidence and certainty to investors and ensure that Australia and Australians benefit from the prosperity generated by new projects. These amendments will send a strong message to overseas investors that Australia is open for business and that projects can get underway quickly.

The bill will remove the 'strike first, talk later' loophole under the Fair Work Act, consistent with the promises of the Labor Party prior to the 2007 election and the recommendation of the Fair Work Act Review Panel. In his speech to the National Press Club of 17 April 2007 the then Labor Leader said:

Industrial disputes are serious. They hurt workers, they hurt businesses, they can hurt families and communities, and they certainly hurt the economy … They—

employees—

will not be able to strike unless there has been genuine good faith bargaining'.

This is not the case under the Fair Work Act, where employees are allowed to strike before bargaining has even commenced. The bill will amend the Fair Work Act to provide that protected industrial action can only be taken if bargaining for a proposed agreement has commenced. This amendment will mean that industrial action cannot be the first step in the bargaining process, restoring a balanced and harmonious approach to enterprise bargaining. The coalition will fix this loophole. In doing so, Labor's 2007 promise will finally be implemented.

The bill introduces amendments to provide clarity and certainty for employees around the use of individual flexibility arrangements. IFAs are an important tool introduced by Labor with the intent of enabling workers and their employers to mutually agree on conditions that suit their needs, while ensuring that employees are better off overall compared to their underpinning employment instrument. IFAs ought to be an important option to enable employees to, for instance, manage their childcare or other caring arrangements, to spend time with family or to have time for other commitments. They are specific to the individual and not designed as a management tool for a business. These amendments about IFAs are based on the Fair Work Act Review Panel recommendations. They also include further new safeguards to ensure that employees are better off.

To be clear, the current IFA framework in the Fair Work Act will stay, with additional protections put in place. This means that an employer cannot force an employee to sign an IFA or make it a condition of employment, and the employee must be better off overall than they would have been under the applicable modern award or enterprise agreement. A worker must provide a statement to the employer saying that the IFA meets their genuine needs and that they are better off overall. Under the current system, unions can restrict the scope of flexibility terms under enterprise agreements through the bargaining process to only cover a single matter, for instance the taking of leave. This means that workers may be denied the chance to have IFAs on other matters even if they and their employer want to agree to more suitable arrangements. The amendments will deliver on the promises made by Labor in 2007 and provide that IFAs may be made in relation to all of the matters currently prescribed in the model flexibility term, to the extent that those matters are covered in the agreement. This will ensure that workers have access to fair flexibility without a veto by union bosses.

The bill also implements the Fair Work Review Panel recommendation that employers should, in limited circumstances, have a legal defence if they enter into an IFA in good faith believing it meets all the requirements of the legislation when it turns out later it does not. The defence will only apply where the employer believed on reasonable grounds that all statutory requirements had been met in relation to the IFA. The bill will also strengthen protections for employees by requiring a statement setting out that the arrangement meets their genuine needs and results in them being better off overall. This will make the position absolutely clear: employees will only make IFAs that provide for non-monetary benefits when the employees themselves make a clear statement in writing why they are better off overall.

Two further amendments recommended by the Fair Work Act Review Panel will be made to provide clarity and certainty to both employers and employees. First, the unilateral termination period for IFAs made under enterprise agreements will be extended from 28 days to 13 weeks, consistent with the position for awards. In addition, the 13-week unilateral termination period for both modern awards and enterprise agreements will be placed in the legislation.

The second amendment will confirm the existing position that the 'better off overall' test for IFAs can be satisfied by exchanging monetary benefits for benefits that are not monetary. This is already the case under the legislation, as introduced by the Labor Party, that operated while the Leader of the Opposition was the workplace relations minister. This position has been confirmed by the independent Fair Work Ombudsman. The amendment, combined with the government's new requirement for a statement in writing from the employee, will provide greater protection and certainty for all parties.

All other rules relating to the IFAs will be retained, including that they cannot be made a condition of employment, that they must leave the employee better off overall and that they must be genuinely agreed to. Anyone who opposes these amendments needs to explain to the Australian workers why they should not have the opportunity to be better off overall and if these arrangements genuinely meet their own needs, as assessed by themselves.

The bill will also implement a number of other common sense recommendations that were made by the now Leader of the Opposition's Fair Work Act Review Panel in 2012 but not implemented by the previous government. The bill will clarify the interaction between leave and workers compensation by removing an exception that allows employees in a few jurisdictions to accrue or take leave while absent from work and receiving workers compensation. This will remove inconsistencies and confusion that currently exist for employees and employers and ensure that employees on workers compensation across the country are treated consistently.

In line with the Fair Work Act Review Panel's recommendation, the bill will clarify the circumstances where annual leave loading is payable when a person leaves their job. The change will restore the long-standing position that employees are only entitled to annual leave loading when their employment ends if it is expressly provided for in their award or workplace agreement. This will address the confusion that currently exists as a result of the legislation and numerous awards adopting different positions. It will still allow for annual leave loading to be paid—including after employment has ended—if it is in the employee's modern award or enterprise bargaining agreement.

The bill will introduce a requirement that an employer must give an employee who has requested to extend their unpaid parental leave a reasonable opportunity to discuss the request unless the employer has already agreed to the request. To be clear, this discussion does not need to be face-to-face but can occur by other means, for example a teleconference or videoconference.

The bill will make changes to the transfer-of-business rules to assist the transfer of employees who wish to move between associated entities voluntarily. Currently, if an employee wants to take on a new position with an associated entity of his or her employer, there needs to be an application to the Fair Work Commission to prevent the employee's industrial instrument transferring with them. Under the changes, the terms and conditions of employment at the new employer will automatically apply to an employee transferring between associated entities on their own initiative. This change will reduce red tape for employers and employees in such circumstances.

In line with the recommendation of the Fair Work Act Review Panel, the bill will give the Fair Work Commission clear powers to dismiss unfair dismissal proceedings 'on the papers' without conducting a conference or hearing in certain circumstances, such as where an applicant fails to attend a conference or hearing or fails to comply with an order or direction made by the commission. The bill includes safeguards to ensure procedural fairness for the parties before matters can be dismissed. This will help prevent employers incurring unnecessary costs in defending a claim that is not being pursued seriously by the applicant.

The greenfields agreements allowed for in this bill will allow prospective employers and unions to negotiate terms and agreements prior to the commencement of a genuine enterprise agreement. Why is this opposed? Perhaps it is the requirement to start in good faith, not to come in seeking the very payments that we are hearing about now. Currently, unions are in the position to withhold any agreement prior to the new project commencing—although it is quite clear, as we are hearing from the Heydon inquiry, that the Hon. Bill Shorten and the CFMEU have developed a technique to help along new enterprises.

What is so wrong with greenfields agreements? They allow both workers and employers to know the terms and conditions in advance of a project starting. The workers will know what their entitlements are prior to accepting employment. The employers can forward plan and everybody benefits. If a union is truly concerned for their members why would they be happy for them to walk into an unknown set of conditions? I commend this bill to the House.

Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If we think about the vision that I think most Australians have for our economy and for our workplaces, it is for workplaces that are productive, innovative and fair and a society of equals, not a society of haves and have-nots and not a society where people, despite working routinely, find themselves poor and unable to meet the basics of life. We are a community that have always prioritised fairness. It does not mean that we are not interested in innovation, productivity and prosperity, but we understand that fairness and prosperity go hand in hand and that this must be underpinned in our workplaces by a fair distribution of the fruits of our collective efforts at work.

Unfortunately, this Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014 is yet another indication that this is a government which in no way shares this vision; a vision which, yes, is held by the Australian Labor Party but which is also reflective of the views of the Australian people. In recent days, we have seen the Prime Minister talk about penalty rates on Sundays as being an accident. Well, I can inform the Prime Minister that penalty rates are not an accident of history. They have been hard fought. They reflect a recognition that people working on Sundays make great sacrifices away from their family, away from their friends and away from the community organisations they value and that penalty rates are a fair recompense for the sacrifices they make.

They also reflect the fact that wages and conditions in this country and the distribution of profits are hard fought for. Working people in our country have always banded together to ask for a fair deal from the employer. It is a part of our political tradition, it is a part of our workplace tradition and it is a tradition that I am happy to defend. It is a tradition that sees a country like Australia enjoy higher than average wages compared to our OECD counterparts and it is also a tradition that sees employees in this country face higher than usual levels of job security. I know there are some on the other side who would see this as a problem. They would probably describe this as the problem that needs to be solved, but this is not a problem that needs to be solved.

Good wages, good working conditions and job security are the cornerstone of communities that are able to sustain happy homes, happy communities and productive enterprises. They are not a problem. It is important when we hear this endless talk about flexibility from the government that we think seriously about the flexibility that we are talking about. For some in this chamber, it is always about flexibility for the employer. It is never about flexibility for the staff member who may have caring responsibilities or who may have a desire to contribute to their community outside of the workplace. It is never even about the kind of kind of flexibility in the workplace that can to lead to improvements in productivity or lead to innovation. It is only ever about the kind of flexibility that transfers risk onto working people, the kind of flexibility that transfers costs onto working people and the kind of flexibility that shifts the share of profit and wages to employers.

Senator O'Neill was in the chamber earlier and she spoke about the situation at 7-Eleven. In recent months, we have had a graphic demonstration of the power imbalances that exists in workplaces when working people do not have access to a union and when working people are not in a position to bargain fairly with employers. The naive idea that a conversation between an employee and employer occurs on even terms without the involvement of a union or some form of organisation or protection is one that really cannot be sustained in the face of what we have seen in the 7-Eleven scandal.

When I look at this bill, what disappoints me about it is that, yet again, the key provisions in the bill are about reducing the role of trade unions, reducing the right of working people to independently express their views in the workplace and increasing the ability of employers, just some employers, to wind down and to screw down the entitlements that have been hard fought and which sustain the Australian way of life.

Other speakers have made much of the fact that this legislation arises from a review initiated by Bill Shorten when he was the minister—indeed, that is correct. In 2011, he announced a three-member panel to review the acts that make up the government's Fair Work legislation. The panel was asked to assess the operations of the act and the extent to which its effects have been consistent with its stated objectives and to report on the extent to which legislation was operating as intended. At the time, Minister Shorten said:

The Fair Work Act underlines a balanced system for good workplace relations — one that promotes national economic prosperity and social inclusion for all Australians. Real economic prosperity and growth requires fairness and security in the workplace.

That was the basis on which the review was undertaken. The Labor government was committed to a system that allowed for efficient and effective negation between staff and management. In undertaking the review, they received over 250 submissions from unions, from employer associations and from industry groups. However, despite the fact that a strong set of recommendations were produced, this bill goes much, much further than anything that was contemplated by that review, and it has specific and serious problems in relation to the role of unions and in relation to the security of hard-fought entitlements.

I want to turn now to the provisions in relation to greenfield sites. The government has said that its changes to greenfield agreements will ensure that agreements will be subject to good-faith-bargaining requirements, but in reality the changes that are proposed mean the exact opposite. It is very important that workers and their representatives participate in genuine bargaining over workplace conditions, particularly in new projects. Of course we want to see new investment, and we want to see new investment in new industries in this country. Our future prosperity depends on it. It depends on new investment, new industries and new kinds of jobs in new parts of the country. But this prosperity cannot and should not be built on the back of unfair working conditions. Workers need to have a genuine role in determining the conditions of work at these new workplaces.

The changes in this bill mean that employers will gain absolute control over which unions they choose to negotiate with. After an employer agrees to bargain with an employee organisation, the employer at any time can issue a notice to commence a three-month notified negotiation period, and this countdown clock does not stop once it starts. An employer could essentially walk away from the negotiating table and simply wait for those three months to expire. At the end of the three months, the employer—and only the employer—can take a proposed agreement to the Fair Work Commission for assessment and approval. These are not arrangements that are conducive to good-faith bargaining or to fairness for workers.

It is time that the government put aside its ideological pursuits and started to accept that enterprise bargaining is a two-way street. It is a conversation between all the people in the workplace that are needed to make a productive and efficient workplace. It is not an employer driven dead end, and it should not be. The provisions in this bill about greenfield sites are not reasonable provisions. They are designed to wind back conditions, and they risk the evolution of Australian industries that are built on poor conditions rather than on innovation and productivity.

I want to turn too to the arrangements for individual flexibility agreements. This bill amends these so dramatically that they are, in essence, Work Choices AWAs. The bill will allow monetary benefits to be traded away for non-monetary benefits. That might be reasonable, but this provision in this bill goes significantly further than the expert panel's recommendations. The expert panel suggested that, if a non-monetary benefit is being traded for a monetary benefit, the value of the monetary benefit forgone must be relatively insignificant, and the value of the non-monetary benefit being gained should be proportionate. Despite this very clear prescription in the recommendations, these terms 'relative insignificance' and 'proportion' are missing from the government's bill.

These were important and strong protections. We are not a country where we accept that it is okay for people to be paid in food, for example. These are not provisions that should be considered reasonable, particularly when we are considering people who are in poor bargaining positions, who may not be in a position to assess, themselves, whether the conditions that are being proposed in any way leave them better off or worse off. We are not often talking about people with extensive legal backgrounds; we are talking about individual workers, sometimes with low levels of education, who deserve, both from their union and from the government, serious oversight and protection when making arrangements of this kind.

That brings me to the next problem with the bill. Other speakers have spoken about the fact that there is a new good-faith defence for employers who can demonstrate that, at the time they formed an individual agreement, they were acting in good faith that they were in compliance with the Fair Work Act, particularly in relation to the employee being better off overall. The expert panel was very explicit about how this should work. It explicitly recommended that, upon making an individual agreement, the employer should notify the Fair Work Ombudsman in writing. That is because the Fair Work Ombudsman has a role in overseeing the overall evolution of industrial relations in this country, in particular to make sure that we are not seeing pockets or individual examples of gross unfairness as people work their way through the industrial relations system. But no such requirement is included in this bill. Instead, an employer will be able to rely on their reasonably held belief that they were compliant with the act, and they will be able to provide a proposed 'genuine needs' statement, which the employee may have signed, as evidence of this belief.

Let us think about how this would actually work. An employee is called into the office and told that their continuing employment is dependent on signing such a statement. There is no requirement that the employee in this situation be informed that they can provide this new flexibility agreement to their union for review. There is no requirement that the employee be informed that they do not have to sign immediately, that there is a cooling-off period. And there is no requirement that the employee be informed that they do not need to sign it at all, that they can continue to work in that place, dependent on the award, without trading away their conditions, and still retain their employment.

This is not fair, and it is particularly unfair for those workers who are in a precarious position, for whom every dollar coming into the household means the difference in being able to pay the bills, buy the groceries and pay the rent. These are not reasonable conditions under which a person can bargain with an employer, because it is simply an unequal relationship. It is beyond me why the government would not have included provisions for oversight of these kinds of arrangements from the Fair Work Ombudsman or stronger protections for workers who are asked to sign agreements of this kind.

I want to talk a little bit about the significance of award conditions and the kinds of people who are dependent on awards, because there is an idea that what we are talking about here are a small number of very, very well paid individuals cushioned by special arrangements. When we are talking about people who are protected by awards, nothing could be further from the truth. There are many employees in this country who are solely reliant on the award for their pay and conditions, and they are typically those groups of workers with very little bargaining power. According to the Workplace Research Centre, 55 per cent of all casual employees, 61 per cent of all female employees and 65 per cent of all part-time employees rely solely on the award for their conditions. These are not wealthy people. Seventy-five per cent of those who are reliant on the award for their conditions earn less than $18.60 an hour. These are our neighbours, our friends, our colleagues, the people in our community organisations and they are people whose conditions need to be protected. They are people who are likely to be struggling to meet basic necessities, they are people who do not enjoy extravagant family holidays but this bill does absolutely nothing to support those people; instead, it allows award conditions to be traded away with little scrutiny, little oversight and little protection or access to unions. What is shocking about this, of course, is that none of this was signalled by the government prior to the last election; indeed, the exact opposite was promised.

The then leader—yes, he was the leader—Mr Abbott, was asked: will you be tinkering with unfair dismissal laws and will you be winding back penalty rates? Mr Abbott, at that time, said, 'The short answer is no to both questions.' Senator Abetz was asked questions in similar terms and he made similar kinds of guarantees. Will Tony Abbott guarantee he will not rip away rest breaks and long service leave? The answer is yes. But of course these were not promises that have been kept. In government, what we have seen is the endless pursuit of small ways of winding back the opportunities for working people to represent themselves in their workplaces and the provisions that have been secured through these means.

Unfortunately this bill, proceeding under a new Prime Minister—Prime Minister Turnbull—is yet another indication that absolutely nothing has changed. The Turnbull government, like all other Liberal governments before it, just do not get it on workplace relations, just do not understand what it means to work an ordinary job and to be reliant on a fair, safe and reasonable workplace. We see it in the way that they approach quite reasonable requests from the Labor Party to have a sensible conversation about the labour market testing provisions around ChAFTA. We see it in their ongoing insistence that penalty rates should be on the table even though we know that penalty rates are a core component of just making do for many ordinary families around the country and we see it in the changes that are before us in this bill.

What is so frustrating about this government's continuing fixation with shifting the share of wages and profits is that it occurs without any deep thought about what would actually be required to lift productivity in Australian workplaces. We do need to improve productivity. We do need to identify new sources of economic growth but there is very little evidence from the government side that any of this is really on the table. There is no deep thought about managerial capability in Australian workplaces. There is no deep thought about science and innovation and the collaboration between our businesses in Australia and our world class researchers. There was a second-rate and expensive broadband project with no real thought about how a genuine broadband transformation could generate new industries built on new services and products. There is no serious thought about skill formation; no thought about the way that working people, school leavers, people at university are going to form up the skills that will support them through a lifetime of contribution to innovative and productive workplaces. This bill does not seek to pursue any of these things, and we do not hear the government talking about these things either. Instead, we just see yet another bill which seeks to restrict the ability of ordinary people to participate in their union and we see a bill that makes it easier to strip away hard-fought conditions without any scrutiny from the mechanisms of oversight that were put in place to protect workers.

Sadly, this bill indicates that when it comes to working people, absolutely nothing has changed. This is a one-sided government that can only ever see one side of the story, that does not empathise with the real circumstances of ordinary people and that will never give up its war on working people.

Linda Reynolds (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise today in support of the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014.

Four months prior to the 2013 federal election the coalition's policy to improve fair work laws was released. Since forming government in 2013, we have been implementing our workplace relations election commitments; nothing more, nothing less. We have already established the Registered Organisations Commission and re-established the Australian Building and Construction Commission, and we have taken measures to support very comprehensive measures to support small business.

We promised Australia would be open for business and we are delivering on that promise by restoring certainty to the workplace relations system and ensuring that the relevant legislation and regulations are more balanced and more effective in the 21st century. Great outcomes are realised when passionate people from all different sectors in our community come together to pursue common goals; goals underpinned by a desire to adapt, a desire to transform and a desire to evolve our economy and our society. Change occurs when people are not fearful of that change but instead find a way to work together to collaborate and to embrace that change.

Business, government, community organisations and trade unions all play an important part in preparing our nation for the future. I believe that that has never been more important than it is today. Internationally there is increasing recognition of the importance of collaboration and cooperation to facilitate innovation, economic development and of course the jobs of the future for all Australian workers.

Innovation is essential in every industry, not just to thrive but simply to survive. Today, if you stand still, you go backwards. In the era of the internet of everything—and increasingly liberal trade arrangements—without rapid and continual adaptation, standing still means death; and not just for individual businesses and the jobs that go with them but also for whole industries which support our economy.

Trade unions must absolutely have a role, not only in protecting those they represent but also in engaging in debate about how we can create and sustain the jobs of the future in the economy of the future. I believe that the old-style union tactics and mindset, which are so clearly apparent in the royal commission, have absolutely no place in preparing this economy and our workers for the jobs of the future.

Despite all the emotion, the rhetoric and the flourishes from those opposite, the amendments in the Fair Work Amendment Bill will help Australian businesses embrace the jobs of the future, and expand and deliver high real-wage growth, while ensuring that fair work laws maintain a strong and enforceable safety net for all Australian workers.

The state of Western Australia—my own home state—is a clear example of the evolving nature of workplaces in Australia and the need for change in order to grow. In my own state, as nationally, no one government, no single level of government, no single business or industry group or indeed trade union organisation, can do it alone.

Take the case of manufacturing. If you just listen to the prevailing national debate and narrative on the future of manufacturing in Australia, you could be forgiven for thinking that high-end manufacturing has no place anymore in this country. But I can tell you that Western Australia is living, breathing proof that this is simply not true. Nationally for the last 14 years manufacturing has been increasing on average by only 0.4 per cent per annum, but in my own home state of Western Australia over the last 14 years manufacturing has in fact been increasing by nearly five per cent every year. In fact today, from Western Australia alone, we export well over $20 billion worth of high-end manufactured goods to the rest of the world, in addition to what we are producing for the rest of the country. That is a fact that has until now been overshadowed by the sheer volume of our resource sector exports.

Western Australia has almost 9,000 manufacturers, employing 91,000 workers. But their competitive advantage lies not in labour costs but in the ability of their workforce to innovatively produce high-quality and high-value bespoke goods. So the issue for us today in Western Australia, as it is in the rest of the country, is: how do we collaborate, how do we work together, to help those manufacturing industries, those 91,000 workers, adapt to the post mining and construction phase, to survive and to thrive in new domestic and emerging international markets?

My own home state of Western Australia has always been trade exposed, and we understand that to be internationally competitive we need to innovate to keep being productive and to keep offering those high-value manufactured goods. But, for that, we need to understand also that we need to be able to commercialise. How do we do that? Growth and competitiveness are increasingly driven internationally by education—skills and training. It is also driven by developing financial markets and increased access to foreign markets. And, critically, growth and competitiveness are increasingly driven internationally by the subject of the bill before us today: the availability of well-functioning goods and labour markets.

So how do we measure our performance? And what does this government need to do—and what do all governments need to do—to create this environment? A good place to start and a good indicator of where we sit is to look at the Bloomberg Innovation Index, in which Australia is ranked 13th out of 50. There is also the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index innovation pillar, in which we sit at 23rd of 140. They are not bad statistics, but they clearly indicate where policy at all levels of government needs to focus to get us further up towards No. 1.

But I think the most alarming statistic, which should concern all of us in this place, is that, when you have a look at Australia's future prospects for jobs, currently we sit at 39th out of 40 OECD countries in commercialisation. Think about the implications of that: 39th out of 40 in our ability to commercialise innovation. That translates into an appalling record in commercialising in new industries for jobs. That, I believe, is where we all need to work together to improve.

So what are some of the areas that—not this government but those overseas; in fact the OECD has advised us—we need to get far better at in order to commercialise? How do we create jobs, innovate, become more productive and really not stand still? How do we create the jobs of the future?

In this year's report, the top four inhibitors to business and job creation are: No. 1, restrictive labour regulations. That is exactly the case in point of this legislation today. Then there are: tax rates, inefficient government bureaucracy, and complexity of tax regulations. These are clearly issues we need to address together—including trade unions—to make this country a better place to do business, and also to create the jobs of the future. The No. 1 barrier to creating jobs here is 'restrictive labour regulations'.

Creating the right environment for growth and innovation by improving our employee arrangements is precisely what this government intends to do with the Fair Work Amendment Bill. It is interesting to note that this bill will deliver not just on the promise we made to the Australian people prior to the 2013 federal election; we are also delivering on Labor's broken-promise policy commitments made prior to the 2007 federal election. This is a somewhat inconvenient truth for those opposite, who are now seeking to block the passage of this legislation. Not only is it exactly what we took to the federal election; it is also what those opposite took to the 2007 federal election. All I can say to those opposite is: we are now actually delivering on your own policy.

The Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014 seeks to restore balance to the Australian workplace relations system through a variety of modest but important amendments to the Fair Work Act. I will address these amendments in turn, and discuss why I believe this bill is necessary for ensuring that the workplace relations system in Australia balances the competing interests of employers and employees fairly and effectively. It has to be a matter of balance on both sides.

Firstly, this bill will address the current imbalances in union workplace access rules. I believe that although unions should, in certain circumstances, be permitted access to the workplaces of the workers they actually represent there must be conditions attached to ensure that employers are able to run their businesses without unnecessary disruption, interference or, in some cases, intimidation.

Many issues in workplaces have come to light in the royal commission into union corruption. The questionable union practices necessitate the measures contained in this bill. Unions have played, and continue to play, an important role in Australian society and in our workplaces, but like the rest of us in society they cannot be above the law.

The royal commission has already referred 26 people for investigation over serious breaches of criminal, industrial, corporate and competition law. It has already led to the arrest of four people. It has uncovered dozens of slush funds, by which senior union officials have siphoned money to themselves and to their associates. It has uncovered associations between the CFMEU and the criminal underworld, including the Bandidos.

When Labor's very own former branch president, a former CFMEU official, was arrested and charged with blackmail, Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, said nothing. The Leader of the Opposition in the Senate also remained silent. When a current CFMEU official was arrested and charged with blackmail for pressuring employers to sign his enterprise agreement, again, the Leader of the Opposition in the other place, and in this place, remained silent. The unions need to be used for the purposes for which they were intended and the purposes for which their union members pay their dues. They need to operate within the law and in a way that will not be detrimental to Australian jobs and to the Australian economy. It is for all of these reasons that I support the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014.

In 2007, the Labor Party made a promise that there would be no changes to the union right of entry laws. Julia Gillard stated in August 2007:

We understand that entering on the premises of an employer needs to happen in an orderly way. We will keep the right of entry provisions.

These were the words of a future Labor Prime Minister, evidence that those amendments are not even unreasonable to Labor. So that is what they said, but what did those opposite actually do? It was not what they promised. Instead, under the Labor government there was a loosening of the right of entry provisions under the Fair Work Act, which provided unions greater access to workplaces. This access was then intentionally exploited with businesses receiving excessive visits from unions, competing to represent employees at their workplaces. The Fair Work review panel, commissioned by the now Leader of the Opposition Mr Shorten, in its 2012 report noted that the Pluto LNG project received over 200 right of entry visits in only three months. I struggle to believe how even those opposite could believe this is a tenable situation for such an important industry. I think it demonstrates also that intimidatory tactics have no place in 21st century workplaces.

This bill is essential to ensure that businesses are not deliberately harassed by unions looking to increase their membership. Only 17 per cent of workers in Australia today choose to be a member of a union. And having look at a lot of the outcomes of the royal commission, it is no wonder that they choose not to join a union.

The changes included in this bill will not impact on the unions who exercise the right of entry responsibly. It will, however, stop the militant like behaviour of some unions and their officials which, as I have said, should have absolutely no place in modern workplaces. I asked why should unions be permitted to enter a workplace and hold discussions when they do not even have members in that workplace, and no-one has sought their assistance or there presence? To me, and to those on this side of the chamber, that is not reasonable.

Under these amendments unions will only be entitled to enter a workplace for discussion purposes if they are covered by an enterprise agreement, or if they have been invited by a member or an employee they are entitled to represent. This is neither unreasonable nor restrictive. Why should unions be entitled to disrupt workers during their lunch breaks when their presence has not been requested and the workers are not even union members? I imagine the vast majority of the 87 per cent of private sector workers, who have chosen not to join a union, would rather eat their lunch in peace than be harassed by union organisers.

This bill will allow employers to nominate a room for the purpose of discussions—again, not unreasonable. Employers will continue to be prevented from nominating a room with the intention of intimidating, hindering or discouraging employees from participating in these discussions. This will allow the unions to discuss their business with employees who want to engage in such discussions rather than subjecting the entire workforce to an impromptu lecture during their meal break. Again, this is not unreasonable.

I also wonder why employers should be obligated to provide accommodation and transport to remote sites for union officials? To me this is nothing short of an outrageous imposition on businesses, particularly in the resources sector in my own state. These arrangements should be made between the unions and the employers as the circumstances arise and not dictated in legislation. This bill will repeal this onerous practice.

In conclusion, it is my belief that this bill delivers on the pre-election promise made by the government to ensure that Australia is open for business and can create the jobs of the future and support innovation required to deliver that. These measures are necessary to ensure a more stable, fair and prosperous future for Australia's workers and businesses in a rapidly changing and innovative world economy.

Not only does it deliver on the promises made by the coalition in 2013; but we are also delivering on the election commitments made and broken by the Labor Party in the lead-up to the 2007 election. The amendments proposed today are nothing more and nothing less than what was foreshadowed in The Coalition's Policy to Improve Fair Work Laws. We are simply getting the job done, creating a fairer system which will benefit Australian workers and Australian business and ultimately create more jobs. These sensible and measured amendments will ensure that workplace relations are governed in a way that allows Australian businesses to flourish and makes it so, while they cannot compete on labour rates, they can still compete on innovation, high-end manufacturing and high-end bespoke goods in an internationally competitive environment. But, to do that, we have to tackle the tax issues that make us less competitive and the restrictive labour practices, which combine to hinder us, leaving us behind the eight ball internationally.

This bill will help encourage investment in new projects that are absolutely critical to the Australian economy by preventing unions from vetoing agreements. This will strongly signal to investors that Australia is open for business. It will strike the correct balance for the continued development of a strong, innovative and productive economy. The amendments contained in this bill correct the current imbalance and remove one of the many impediments to us moving forward into the 21st-century economy. It is for all of these reasons that I support the bill and commend it to the Senate.

Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too would like to contribute to this debate about the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014. I would like to highlight to the chamber that what we have witnessed here this morning is once again the spectacle of the coalition government filibustering one of their own bills. Presumably they are trying to get the support of the crossbenchers for their bill, but, by the amount of filibustering that has been going on, they have not done that. The reason they have not been able to do that is, I presume, because this is such a bad bill.

The bill has been to the appropriate Senate committee, and I draw attention to the Labor senators' dissenting report tabled with the committee report and accurately describing this bill as a return to Work Choices by stealth. The Labor senators also pointed out that, if this bill is passed in its current form, it will have a detrimental impact on Australian workers and their families. I agree with those findings of the Labor senators on the committee, and for that reason I and all other Labor senators oppose this bill.

As has been said by previous speakers, Labor in government commissioned a review of the Fair Work Act 2009 in 2010. The Fair Work Act, of course, replaced the former coalition government's Work Choices legislation, which was by anyone's standards a dreadful piece of legislation by an antiworker, anti-union, antifairness Howard government. The review of the Fair Work Act that Labor commissioned made 53 recommendations that were to encourage productivity growth, to enhance equity in the workplace and to correct anomalies that had been detected in the Fair Work Act. Many of those recommendations have already been implemented. They were uncontentious.

This bill allegedly deals with remaining recommendations from that review. Of course, in typical coalition style, it goes too far and is another example of the coalition seizing every opportunity it possibly can to return to its ideological nirvana of Work Choices. The bill addresses three main areas in particular. They are regulation of greenfields agreements, right-of-entry provisions for unions and individual flexibility arrangements, including the better-off-overall test. Labor has concerns about all of the proposed amendments to the Fair Work Act that deal with those provisions. They are the parts of this bill that we see as the continuation of the government's crusade against Australian working people, against their working conditions and against the unions who legitimately represent them at the workplace. The previous coalition speaker clearly belled the cat about what the actual intention of this coalition government bill is: the usual union-bashing, antiworker, antifairness, 'give all the power in the workplace to rogue employers' type of legislation that we are so used to.

This bill is here despite the government promises before the 2013 election—and who can forget then Prime Minister Tony Abbott promising that Work Choices was dead, buried and cremated—but here it is back again, very much alive. We can only hope that the new Prime Minister, Mr Malcolm Turnbull, might have a better attitude toward the working conditions of Australians and might be a more conciliatory and less hardline prime minister when it comes to what happens in the workplace. Unfortunately, I do not think that is going to be the case. We might have a new man at the top, but I do not think the policies are going to change at all. There has been no evidence that the workplace relations policies are going to change. Just last week we saw the new Treasurer, Mr Scott Morrison, confirm that the Turnbull Liberal government is just as intent on slashing penalty rates as was the Abbott government.

The Treasurer joined a chorus of coalition members and senators trying to deceive people with the argument that somehow if penalty rates are cut more people will get work—more people with disabilities will get jobs, more young people will get jobs and more single parents will get jobs. There has been investigation after investigation, but there is no evidence that points to the creation of jobs by cutting or reducing penalty rates. All you do by reducing penalty rates is make people poorer. We do not want people to be poorer in Australia. We do not need to cut penalty rates.

Further suggestions by the Treasurer last week included that penalty rates could be traded off for tax credits. That is an interesting concept. Is the new Turnbull government seriously suggesting that they would introduce tax credits to compensate people who work on the weekend so that now the taxpayer funds the penalty rates? I would not have thought that was a serious suggestion—but, anyway, it is on the table. On this side of the chamber we do not have those flights of fancy. We know that, no matter how you work it, cuts to penalty rates mean that workers are worse off.

Australia is already facing the lowest wages growth in 25 years, and still we hear from the new Prime Minister about cutting the income of low-paid workers. When I say 'low-paid workers', I am talking about people who work in hospitality, people who work in the retail industry, people who work in aged care and people who work in disability care. They are the low-payed workers who rely on penalty rates that they get for working what we call unsociable hours on weekends. They rely on those penalty rates, not for frippery but for the basic needs of life. They cannot afford to live without their penalty rates. Most of those people who work in those low-paid industries are women, who are already at a disadvantage in terms of pay equity because of their gender. The proposals to deal with penalty rates that are being rolled out by the new Turnbull-led government will directly affect women in low paid jobs.

We do not join the race to the bottom with the coalition. Labor believes that the government should focus on creating jobs and creating economic growth through investing in skills, training, infrastructure, innovation and entrepreneurship. Why does this government not turn its attention to those important areas? I have to question what other remnants of the Abbott era Prime Minister Turnbull is holding onto. We know that he is going to ditch fairness at work, just as he has ditched any commitment to meaningful environmental policies that he might have had before he became Prime Minister. He has ditched his commitment to marriage equality—again, something that he supported before he became Prime Minister—and he has ditched his republican credentials as well.

Just as he has traded off those commitments that he had before, I presume he is going to trade off fairness at work—as he is going to trade off the management of our precious water resources. I am speaking as a South Australian passionate about the future of the River Murray. Already we have seen management of that given to Mr Barnaby Joyce, whose view about water management is that people in South Australia should up stumps and move to the wet northern parts of Australia if they were going to continue to complain about mismanagement of the river system. We know that Mr Turnbull will be forever indebted to the far right of his party, who gave him his new job. So any serious change in coalition government policy in any area is unlikely. As I said, new Prime Minister; same old, same old, same old policies.

The Fair Work Amendment Bill that we are debating today does give the new Prime Minister the opportunity to backtrack away from that ideological war on workers that was waged by former Prime Minister Abbott and, of course, the former Minister for Employment, Senator Eric Abetz. You would hope that the government, under its new leadership, might pay less attention to undermining the job security of people at work and pay more attention to the 800,000 people out of work in Australia. You would think that they would want to spend more time dealing with the unemployment rate, which is at an unacceptable level of around six per cent. You would think that the coalition would focus on those issues instead of focusing on this legislation which makes it easier for bad employers to cut working conditions in unfair industrial flexibility agreements, for instance. You would hope that, instead of this legislation, the Prime Minister would spend some time legislating to protect employees whose job security will be threatened by refusing to address the job security measures in the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement.

There are so many examples of how the coalition have already attacked working conditions and job security of Australians in the two short years—but, really, they have been two very long years—of the coalition government. They failed to support automotive industry jobs in my home state of South Australia. They failed to commit to building Australia's 12 new submarines, despite promising to do so in my home state of South Australia—and we are still waiting to hear about that. We heard from speakers, in the debate on this bill in the last sitting period, about attempts to deregulate Australians shipping industry so that people could work on Third World wages while in Australian waters. I think you may have spoken about that yourself, Mr Acting Deputy President Sterle. We know that under Senator Abetz's former ministerial responsibilities the government cut the pay of the cleaners who work in this place and in other government offices. So, let us face it: the government's record on jobs and working conditions is appalling. This bill is simply more of the same and that is why Labor is so concerned about it.

One of the most contentious aspects of this legislation is the changes to individual flexibility arrangements, which are a provision of the Fair Work Act put in by Labor, understanding that there does need to be some flexibility in the workplace. What is proposed here, as I said, is a return to Work Choices and a new iteration of Australian workplace agreements that were the hallmark of the Howard government. We know that ended very well for the Howard government—not! I hope Prime Minister Turnbull remembers that. I also hope the crossbench senators in this place, when they are deliberating about what they are going to do in regard to amendments to this bill, remember how unpalatable it was for the Australian community to have Work Choices and individual agreements, AWAs, foisted upon them. It did not go well for the coalition then and it will not go well for the coalition this time either.

The bill removes a key safeguard from what can be traded away under an IFA. As the Labor senators' dissenting report notes, the expert panel that reviewed the act said that if a non-monetary benefit is being traded away for a monetary benefit, the value of the money forgone has to be relatively insignificant and the value of the non-monetary benefit has to be proportionate. Despite that clear prescription in the review—what is relative insignificance and proportion?—both terms are missing from this bill so, basically, anything goes under this bell. We are talking about individual flexibility arrangements which were agreed between an individual employee and an employer.

If you had listened to the previous speaker, you would think everything in the workplace is always sweetness and light. Thankfully it mostly is, but there are rogue employers out there who will use the changes proposed in this bill to put the hard word on individual workers, saying, 'Here you go. You've got to sign this genuine needs statement which says you are happy with the trade-offs being proposed.' What will happen down the track is that the employer, under this legislation will be able to rely on that genuine needs statement to say, 'As far as I knew, the worker was happy with what is being proposed.' The outcome of that will be that the employer will avoid prosecution and will be protected from having to pay compensation for what would otherwise have been a breach of the award under which the IFA is made.

I am not saying that all employers do this. Of course they do not, but there are employers who do do this. If you need an example of rogue employers who treat employees badly, you only have to look at what has happened in the 7-Eleven retail stores in Australia. What a scandal: low-paid workers in vulnerable situations, low-paid workers who mostly do not union representation who are being ripped off by rogue employers. And this legislation will facilitate more of that kind of behaviour by rogue employers who will take every opportunity to profit out of low-paid workers.

The way to avoid that happening is to facilitate union representation in workplaces and the coalition knows that. They know that unions will stand up to that kind of behaviour from rogue employers but this legislation, with its right of entry provisions, is directly targeted at making sure that unions cannot get into workplaces to attempt to represent workers who are being ripped off by rogue employers. Once again, this legislation, as coalition industrial workplace legislation always does, tilts the balance further in favour of employers. The same applies in the provisions in this bill about greenfield agreements. Basically, it means employers can get away with whatever they want in greenfield agreements. Labor has put forward a number of amendments to the bill to ensure that that does not happen, that employers are genuinely negotiating what should apply in an enterprise agreement for a new work site or a new workplace—genuinely negotiating, not putting something on the table and saying, 'Take it or leave it! Take this or get out!' Otherwise, that is what employers will do under this proposed legislation. 'Here are your working conditions. If you don't like them, don't take the job.' That is not the Australian way.

We need to have standards, we need to have benchmarks and we need to have fairness in the workplace. There is no need to drag us back into some arcane kind of industrial relations system—children working in mines—where rogue employers have all the power in the workplace, but that is precisely what this legislation will do if it passes in its current form.

Once again, I appeal in particular to the Senate crossbenchers. Some of you have a reasonable record on workplace relations; some of you have an appalling record. When you ae considering how you are going to vote, not just on this bill but on the amendments that are being moved by Senator Cameron's opposition amendments, please think about the people you purport to represent. Please think about the women, the low-paid workers, the people in vulnerable situations who need their jobs but need them to be well paid and who need to have union representation to help them secure those jobs and those conditions. I urge the crossbench senators not just to do what the coalition tells them to, not just to trade off important workplace conditions for some other deal they are doing with the government to get something else that they want. This is fundamental to fairness in Australia. This legislation deserves strident opposition and I hope we hear it from the crossbenchers.

David Johnston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is a very important bill. It delivers on key aspects of the coalition's election policy but I emphasise does go no further. Indeed, on union workplace access, individual flexibility arrangements and the removal of the ability to strike first and talk later we are delivering on specific, known and identified policies which were also, in many respects, adopted by the Labor Party prior to the 2007 election but which were not followed through upon.

Through our Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014 we are giving effect to a number of commitments in our policy and further restoring balance to the system. We will do this by improving the process for the negotiation of greenfield agreements to ensure that unions can no longer frustrate bargaining for these agreements through unsustainable claims and delays which can threaten investment and delay the commencement of major new projects that are crucial to our prosperity, particularly in my home state of Western Australia.

The bill will also restore union workplace access rules, reflecting those in place prior to Labor's unbalanced amendments, dealing with excessive right-of-entry visits by union officials. This morning I want to emphasise what is happening with union rights of entry to the workplace. The bill will also improve workplace productivity and flexibility by enhancing the scope for employees to make individual flexibility arrangements that meet their genuine needs as determined by those employees. We are closing the 'strike first, talk later' loophole in good faith bargaining rules which Labor has consistently refused to address. We will also maintain the value of unclaimed wages recovered from workers by the Commonwealth.

Let's talk about one of the most important aspects of this particular bill—that is, union workplace access. The Fair Work Amendment Bill will address the current imbalance in union workplace access rules. The government's changes will fairly and sensibly balance the right of employees to be represented in the workplace if they wish to be with the right of employers to go about their business without unnecessary disruptions. The government see right of entry as a specific statutory privilege to which conditions ought to apply. Regrettably, some union bosses do not agree with this very balanced approach.

In 2007 the Labor Party promised on numerous occasions that there would be no changes to the union right-of-entry laws. In a press conference on 28 August 2007 then deputy opposition leader Julia Gillard said, 'We will make sure the current right-of-entry provisions stay. We understand that entering on premises of an employer needs to happen in an orderly way. We will keep the right-of-entry provisions.' This specific promise was deliberately broken, in a calculated way. Unions were given much easier and wider access to workplaces under the Fair Work Act provisions which were then clearly anticipated and badly exploited by unions, particularly the CFMEU. This has meant that many businesses have faced excessive workplace visits from unions, even when their employees are not union members and have not asked for a union presence. The problem has been exacerbated in some workplaces by unions competing to represent employees at that workplace. There have been demarcation disputes and running battles on workplaces throughout Australia by unions seeking to acquire union dues.

The problem was highlighted by the former government's fair work review panel. It noted that the Pluto LNG project received over 200 right-of-entry visits in only three months. Two hundred visits by union officials giving notice of their attendance on particular days at particular times in only three months meant that day-to-day work scheduling was almost impossible. BHP Billiton's Worsley Alumina plant faced 676 right-of-entry visits in a single year. There were 676 notices issued to attend at a time and a place at the employer's workplace in a single year. Our changes will reduce the capacity for unions to deliberately harass and disrupt businesses in this way.

A recent case featuring CFMEU national president Joe McDonald has underlined the urgent need for these reforms. In a recent case Mr McDonald and the CFMEU were fined a sum of $193,600. In this case Mr McDonald ignored consultant requests to leave a site owned by CITIC Pacific's Sino iron ore project in Western Australia. When asked to leave the site because he did not have a right-of-entry permit—that is, he was on the site without a permit—Mr McDonald replied, 'I haven't had one for seven years and it hasn't effing stopped me.' Mr McDonald's attitude regrettably reflects the dark underbelly of the union movement that should have no place in modern and fair workplace industrial relations. In this place, most reasonable senators would agree that this sort of conduct is unacceptable. However, the Labor Party seem to want to defend this type of conduct again and again.

To be clear, the amendments in this bill will enact Labor's publicly stated promise prior to 2007, a promise that was not honoured. Given that the Labor Party in opposition, with the strong support of the union movement, supported the 2007 policy platform, we expected these amendments would not be contentious. But of course we now know that, in accordance with the requirements of their union masters, Labor senators in this place will be doing the bidding particularly of the CFMEU.

Most union officials will find these changes will not impact on their sensible approach to their right-of-entry activities. There has been no greater advocate than me for union right of entry, particularly in sweatshops in the clothing and manufacturing industry in Australia, when there have been clear requirements for a strong union presence to expose the exploitation of workers. But in the events I am about to put to the Senate you will see that there is clearly, unequivocally a gross abuse of the right of entry into workplaces happening, particularly in my home state of Western Australia. Currently, right of entry for discussion purposes can occur when the relevant union is entitled to represent the industrial interests of the employees in the workplace. This means unions can enter and hold discussions even if they have no actual members at the workplace and no-one has sought their presence. I go back to the fact that Worsley aluminium plant in Western Australia faced 676 rights of entry visits in just one year.

This bill will amend the provisions so that the ability for unions to enter a workplace is either tied to a union's recognised representative role of the workplace or employees at the workplace have requested the union's presence. I would have thought this was common sense. A union will only be entitled to enter a workplace for discussion purposes, if they are covered by an enterprise agreement or they have been invited by a member or employee they are entitled to represent. If the employee who would like the union to come to their workplace wishes to remain anonymous, a union will be able to apply to the Fair Work Commission for an invitation certificate. The Fair Work Commission must issue a certificate, if it is satisfied that a worker who performs work on the premises and whom the union is entitled to represent has invited the union to the workplace to hold the discussion. The certificate will not identify the employee who has made the request for the union's presence. This will restore the balance in the right of entry regime so that it is similar to prior to the commencement of the Fair Work Act consistent with the bipartisan consensus prior to the 2007 election.

The bill will also provide an effective mechanism for the Fair Work Commission to deal with disputes about excessive right of entry visits for discussion purposes. The previous government's amendments to the Fair Work Act in this area were drafted in a way which renders them largely ineffective and only able to be used in extreme circumstances where there has been an unreasonable diversion of the occupier's critical resources. These amendments will remove the restriction to ensure the commission has the power to properly deal with excessive right of entry visits—again, I say that 676 right of entry visits in one year did not come within the provisions—for example, by suspending, revoking or imposing conditions on an entry permit. Additionally, the amendments provide that the Fair Work Commission can take into account the combined impact of visits by all unions to the workplace reflecting that, in some circumstances, an employer will be subject to visits by multiple unions.

The bill will also repeal the previous government's amendments made in 2013 that expanded the union right of entry rights even further by allowing for uninvited lunch room invasions and requiring employers to pay for the cost of union boss joy rides to remote work sites. Those amendments gave unions the right to insist on addressing workers in their lunch room even when the workers have not requested their presence and are not union members. This was simply a bizarre blank cheque given by the former Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government to militant unions, particularly the CFMEU. This is unfair to the 87 per cent of private sector workers who are not union members and for all workers who just want to eat their lunch in peace—and I can certainly relate to that.

This bill will restore the sensible arrangements that were previously in place whereby union officials must comply with a reasonable request by the employer to hold discussions in a particular room. Employers will continue to be prevented from nominating locations with the intention of intimidating, discouraging or hindering employees from participating in discussions—a very fair provision.

The former Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government also introduced obligations on employers at remote work sites to provide union officials with transport and accommodation to enable them to access those sites. We will repeal this costly and onerous piece of regulation and, instead, reinstate the previous approach where unions and employers can reach their own arrangements in these circumstances.

I want to talk about a few cases that highlight the necessity for these particular types of amendments. I want to deal firstly with a Mr Perkovic, who is a CFMEU official who abused his right of entry permit and was suspended from the use of that permit for some 19 months. He was banned, as I say, for 19 months after a very foul-mouthed session of abuse of a government inspector which just happened to be caught on video. In this case, he was seen and found by the Fair Work Building and Construction commission to deliberately refuse to meet his basic obligations as a permit holder when asked to do so but also he proceeded unprovoked to use abusive language and physically menace in an attempt to intimidate, bully and belittle a Fair Work Building and Construction inspector going about his lawful duties.

What did Mr Perkovic actually do? He called a government employee on video 'an effing piece of shit' and was so close to him as to be intimidated. The Victorian official John Perkovic allegedly abused the investigator at the Ibis Hotel project site in Adelaide after he and other union officials illegally entered the site. Perkovic is one of 10 CFMEU officials who allegedly breached right of entry laws in a spate of illegal entries to Adelaide construction sites earlier this year. Fair Work Building and Construction commission has subsequently launched four cases against CFMEU—and I have already indicated what the outcome of those cases were. The official was suspended for 19 months.

Mr Perkovic shouted at the investigator words to the effect:

You're just about having a heart attack. You're shitting yellow, you piece of shit. Go f—k ... brush your teeth next time, you piece of shit, alright?

This is in his face. This is on video. This is the sort of conduct that you see for CFMEU officials on workplaces right around Australia. Fair Work building commission alleges Perkovic pushed the investigator with his stomach, causing the investigator to lose his balance. Perkovic was one of several CFMEU officials who flew into Adelaide and caused problems at three Adelaide construction sites. Fair Work understands CFMEU officials flew in from the Northern Territory, Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales and Victoria. It is alleged right of entry breaches occurred at the Minda homes master plan stage 1 in Somerton Park, a development which will provide accommodation and services for people with intellectual disabilities. An aged-care development in Kensington Road, Leabrook and the Ibis Hotel development were also targeted. Fair Work successfully allege officials refused to show their right of entry permits and did not give 24 hours notice before entering the sites, which is compulsory under federal law. Officials also allegedly refused to wear safety glasses when asked. Two officials had to be escorted off the Minda Home site. When asked to show his permit at the Ibis Hotel, one official told the site manager to 'eff off' and 'grow some balls'. This is very mildly representative of the sort of conduct that employers and people going about their lawful workplace occupations—employees—have to put up with.

Another case that comes to my attention is where three CFMEU officials were recently penalised $38,500 for 'hindering, obstructing and acting in an improper manner' on a Brisbane construction site:

On 28 February 2014, Judge Burnett penalised the now Assistant Secretary Kane Pearson and official Joseph Myles $4,950 each and official Shane Treadaway $2,200 for their conduct at a $350 million city project on 11 February, 2010. The CFMEU was penalised $26,400. The officials entered the site to investigate alleged safety concerns. In a liability decision delivered on 20 December 2013, Burnett J said: “Plainly, these experienced industrial organisers were more interested in grandstanding by engaging in provocative behaviour in the presence of workers on the site, notwithstanding their presence onsite purportedly being in respect of safety issues. Undoubtedly their behaviour was directed more to recruitment and membership retention than any other object.”

The Court found that Mr Pearson acted in an improper manner by being rude and offensive, including by swearing at and insulting a site foreman: 'you’re a d***head, I’m not dealing with you I want to talk to the [project manager]' and by calling the site foreman a 'f***wit', 'deadbeat' or 'd***head'. Mr Pearson was also found to have intentionally hindered, obstructed and acted in an improper manner by causing the disruption to work schedule to take place at the site …

This is the tip of a very big iceberg.

The principal case, which I do not have time to talk about at length, is of course the Bechtel versus Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union of Western Australia case. It was a Fair Work Commission decision where, on the Wheatstone project, CFMEU officials had an injunction extended for their conduct. Without going into considerable detail as to what in fact happened, the commissioner found that the injunction should continue because of the conduct of the officials involved. Here is a short but brief quote of some of the things that were said on a particular day by one of the officials to company employees. When he asked about why the workplace meeting that was scheduled was held in a particular place and was told, 'If you're not happy refer it to Fair Work Australia', a Mr Upton—who was a CFMEU official—said, 'That’s the AWU way, we don’t do things that way. We do things the effing CFMEU way.'

Things deteriorated from that point on. The industrial relations manager for Bechtel engaged this man in a very reasonable way, but Mr Upton then yelled at this person and said, 'I won’t accept you treating the boys like effing dogs. Eff off!' He then, in dealing with a particular person from Bechtel who was an American citizen, said, 'Is this shithole place acceptable to you?'—

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Johnston, it has been brought to my attention that under the President's rulings on Senate practices of October 2014 clause 58, in quoting from a document there are certain words that should not be uttered even though you are quoting. I have allowed a free range of quotes, but the actual words themselves the Senate may not need to hear. Not bad from the truckie to the lawyer!

David Johnston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President. What we see is a categorical abuse of the Bechtel official not only from an industrial perspective but also because he is American. The abuse goes on for some long period of time in a most appalling and disgraceful way, using every single expletive one could possibly wish to imagine. Indeed, I accept your ruling, Mr Acting Deputy President, because it is really quite disgraceful that people in this place want to continue to defend this conduct by opposing what are the most reasonable of amendments to stop this sort of behaviour on industrial work sites. (Time expired)

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014. Hearing Senator Johnston with some of those case examples emphasises why it is important that we bring some rationality, fairness and balance to our industrial relations and to our fair work arrangements within Australia. As Senator Johnston has so graphically pointed out, some of the actions of some of these unionists, allowed for under legislation of the previous government, is just disgraceful and entirely un-Australian. I know without doubt that I can say that 98 per cent of all Australians would find the examples given by Senator Johnston appalling and a good reason for why something needs to be done.

This piece of legislation actually follows a commitment the coalition made prior to the 2013 election, where we said that we were committed to addressing a range of key problems with the fair work laws. This bill continues to implement the commitments that the coalition made prior to the last election. We are a party that makes promises and we intend to keep our promises. That is why this legislation is being introduced. There are some other parties in this chamber who make promises, like 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead', and then the first piece of legislation that comes in actually breaches that promise. We want to be recognised as a government that has made promises and tries its best to implement those promises with legislation at the earliest possible time, and that is what this bill is all about.

The bill will amend the Fair Work Act to provide for a more balanced workplace relations system, while safeguarding workers' conditions and protections, and that is important. The measures in the bill will help encourage investment in new projects that are important to our national economy and will help encourage those investments by preventing unions from vetoing greenfields agreements. This bill strongly signals to investors that Australia is open for business.

Unions certainly have a place in our society and always have done. In years gone by, perhaps even centuries gone by, unions performed a wonderful role in protecting, enhancing and building conditions for all people, whether they were workers, employers or those who depended on those people. I have always thought that unions have a real place in our society. However, the legislation that previous Labor governments have introduced give unions an undue influence over workers' conditions and pay and more influence over workers' conditions and pay than workers themselves need or want. Very often workers in this day and age do not need a union standing over their shoulders saying, 'This is what's good for you, so we're going to get it.' Most workers in Australia can work that out for themselves and can make deals with their employers that allow for flexibility, family arrangements and other things that are important to workers and their families.

Unfortunately, Labor governments tend to overemphasise the importance of unions in discussions relating to workplace conditions and arrangements. I can understand why Labor governments do that. It is because most people in Labor governments have a union background. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. But when this sort of legislation, introduced by a Labor government, comes before the parliament there is a bit of an imbalance, because most of the ministers in Labor governments have a union background. They owe their very existence in this parliament to the unions and very often they owe their positions as ministers to deals that the unions do amongst themselves and with the Labor Party, who they control. They work out which member or senator is going to be a minister. The unions make those sorts of arrangements.

That would be okay—well, perhaps you could excuse it—if the unions actually represented Australian workers. But the Australian Bureau of Statistics has some interesting figures on just who does and who does not represent Australian workers. According to the ABS, 88 per cent of all Australian workers in the private sector choose not to join a union. Twelve per cent do; 88 per cent choose not to. So how can the unions say that they speak for Australia's workers, when 88 per cent of Australian workers say, 'Sorry, mate, we don't want you to represent us. We are quite happy to represent or make arrangements for ourselves. We are not dills. We are not incapable of making arrangements and conditions. We will do that ourselves, thanks very much. We do not need you to do it for us'? Twelve per cent of Australian workers feel that they are incapable or that, for some other reason, they want a union there—and that is their right. If that is what they want, they can do that in Australia.

It should be remembered that 88 per cent of all Australian workers in the private sector choose not to join a union and choose not to have the unions acting and speaking for them. Yet the bills introduced by the Labor Party—which this bill seeks to amend and make fairer—are not bills that were introduced for the workers' benefit; they were introduced for the unions' benefit, so that the unions can continue to have a reason to exist when 88 per cent of workers in the private sector do not want them.

Those ABS figures are instructive. If you take the total Australian workforce—that is, the public and private sectors—then only 17 per cent of all workers in Australia have chosen to join a union. Again, that means that 83 per cent of workers across Australia have made a rational decision that they do not want the unions to speak for them. They feel that they are capable of speaking for themselves and of dealing with their own workplace relations in the way they want and not in the way some paid union official might think is good for them. The workers have voted with their feet and have chosen not to have unions representing them.

So why do Labor governments come in here and continue to pass legislation that give the unions all the power and authority and take it away from the workers who are capable and who have expressed their desire not to have the unions working for them? I repeat: if people do want to join a union and want the unions to speak for them, then in Australia they are perfectly able to do that. They do that with my support and I know with the support of all parliamentarians. But workers should not be forced to have the union making the rules, when the workers themselves do not want the unions there. This bill puts a bit of balance, fairness and flexibility back into the arrangements.

I said that I know why Labor governments pass legislation that increases enormously the power of unions, not the power of workers in negotiating but increases the power of unions when workers do not want them. I understand that, and I mentioned that most minsters in Labor governments owe their very being to the union movement. You only have to look around this chamber. Of all the Labor senators, and I do not have the exact figures these days, at least 80 per cent—and I think that is probably a generous estimate—of the senators in this chamber are former union officials. They are here because their union did a deal within the Labor Party to make sure these particular union members received preselection and therefore were voted into the Senate. As a result, a number of them are shadow ministers—for example, the shadow minister for trade, who is also the opposition leader in the Senate, Senator Penny Wong, is a former CFMEU employee. I do not want to speak ill of Senator Wong when she is not here, and she can no doubt speak for herself, but you would wonder why Senator Wong has not roundly condemned some of the activity that the previous speaker, Senator Johnson, was talking about—CFMEU officials being absolutely vile, foul-mouthed and intimidatory to government officials, in many cases women. You would have thought that people like Senator Wong would have been on their feet condemning that in the strongest and loudest words, but we have heard barely a 'boo' from Senator Wong. Perhaps the fact that she was employed by the CFMEU, got to her position in the Senate because of the CFMEU and got to her position as Leader of the Opposition in the Senate because of the CFMEU is why she has not loudly condemned some of the thuggish and sexist behaviour that we have seen from the CFMEU.

This bill, as I said, puts back some flexibility and I want to talk about some elements of the bill. My colleagues on this side have gone through some of the elements very carefully and I will not repeat a lot of those. This bill does one thing that I particularly like: it removes the strike-first talk-later loophole under the Fair Work Act that has been in that bill. The Labor Party, prior to the 2007 election, promised they would do something about that. I quote the then Labor Party leader who said:

… industrial disputes are serious. They hurt workers, they hurt businesses, they can hurt families and communities, and they certainly hurt the economy.

Further, he said, 'They'—the employees—'will not be able to strike unless there has been genuine good faith bargaining.' That is what the Labor leader said prior to the 2007 election. Unfortunately, that was not the case under Labor's Fair Work Act, where employees were allowed to strike before the bargaining process had even commenced. This bill will amend the Fair Work Act to provide that protected industrial action can only be taken if bargaining for a proposed agreement has actually commenced. This amendment will mean that industrial action cannot be the first step in the bargaining process and that restores a balanced and harmonious approach to enterprise bargaining.

This bill is helping the Labor Party fulfil a promise it made prior to the 2007 election. For that reason, wouldn't you think that all of the Labor Party senators in this chamber would be supporting this bill, because by supporting it they are actually supporting the coalition government honouring a commitment of the Labor Party made prior to the 2007 election. I do not know of course how Labor senators are going to vote when this bill comes for a vote. If they are not going to support it, I would like some of them to explain why, prior to the 2007 election, they supported this particular proposal, yet here they are opposing a proposal which they introduced. This bill does a lot of things like that where fairness and flexibility is brought back into the system of enterprise bargaining and into industrial relations generally.

Senator Johnston very graphically indicated the right of entry of union officials, without rhyme or reason, to enter lunch rooms and harangue workers about particular issues which are important to the unions—not important to the workers but important to the unions. Again, I emphasise—because I think this is just so important—that this right of entry under Labor Party legislation, which allows union officials to go into places and to talk to employees when the employees are not interested in talking to them, simply becomes ridiculous when you understand that of the employees they are talking to, on average, 87 per cent do not want the union there. And yet the 87 per cent who choose not to join the union, who choose not to have the union talk to them, have to sit there and be subjected to this unfettered right of union officials to wander around their place of work, to wander into their lunchroom and to harangue them with, as I say, issues that may be important to union officials but are clearly not important to the workers themselves.

The former government, the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government, also introduced obligations on employers at remote worksites to provide union officials with transport and accommodation to enable them to access those sites. Again this is ridiculous when you take into account that these sites in remote areas are nearly always private sector, and 87 per cent of private sector employees do not want the union. And yet the employer has to provide the unions with transport and accommodation to come out and harangue 100 per cent of the workers, when only 12 per cent of them want the union to be there. This is a very costly and onerous obligation on the employers. It does not help the employees, most of whom have demonstrated that they do not want the unions talking for them, and it just adds to the cost of doing business in Australia.

In the end result, when you make the cost of doing business in Australia prohibitively expensive, investors go elsewhere. Australia is a lucky country, but it is not the only one with resources and know-how for doing things. Investors simply say, 'It's too expensive in Australia; we'll go somewhere else.' What is the result of that? As we are seeing in Queensland at the moment, another 500 jobs in the mining industry have been lost because Australia has become uncompetitive. Part of that uncompetitiveness was the ridiculous mining tax which the Labor Party introduced on the miners. It meant that investment in mining in Australia stopped for a considerable period of time, and it has meant that jobs have been lost. Don't the Labor Party—who are here because of the unions who put them here—understand that they are costing real workers their jobs because of some of this stupidity? This bill will go a long way to fixing a lot of that stupidity, and I urge its support in this chamber.

Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution to this debate on the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014. I was in fact the Australian Greens portfolio holder for industrial relations when Mr Howard rammed Work Choices through this place. Who of us who were here at the time can forget the hours that we spent debating that appalling legislation in this place? It breaks my heart that here we are and the same colour of government, the coalition, is once again trying to undermine protection for workers.

It is really important to remember the context of this debate, and that is the growing inequality that we face in this country. Remember the impacts that inequality has in a society. It has direct impacts on people's health and life outcomes and, in particular, intergenerational impacts. The previous speaker and other speakers have spoken about 'balance'. Well, I say, 'Ha!' to that. This is not about balance; it is about tipping the balance towards employers and big business and putting more and more money—particularly when you look at the greenfields issues in here, and I will come to those in a minute—in the pockets of employers and big business. It is about tipping the balance right over to them, not a proper balance that people expect when you are talking about the concept of balance. If you look at the final consequences of that, you see that that will lead to more inequality in this country. We know from report after report that inequality, both wealth inequality and income inequality, has grown. We must always remember when we are debating these issues that that is very real and growing in this country.

The Senate has twice rejected these pieces of legislation that form a major part of this coalition government's attack on people's rights at work. It is an obsession with the coalition to undermine workers' rights. I hope that the Senate rejects this piece of legislation too. However, right now it is very likely that some of the crossbench senators are in fact negotiating, doing a deal with government, to get this legislation through this place. It may not pass in full in its current form, but it looks like some of the worst parts of this legislation could remain and be passed if the crossbenchers do in fact do a deal with the government and join with the government to vote this piece of appalling legislation through the Senate.

One of our main concerns is with the greenfield agreements component of this legislation. However, there are many more, which, if I get time, I will address as well. I wonder if the crossbench senators are really aware of what this legislation would do and what impact it would have on workers and workers' rights into the future. If it were to pass, these changes would deny workers on big projects a voice on their wages and conditions, all in the name of helping big business, big miners and big developers at the expense of workers. These are workers on the new projects like new mines, ports and LNG gas processing plants.

When we look at what returns have come to workers over the long term and how issues like inequality have been addressed in states—for example, in my home state of Western Australia—we know from reports from the BankWest Curtin Economics Centre, at Curtin University, that in fact inequality has expanded the most and more quickly in Western Australia during the boom than in any other state. So this whole idea that, if you support big business and big mines and the big resource companies, you will get a trickle-down effect and float all the boats is nonsense. The report clearly shows that in fact that does not happen. We have an unequal share of resources in Western Australia and the situation will be worse for wages and conditions if this particular piece of legislation goes through. It would mean that employers will be able to bargain with themselves and unilaterally determine the wages and conditions that workers on their projects would receive, without having to negotiate with workers or unions. You think: how could that possibly happen? But I will outline how that could and would in fact happen.

In fact, the legislation goes beyond this. It even allows the employers to choose which union they want to be their negotiating partner. Usually it is the workers who have the right to choose which union is involved in their negotiations but this legislation goes against this and allows employers to choose. So not only would employers get to pick the wages and conditions for workers but they would also get to pick their negotiating partner, who they will then face off with at the negotiating table. This goes far beyond the recommendations of the Productivity Commission's draft report into workplace relations.

The Productivity Commission's draft report recommends the Fair Work Act be amended so that if an employer and a union have not reached a negotiated outcome for a greenfields agreement after three months, the employer may: continue negotiating with the union; request that the Fair Work Commission undertake 'last offer' arbitration of an outcome by choosing between the last offers made by the employer and the union; or submit the employer's proposed greenfields arrangement for approval with a 12-month nominal expiry date. But this legislation would not even allow this. Instead of employers and unions negotiating a decent agreement on wages and conditions that works for both parties, this legislation would see employers able to wait it out for three months or for six months if one of the crossbench amendments passes. The employers would then be able to ask the Fair Work Commission to accept whatever they have put on the table, giving employees and unions absolutely no say at all—in other words, they can just sit there and hold tight and they will get their way.

The Greens think that workers are entitled to a share in the resources boom. But this legislation is really about letting employers and companies earn even more profit from their projects. In other words, there would be even less of a so-called trickle-down effect and workers would be even worse off. We have not heard many reports of projects not getting off the ground because of difficulties negotiating under the current legislation, so this is not an attempt to get more projects up; it is an attempt to get employers an even greater share of the profits coming from agreements by shutting down the ability of workers and unions to negotiate their wages and conditions.

The Greens have our own amendments to this bill, which Senator Rice will be moving, which would give people better control of their work-life balance.

I encourage the crossbench to support our amendments to give people better control of their work-life balance, rather than support the government's plan to remove the ability of workers on big projects to take control of their working lives. This is an area of the legislation that we are particularly concerned about and, coming from Western Australia where we tend to have big projects, it is a pretty important issue.

This is a bill that was first put forward by a government and a Prime Minister that have been on a crusade to slowly but surely strip away the rights of Australian workers and it seems that, under this new leadership, nothing has changed—new Prime Minister, same old policies. In this bill we see a government that is continuing to put the profits of big business ahead of the rights of vulnerable Australian workers. The legislation that is before the Senate today is about changing the minimum standard. It is not about giving people more flexibility; it is about giving bad employers more power over vulnerable people. When one looks at the provisions in this bill, one can see that the government has gone back to the previous Fair Work review and just cherry picked the things that work on one side of the ledger but there is nothing there to balance it up on the other side—the side that protects workers.

In this bill we again see the obsession of the government about employees having access to their union representatives at reasonable times. In many workplaces, often the only way workers will find out about their entitlements is from a union representative who comes in and tells them, 'No, actually, there are laws to protect you, you are entitled to be paid properly as a member of the Australian community and these are your rights.' Yet what we see in this legislation is a winding back of the provisions that would allow someone to come in and give that explanation. We know that what some unscrupulous employers do at the moment or have done in the past is to say, 'Sure, you—a low-paid worker—can find out what your minimum legal rights are. But I will tell you what I will do: I will put the union representative, when they come during your lunch break, in the room next to my office and I will just sit there with a clipboard making a note of every worker who comes in to get advice about what their minimum conditions are.' We know what that can lead to. I remember hearing of that from workers when we were discussing previous IR legislation in this place.

Currently, the law says you cannot do that. You must strike the right balance between not disrupting the workplace and allowing people to find out what their minimum entitlements are. That will be abolished under this bill. Government continues its obsession with workers getting access to information that informs them about their rights. When you think about this from the perspective of a vulnerable worker, who may not have English as their first language, you realise how important it is that people do get access to this information. How are they going to find out about their rights? They simply will not. That will be the practicality of this particular amendment; workers will not be able to gain access to the information that they need. That is exactly what this legislation is designed to do.

I note that there have been a number of amendments to this bill, most notably the amendments proposed by members of the crossbench. It is important that the crossbenchers who have proposed these amendments—and this chamber—are aware of what these amendments do; essentially, they make a bad bill just a little bit less bad.

But you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Yes, the amendments will remove part 2 of the bill, which says: if you happened to accrue annual leave loading and other reasonable measures during your time at work and if it turns out that you get sacked before you have had the chance to take them, do not expect to get your full entitlement paid out; you are only going to get part of it. And, yes, it also takes out part 3, which would remove the right of employees to take or accrue annual leave while they are receiving workers compensation. While the Greens welcome the removal of these provisions, we still cannot support this bill. This deal the crossbench has done will take out some of the nasty provisions that the original bill contained, but it still does not go far enough to protect the rights of vulnerable Australian workers.

What the crossbench deal has not removed from this nasty bill is the provisions that would take away employee's rights to industrial action. This will tip the scales in favour of the employer during negotiations. Imagine going to your employer with a legitimate request for better pay and conditions, and having the employer being unwilling to even have a conversation with you about it; and you as the employee having no legally protected course of action to make the employer come to the bargaining table. Under this bill an employer gets to be the sole decision maker on what legislation and minimum standards apply in the workplace. It removes the negotiation element of bargaining and allows an employer to sit there, fold their arms, and say, 'We refuse to engage in discussions with you about an enterprise agreement'.

It is deeply concerning that this bill will also take away an employee's only power in this situation, which is to take industrial action. Under existing laws, if an employer refuses to negotiate with their employees, the employees are able to commence stop-work meetings or go on strike. What are employees supposed to do when under this bill these options, their only two options, are taken away from them? The government is continuing its obsession with taking rights away from workers.

The Greens have also moved amendments to this bill that will genuinely make work fairer. Our amendments—those proposed by Senator Rice—would give workers more job security and allow workers to have the flexibility that works for them, so that they can have the time off to pick up the kids, to drop them off at school or, perhaps, to look after a sick grandparent. These are the sorts of flexibility that we have been pursuing for years.

The average full-time working week in Australia is 44 hours; that is the longest in the Western world. We perform $72 billion in unpaid overtime each year. Imagine how many jobs that would make. Just over half of all Australians want to change their hours of work, even if it might impact on their income. On average, full-time employees would like to work about 5.6 hours less per week; while part-time workers would like to work on average four hours more per week. Research shows that working hours are impacting on wellbeing; there are poorer health outcomes and greater use of prescription medications. It is also affecting our personal and family lives. Sixty percent of women feel consistently time-pressured, and nearly half of men also feel this way.

In this country we need to better match the hours people want to work with the hours they actually work. If people want to work different hours or work from home so that their life is better, then the law should allow it, provided it does not unduly impact on their employer. In fact, flexibility often works better for the employer. Allowing workers more flexible hours will be a productivity bonus for the economy. Business will benefit from this reform and good employers are already promoting better work-life balance. Satisfied employees are likely to remain in a workplace longer, and be healthier and more productive.

In this Senate we need to be working to improve and protect the rights of Australian workers, not passing legislation that will, bit by bit, see their rights stripped away from them—see their working conditions worsen and see the fundamental protections given to them by current laws taken away.

People have rights under the law that protect their working life. This government is intent on stripping them away. They are obsessed with it. Increasing people's flexibility—making sure that employees are not working unpaid overtime—is essentially jobs that other people could do. It makes sense to have fair workplaces. It makes sense to address the massive inequality that continues in this country and which is in fact growing. This legislation is bad legislation.

As I said: you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The crossbench amendments make this bad legislation slightly less bad, but it is not good legislation. The Senate should reject this legislation and reject this government's attempt to erode workers' rights in this country. Instead of having the longest working week in the Western world, we should in fact be looking at how we can help more people to find work; rather than undermining the rights of workers. We will not be supporting this legislation.

Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Women) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to close debate on the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014. In doing so, I thank all senators who have contributed to the debate.

The measured reforms in this bill will help bring back some balance to the workplace relations system. The bill represents longstanding government policy, and each of its measures was clearly outlined in the coalition's election policy. These important measures include improving the process for the negotiation of greenfields agreements by allowing the independent umpire, the Fair Work Commission, to act as a relief valve in bargaining for greenfields agreements; maintaining the value of unclaimed wages recovered for underpaid workers by the Commonwealth; providing for discussions between employers and employees where an employee requests an extension to maternity leave; and closing the strike-first talk-later loophole in the bargaining rules—a loophole which Labor's own 2012 review of the Fair Work Act identified and recommended be closed, but which Labor failed to implement.

The government has engaged constructively with the crossbenchers in relation to this bill, and I thank Senator Abetz for his work in this regard. As a result of that engagement, there is in principle agreement to a number of measures in the bill to progress today. I understand amendments will be moved at the committee stage that would enable some measures in the bill to be passed by the Senate today. The government is, of course, committed to and looks forward to continuing to engage constructively, in particular with the crossbenchers, on those matters that are not passed by the Senate today to demonstrate the need and fairness of the remaining measures and how they will restore balance to the system.

If I could now address some inaccuracies that have arisen in the debate on this bill. A number of false claims have been made about our reforms to greenfields agreements. For the sake of clarity, I want to make it clear that these are brand new projects that do not yet have employees. The former government's own Fair Work review panel found that bargaining practices associated with greenfields agreements were unacceptable and put at risk investment in important, new projects. The current Productivity Commission inquiry has made similar findings in its interim report.

The bill will ensure that greenfields bargaining does not delay or jeopardise these vital new projects by removing the capacity for unions to veto this agreement. The bill does this by providing the option for employers to notify a negotiation time frame. Where agreement with the union cannot be reached within the optional negotiation time frame, the employer will be able to take the agreement to the Fair Work Commission—the independent umpire—for approval. To ensure that future employees are protected, agreements made under this new optional process must meet all existing approval requirements under the Fair Work Act and, in addition, provide pay and conditions that are consistent with prevailing pay and conditions within the relevant industry for equivalent work.

Contrary to some claims, employers will continue to have to bargain with the union, or unions, able to represent the majority of future employees in line with existing requirements under the Fair Work Act. In addition, the bill ensures that genuine negotiations occur by introducing an enforceable requirement for both sides to bargain with each other in good faith. The changes we are making to greenfields agreements provide strong employee protections while ensuring that new projects, which are essential to employment growth and Australia's ongoing economic prosperity, can go ahead without undue delay.

The bill also amends Fair Work Act to provide that protected industrial action cannot be taken before bargaining has commenced. This is not an onerous requirement, it simply means that negotiations with the employer for a new enterprise agreement must have started before employees can take industrial action. This change was itself recommended by the previous government's Fair Work Act review and, again, is a draft recommendation of the current Productivity Commission inquiry.

This is nothing more and nothing less than a common sense reform that will help to ensure that costly industrial action is not taken prematurely. The Fair Work Amendment Bill responds to evidence of problems with the Fair Work Act. Many of these problems have themselves been identified by the opposition's—the then Labor government's—Fair Work review and are now being highlighted again by the Productivity Commission inquiry. By removing a range of impediments to productivity and growth these reforms will help to build a more stable, fair and prosperous future for Australian workers, businesses and the economy. The bill faithfully implements reforms taken to the Australian people in our 2013 election commitments—nothing more and nothing less—and I commend the bill to the Senate.

Stephen Parry (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the bill be now read a second time.

Bill read a second time.