Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021. I welcome the opportunity to lead for the Labor Party on this bill, which we very strongly oppose in its totality. This bill is dangerous and it's unfair. Rather than doing what its title says, it will in fact hurt workers, cut their pay and conditions and make jobs less secure, not more secure. Ultimately it will hurt the Australian economy. It's nothing more than a cynical and opportunistic attack on workers' rights and conditions at work, all under the guise of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It could have all been so different if only the government had been genuine in its rhetoric about wanting to improve our industrial relations laws in ways that would create jobs and leave no worker worse off. But, as always, the government talked the big game and made the big announcements but, in a so utterly predictable manner, failed to deliver anything like it. We've seen it so many times with this government—all announcement and no delivery. But, when they do deliver, of course, it's pork-barrelling and rorts or just delivering for their mates.

As our country and the world have grappled with the enormous health and economic challenges presented by COVID-19, Labor has provided the government with all the necessary cooperation to ensure financial assistance reached businesses, workers and families as quickly as possible, to help them get through this terrible pandemic. The measure Morrison and Frydenberg so loudly proclaim as their big success—the wage subsidy, or JobKeeper, as it has been branded—was originally put forward by Labor and the unions but rejected out of hand by this government. The Prime Minister actually said it would be 'dangerous' to implement what became JobKeeper.

We put forward the idea, and when the government finally decided to do it we supported it, even though it left a million casual workers behind; ignored university workers, people in the arts and entertainment industry, the sporting industry and of course the tourism industry, which I've been familiar with; and left loyal aviation workers completely out in the cold. Nevertheless, we were constructive. Similarly, the union movement worked with employers and the Fair Work Commission to ensure that changes to awards could be made quickly to allow businesses to keep operating in the most difficult and unique of circumstances. If anything, what was achieved showed that the current system was already flexible enough to respond to and manage unforeseen issues. And despite the fact that Labor was not invited to the negotiating table, when Scott Morrison announced his industrial relations working groups we were prepared to considered agreed measures that came from those groups. The unions were invited and were involved with that process, and they were represented in every working group. So, if there was agreement coming out of that process, we would be open and willing to consider those changes.

But what we have before us is not the result of anything that came out of those working groups—and this is an important point. We cannot be deceived by employer groups or media reports that the legislation represents consensus from any of the Attorney-General's working groups, because it does not. Even the wage theft provisions in the bill, which at least contain some positive measures, override existing stronger legislation in both Queensland and Victoria. This was not supported by unions, so it's fair to say that there was virtually nothing to show for the 32 working group meetings over a period of 10 weeks, taking up around 150 hours. When the working group process was gradually announced by the Prime Minister back in May last year, it was all about breaking away from the old arguments and finding new ways for employers and unions to work together to come to an agreement around improving our industrial relations system. The Prime Minister tried to portray himself as a Bob Hawke of the day, forging a new way forward. Well, I knew Bob Hawke, and Scott Morrison is no Bob Hawke.

But nobody bought the idea. As my colleague the shadow minister for industrial relations pointed out, when Hawke negotiated the first prices and incomes accord with the trade union movement he brought universal health cover to the table. Scott Morrison, on the other hand, simply brought the table. There was never going to be any give in this, only take. And that's what we're left with in this legislation. Just ask the union movement, who, in good faith and in the spirit of cooperation, participated fully in every one of those 32 meetings. But, I'm afraid to say, it was all for nothing. With what we have before us here in this legislation, it is actually as if the union movement were not even in the room. I'll say that again, Madam Deputy President, because I know you're surprised, but it's as if the union movement were not even in the room.

Just read the opening summary to the ACTU's submission to the Senate inquiry on the bill:

This Bill, if enacted will cut the wages, conditions and rights of Australian workers. Working people have either been the essential workers supporting the country during the pandemic or have already suffered the most from the economic impacts of Covid19. Punishing them with cuts to their rights should not be acceptable to this Parliament.

But that is the outcome of the Prime Minister's and the Attorney-General's working groups: a complete failure or, as was expressed in so many other submissions, a lost opportunity. We shouldn't pretend that there's any balance in this legislation so far as the workers are concerned. What we need to understand is that the temptation to use the COVID crisis to drive through a long-wished-for group of antiworker measures was just too great for this government. They simply returned to what they always do; it's in their DNA. That DNA gave us Work Choices over a decade ago. Remember that? Howard finally got his chance, his dream, to implement his own industrial relations provisions called 'Work Choices'—of course it was nothing like work choices—over a decade ago. It was comprehensively rejected by the Australian people in the 2007 election.

Even in the absence of consensus from the working groups on industrial relations reform, Labor set a very simple test as to whether we would support the legislation: would it deliver secure jobs with decent pay? It's a simple question: would it deliver secure jobs with decent pay? The answer to this piece of legislation is an outstanding no. It simply does not deliver secure jobs with decent pay. When we first saw this bill last December, which contained even more extreme provisions relating to a two-year suspension of the better off overall test, we said no. The bill represented an attack on the rights of workers who got us through COVID, the heroes of the pandemic. I will say that again, Deputy President, because I know you're interested in this point: the bill represented an attack on the rights of workers who got us through COVID, the very workers who managed to hold the fort while lots of us didn't turn up for parliament. These workers, like shop assistants, turned up for work every day, serving customers, risking their own health. What reward do they get from this government? They get a piece of legislation that kicks them right in the guts. Their thanks for—

Senator McCarthy interjecting—

It is a shame, Senator McCarthy. You've hit the nail on the head there. Here we have a group of workers—I'm familiar with retail workers and that wonderful union, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association, which represents them—who worked through this crisis when heaps and heaps of people in this chamber did not turn up to work. They were working; they were serving customers. They were ensuring that the one thing that people who might have been in lockdown could do was get food on their tables at home to feed their kids and feed their families. What does this government do to them? In what way does this government thank those workers for sticking their necks out, turning up for work every single day—unlike what we were doing here—providing a service to our community in the worst pandemic in 100 years? What reward do they get from this government? They get a kick in the guts. There's no other way to describe this piece of legislation. In fact, those people opposite ought to be ashamed when they come to vote for this piece of legislation, because of the way they want to reward those brave workers. I've just picked out the retail workers because I'm familiar with them, but there are lots of others: there are the hospitality workers that you'd be familiar with, Deputy President, and the people who work in hospitals—nurses and doctors. All of those people who stuck their necks out during the pandemic and continued to go to work, treating or dealing with people who might have had COVID or did have COVID. The way these people opposite, the government, say thank you to them is to reduce their terms and conditions, their bargaining power and their ability to get a wage rise.

When was the last time any of these workers got a wage rise? People in this chamber have had a wage rise more recently than most Australian workers. Have a look at the figures on what's happening with wages, Madam Deputy President; I know you are familiar with this already, but I will tell you again. Basically wages are stagnant in this country. Wages are not rising. So what does this government do? It proposes to set in place a piece of legislation that's going to make it even more difficult for workers to try and recover what they've lost.

Malarndirri McCarthy (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's a disgrace!

Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a disgrace; I can't agree with you more there, Senator McCarthy. It's a disgrace what this government is proposing to do.

Just think about who they're trying to target with this bill. It's not professionals. It's not the top end of town. It's those people who jobs are most vulnerable. Their jobs are already under threat with JobKeeper ending. I know about this. I was up in Far North Queensland only a couple of weeks ago talking to some of the people who face an economic cliff in two weeks time because of the removal of the JobKeeper provisions. The people who have continued to work, like casual shop assistants, turning up for three-hour shifts or whatever they might be, are the most vulnerable in our community right now. They've done the right thing. They've continued to work through the whole COVID pandemic to serve the community. And how does this government thank them? How does this government reward them? This government takes away their basic terms and conditions that might give them an opportunity to try and improve their wages as we go forward.

This bill goes backwards. What we should have had by now is a bill that goes forwards, that says to these workers: 'Thank you. We appreciate what you have done during this pandemic, and we are going to reward you—maybe even with a wage rise, some extra hours, some better leave provisions, some pandemic leave provisions.' No—none of that. This government only wants to go backwards. Labor will oppose this legislation.

Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise on behalf of the Greens to speak to the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020. I can tell you that, unlike the title of it, there is absolutely nothing fair about this bill. This bill seeks to suppress wages and erode working conditions for all workers, especially those who are the lowest paid, through a suite of measures designed to further shift the balance of power from workers to business. The Morrison government's clear agenda in putting this bill—the biggest attack on workers' rights since John Howard's Work Choices—is entrenching insecure work to the overwhelming benefit of big business and to the enormous detriment of workers and communities.

One of the most noxious provisions of this bill is its redefinition of 'casual employee'. The new definition will give employers all the power to determine whether a worker is casual, and will allow businesses to classify workers as casual at the start of their employment regardless of the hours they end up working. Not only does this new definition do nothing to prevent misclassification of permanent workers as casual; it actually facilitates it by allowing businesses to hire workers as casuals and give them full-time hours, without requiring businesses to pay entitlements or provide any job security.

This bill will rob part-time workers of hours and income security by allowing businesses to effectively treat them like casuals, with the power to increase and decrease workers' hours. Part-time workers in industries that have been hardest hit by the pandemic such as hospitality and retail would be employed on contracts that offer a guarantee of only 16 hours a week, with their employer able to increase their hours without paying any overtime. Workers will be forced into a false choice: accept a contract with minimal guaranteed hours and agree to additional hours at lower pay; or risk losing the job offer or additional hours to one of the over two million people who are currently unemployed or underemployed. This push from the government turns what should be secure well-paid jobs into insecure work, with no guarantee of regular hours or take-home pay.

Despite the removal of the changes to the better off overall test, the government has snuck in changes that could have the very same effect: a suite of changes proposed in this bill would significantly erode workers' rights and undermine the role of unions in the enterprise-bargaining process. The Fair Work Commission won't be required to satisfy itself that an agreement doesn't exclude the minimum National Employment Standards set out in the Fair Work Act. Instead, the bill replaces the safety net with a yet-to-be-seen regulation that will allow employers to provide a model NES interaction term—which will supposedly assure Fair Work that minimum standards are not excluded.

Additionally, employer obligations to provide workers with important information and all documents relating to the agreement are significantly weakened and employers are no longer required to notify workers that they have a right to be represented by their union in negotiations until a month after they begin. This means that workers may not have all the information necessary to make a decision about an agreement, and might not even know that they have access to support until it's too late. The bill also requires the Fair Work Commission to approve agreements within 21 days, a provision which has raised significant concern about pressure to approve or reject agreements without proper scrutiny, resulting in low-quality agreements which actually harm workers.

As if this catalogue of unfairness were not enough, the government has included provisions that prevent unions which haven't been involved in negotiations from making submissions to the Fair Work Commission. This means that unions—the experts in industrial relations—will not be able to scrutinise non-union agreements and work towards improving them.

During the inquiry into this bill, we heard from unions about the working group process up to the bill. Ms Lori-Anne Sharp, assistant federal secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Foundation, summed it up pretty well when she said:

I was involved in that five-month process, during the lockdown in Melbourne, and we entered it all in very good faith. How disappointed we were to see this legislation, … It seems that the government has gone straight to the hands of the big corporations.

And that is exactly right. The government, as always, has gone straight into the hands of the big corporations.

It appears that while plenty of proposals from business lobbies have made their way into this bill, the recommendations of unions and other labour law experts were summarily dismissed by the government. It's not hard to imagine why. We know why: reforms that would improve workplace entitlements and benefits for workers are not part of the Liberal-National-big-business agenda. I don't think they ever were. Time and time again we have seen big businesses act in their own self-interest at the expense of workers' wages and conditions. However, the government is removing the safety net checks and balances that are designed to protect workers and asking them to trust businesses to do the right thing. This is not a government which has any interest—any interest whatsoever—in supporting good jobs for anyone but the wealthy or the kind of economic recovery which would make life better for everyone in our society. Their interest is in propping up dying industries like coal and gas at the behest of their donors and in securing jobs for themselves—the board directorships and senior executive positions that await them at the other side of their term in this parliament. This government's only true constituency is big business, and this bill is a gift to the corporate interests that bought the Liberal and National parties a long time ago.

A casualised workforce, effectively at the mercy of bosses' wishes to hire and fire, is exactly what corporations and this government are looking for, and that is what this bill will deliver—an insecure workforce with no income security and reduced capacity to organise collectively. It will deliver a more easily exploitable workforce, one which has no choice but to accept bad jobs with bad pay and bad conditions so that people can just get by. The explosion in casual work before and during the pandemic has been a recipe for greater inequality and more stress and angst amongst people and communities.

The pandemic has highlighted the inequality that has been allowed to flourish as a result of insecure work in Australia, and it has supercharged it. Not only is this bill antiworker; it is also racist and sexist. A bill which increases the precarity of casual and part-time workers, reduces collective bargaining power and suppresses wages will be yet another blow to women and migrants, compounding the harm of this government's gendered, racialised and exclusionary responses to the pandemic so far. Just as women and migrant workers have borne the brunt of this pandemic, so too will they suffer because of the provisions of this bill. Already overly represented in the casual and part-time workforce, women and migrant workers are also overrepresented in the lowest-paid sectors of the economy. During the pandemic, women lost their jobs twice as fast as men did, withdrew from higher education at greater rates than men did, were even further loaded with unpaid caring work and, after a brief period of free child care, had that ripped from under them too. Thousands and thousands of migrant workers have been locked out of JobKeeper and JobSeeker due to eligibility requirements. Migrant workers were already vulnerable to exploitation and wage theft. Without the ability to access income support, their situation has become even more precarious. Many have been forced to rely on charity or to try to make ends meet in the gig economy. The danger of unregulated gig work was brought home by the deaths of delivery riders on the job. This bill will only make things worse for the most vulnerable workers in our society.

Before the pandemic, wage growth for all workers was stagnant. Jobs were increasingly insecure and wage theft was rife. Since COVID reared its head, things have only gotten worse. Casual workers were the hardest hit during the pandemic, accounting for two-thirds of people who lost their jobs in early 2020. Casuals who still had a job were amongst the lowest paid and least secure workers, with no access to paid leave entitlements. The labour share of national income has fallen below 50 per cent for the first time since 1959, and corporate profits have soared. Wage growth has fallen to record lows during COVID, and wages have declined in real terms. As lockdowns have ended and businesses have begun to reopen, the proportion of insecure jobs has exploded. Sixty per cent of all jobs that have been created as the economy has started to open up again are casual jobs. Nearly two-thirds of new jobs are part time. Where those part-time jobs are permanent, the government is effectively opening the door to casualising them.

It is impossible to deny the extreme danger to public health posed by insecure work, in the form of both the direct threat to public health in the context of a pandemic and the negative effect on people's psychological, social and economic wellbeing. As we know, the lack of paid leave for casual workers forced people to choose between their health and their income. This government forced people to make an impossible choice between risking contracting COVID by going to work or losing their income and staying home, like we were all instructed to do to keep ourselves and each other safe.

An economic recovery measured solely in terms of how well business is doing will be no recovery at all. An economy is not just numbers cleverly arranged on a spreadsheet. It is not just a series of balance sheets. It is not just the fantasy world of financial markets. The economy is fundamentally about the way our society is organised: how resources, power and the productive and caring work that sustains us are distributed and how that work is compensated. An economy cannot be healthy if it isn't fair and inclusive. If people don't have their basic human needs and rights met, if work isn't meaningful and safe, if people aren't able to be creative and social, because they don't have time or can't afford it, an economy is not functional. The Greens reject the fantasy world the Morrison government lives in, a world where money and price are realistic representations of value and sufficient signifiers of the health of an economy. We recognise the vital importance of social labour and care and the fundamental necessity of making sure everyone's economic and social needs are met. We deserve to have a government determined to help the country grow out of this public health and economic crisis with a more inclusive, safer, secure economy where every worker can honestly look forward to a brighter future.

We should be reducing insecure work, not entrenching it. We need a genuine process for ensuring casual workers have the opportunity to convert to permanent employment if their work is regular and if they would like to, to avoid catastrophes like we have seen throughout the pandemic. At the very least we must ensure casual workers have access to paid pandemic leave, we must ensure that gig economy workers receive the same wages and conditions as any other workers and we must wind back union-busting laws and guarantee the right to strike. We need to shift the balance of power back towards the workers, not more in favour of billionaires.

The Greens want minimum wages, terms and conditions in the Fair Work Act; modern awards or enterprise agreements to apply to gig economy workers; and legislated security of work. Instead, the Morrison government want to take us further down the path of extreme wealth inequality and disempowerment of labour because, like all the neoliberal zealots that came before them, they have no abiding belief in society or community. If the Senate passes this bill, it will be buttressing a nihilistic ideology that sees workers not as people but as wage bills to be minimised and units to be shuffled around to fill shifts and then be discarded. It will send a message to every worker in this country that their lives, their families and their communities aren't important to this chamber. Workers deserve much better than that. The Greens reject this bill and the Greens reject this government.

Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021 is an important piece of legislation in the life of this parliament. When we come to the topic of industrial relations it's an opportunity to hear about the parallel universes that exist around this chamber. We hear all sorts of smearing and basically the inference of corruption, which we heard from the Greens just then. That is such a degrading way to start a debate.

I understand that people have different views on these matters, but the reality is that these are important issues for working people and for Australians. The way that we calibrate our labour laws and the way that we set up our tax policies are very important to the lives of people who elect us to these chambers. I would like to think that we could have a more mature debate than have people come in here and read out talking points that haven't even been written in this building. It is quite clear that vested interests are writing these talking points for members and senators. I think they're just coming in here and reading them out.

When it comes down to the basic elements, we have a country that has been very successful. We're the 12th-largest economy on earth. We have a small domestic population. We have relied upon foreign capital and have relied upon trying to get good migrants. We've got an outward disposition. We have to be competitive because we're competing for investment. We haven't got enough capital to develop our own country. That is the Australian problem. Capital has been diverted to superannuation people and others, so we have a major issue with our competitive position. That is the starting point for me, because how competitive you are determines how much investment you will get and then how many jobs you'll be able to create on the back of that investment. It's pretty simple. So labour laws are critical. Labour laws have to be competitive. No-one owes this country a favour, so you have to be competitive. You have to create the conditions where organisations, people and businesses are going to invest in this country and create more jobs. When you look at the things that hold back the economy—and I accept that they're politically difficult to change—tax, the way you tax, tax rates and labour laws are really important things. So I welcome the fact that our government is pursuing these industrial relations changes. They have come out of a process held in good faith by our government and key stakeholders, employers, unions and third parties.

On this question of unions, a lot has been said. This side is not wanting to be hostile towards organised trade unions, but we are concerned about the tendency of organised trade unions to operate for the benefit of themselves and not for the benefit of their stated constituents, the workers. There has been a tradition of financial schemes, boondoggles, super funds, industry super funds—whatever—bringing together money taken from workers and spending it on themselves. That is a major concern. We want to see good trade unions representing the interests of workers.

We want to see the same thing on the business side. We want to see good, organised business operations representing the interests of business focused on the national interest. This is the challenge we have in this area. It's the same on labour laws and it's the same on superannuation. It's hard to find organisations that will argue what the best thing is for the nation right now. I'm not interested in trying to find the best thing for capital or labour; I'm interested in trying to find the best thing for the country as we come out of this economic shock. That is very important. So I wish that more would come with clean hands.

On the elements that have come out of this process, perhaps the major one deals with casuals. There has been enormous confusion after the Rossato case. A court decision said that casuals, paid a higher rate of pay, can effectively double dip and get the same protections as full-time workers. We have no problem with flexible work. We have no problem with full-time work. We have no problem with people having legal statutory protections. But we don't want to see double dipping. The implications for people coming into this place and arguing against these changes really are quite grave.

The way the Rossato case has been determined by the courts has meant there is $39 billion of liability sitting on the balance sheets of these organisations, businesses, in Australia, so we have to tidy this up. We have to give certainty about what a casual worker is. Australian Mines and Metals Association CEO Steve Knott, last year, said:

The precedent set by the Federal Court in both the Rossato and Skene decisions overturned decades of common understanding about casual employment and suggested casuals could have two bites of the cherry—higher hourly pay rates and entitlements reserved for permanent employees.

This is something we should fix, and this bill offers a pathway.

This bill gives casual workers a pathway to permanent employment. That's what it does. It clarifies exactly what a casual worker is and what a full-time worker is so that businesses can employ people knowing what the laws are. Quite an important precondition for investment is understanding the world in which you're entitled to make an investment. Labour costs, quite rightly, in many sectors are quite high. So clarifying this and giving a clear path to conversion is a welcome reform.

Award flexibility is another element. We want to see the extension of the coronavirus settings that allow workers and businesses to agree on more flexibility. This whole idea that we've got to be trapped and straddled to this Fair Work Commission archaeology forever is going to send Australia to the Dark Ages. I think the idea that workers and businesses are banned and can't actually agree on providing more flexibility which suits them is very, very troubling. You have to wonder: why would parties come into this place and want to deny individual workplace agency? Perhaps we'll find out. At the end of the day, we also want to improve underemployment by providing more avenues for people to get more work, which could be delivered through the question of more flexibility. Thirty per cent of retail workers say they want access to more work. Forty per cent of food and accommodation workers say they want access to more work. The flexibility proposed in this bill could deliver that.

When we turn to enterprise agreements, this has to be one of the biggest failings of the industrial architecture known as the Fair Work Commission framework. The whole idea is that you've got basic conditions guaranteed in law, the employment standards, and then you've got the award. That is supposed to be a baseline; that is supposed to provide Australian workers with certainty and protection. The whole system is premised on the basis that there would be enterprise bargaining, there would be the opportunity for workers, individually or represented by unions, to bargain with their workplaces, with their employers, to go above and beyond to get a better deal at the workplace level. That system is dead. Enterprise bargaining in Australia is dead. It has died and, if you don't believe me, I give you the view of a former Fair Work Commission senior deputy president, Peter Richards—it's had so many presidents, it's hard to keep up with all the presidents in this constitutional monarchy. He said:

Ironically, collective agreements have become bundles of individual contracts, and are simply too transaction-rich for employers to bother about.

But interestingly, we've got a view from the Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary, Sally McManus, who has quite rightly said in relation to the bargaining system:

We cannot allow workers' pay or conditions to go backwards through bargaining—

Agreed, because bargaining has got to be a better deal; it can't be a worse deal. Ms McManus went on to say:

We need to fix the bargaining system to give workers more power to win pay rises and improve conditions, not give employers even more options to cut wages—

Agreed, agreed, agreed. My former boss Jennifer Westcott has said that the BOOT and the enterprise bargaining system, which is dead, were 'a productivity killer'. So there you go: the ACTU and the Business Council of Australia are both saying this enterprise bargaining system is dead. That means that workers can't get a better deal.

Our bill puts forward a proposition that you can get enterprise agreements, EAs, done in 21 days, not three years or 14 decades, which this Fair Work Commission takes to deal with things. A less technical test would revise enterprise bargaining in Australia, and that would be a good thing for Australian workers. That would be a good thing for business, which ultimately provides 80 per cent or 90 per cent of the workforce in Australia. We can't all work for the government in this country; most people work in the real world and they want to get pay rises, they want to get a better deal than the awards. Enterprise bargaining being dead is hurting workers, so we need to bring enterprise bargaining back to life. This bill is the only option in town. This is the only chance to bring enterprise bargaining back from the dead, from the crypt. You can knock off an enterprise agreement in 21 days, if this bill were to pass. The Fair Work Commission thinks it has the powers of some sort of an emperor over the economy. I tell you what, no-one elected those people and we need to legislate to provide that the Fair Work Commission needs to deal with these things swiftly, and it needs to take a sensible approach, a principles based approach, in making its assessments about whether workers are better off or not. That's a pretty simple test. It will go to their pay and their conditions. It's a pretty simple test, but we need to clarify it because enterprise bargaining is dead and it is hurting workers.

This bill will also deal with longer-term agreements. It will provide that there can be eight-year greenfield agreements when the agreement exceeds an investment of $250 million. I remind the chamber that, yes, we have this problem in this country that we don't have enough money to fund our own projects and so we rely upon foreign investment. Actually having longer-term agreements means we might get more foreign investment and we might have more jobs. So that is another important reform. I would say to the Senate that there are serious projects which would benefit from having longer tenure. In my home state of New South Wales, we're currently building the second Sydney airport. I've got no doubt that projects associated with the aerotropolis, soon to be known as the suburb of Bradfield, named after the great engineer who designed the Harbour Bridge, would have benefited from these longer term agreements.

Finally, I come back to underpayments. This will turn on much stronger laws in Australia. You're looking at four years jail if you underpay your workers and a $1 million fine for individuals. So we are taking this very seriously. It actually addresses a lot of the issues that have been raised in the Senate inquiry conducted through the Senate references committee.

In summary, the whole point here is that we want workers to get a better deal and we want more investment in Australia. These are sensible, incremental changes which are not based on ideology. They are based on solving problems. They will mean that there will be more jobs as we recover from this pandemic. We will be a more attractive investment destination because people will have certainty that they can employ casual workers, they can have longer deals and they can get an enterprise bargaining agreement through our system. That is a good thing for Australian workers.

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

I rise to speak on the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021. This bill represents the Morrison government's latest industrial relations reform package and their latest attempt to erode the rights of workers and suppress wage growth. Labor have said from the outset that we will only support legislation which not only protects the pay and conditions of workers but enhances it and ensures secure jobs with decent pay. Christian Porter may have removed the most extreme part of this bill—the suspension of the BOOT for two years—but there is no doubt in my mind that the bill before us makes work less secure and cuts pay. It's also self-defeating because, without measures to create more secure jobs with the prospect of wage rises, workers will have less capacity and confidence to spend, which will in turn suppress demand and hurt the domestic economy.

This bill is being introduced at an unprecedented moment in Australian history. Before COVID-19 hit our shores, wage growth was at its lowest level since the 1930s depression. Now it's exacerbated by COVID-19. The recession has seen wages standing still, growing at a mere 0.6 per cent in the December quarter. The CPI rose by 0.9 per cent in this quarter as well. So any growth has been negligible. There is also a wide consensus amongst academics, unionists, economists and the Reserve Bank that wage growth must be incremental in ensuring that we are able to fuel our economic recovery. But this bill will do the opposite.

In its briefing note prepared following the introduction of the legislation, the ACTU said:

The Bill fails the Government's own test: workers will be worse off.

…   …   …

The Government's changes will make jobs less secure; they will make it easier for employers to casualise permanent jobs and allow employers to pay workers less than the award safety net. This is the opposite of what the country needs.

The working group process was a great idea. Getting employers, unions and government officials around the table is productive. But, as indicated in these comments from the ACTU, it is clear that the bill does not represent a consensus outcome from the working group process. The government has, ultimately, reverted to type and bowed to the demands of employer groups, using the COVID crisis as leverage. As said repeatedly in the public hearings, this is a big-business-lobby wish list, and it will come at the expense of working men and women.

Despite the government's and employer groups' fear campaign around the impact of the recent Federal Court decision on employers hiring casuals, the bounce back in employment numbers has seen casual jobs accounting for around 60 per cent of all wage jobs created since May, according to the Centre for Future Work. We know that casualisation is alive and well in Australia, a country that is becoming increasingly split between the haves and the have-nots because of the Morrison government—because of their policies and because they want to undermine working Australians. They want to cut their wages and their conditions. That analysis found that between May and November 2020 casual employment grew by 400,000, by far the biggest expansion of casual employment in Australia's history. That's what's happening right now in this country.

The permanent addition of flexible work directions is proof that changes to the Fair Work Act introduced temporarily by the Liberal government are never that. This measure was originally introduced as part of the JobKeeper program and limited to employees receiving the wage subsidy. However, since then, it has continued to be expanded in its application, well beyond its original intent. That's why you always have to read the fine print in anything proposed by this government. But now the bill creates a new definition of a casual employee. Extraordinarily, the government has ignored years of common law and overturned the recent Federal Court decision that upheld the common law definition of what a casual is. The designation of an employee as a casual at the start of their employment determines their ongoing status, regardless of their actual work pattern. Under the government's own figures, this involves cancelling an estimated $18 billion to $39 billion in back pay that would have been otherwise owed to casuals.

Over the past seven years, and under the nose of the Morrison government, there has been a notable trend of increasing use of subcontractors and labour hire firms. This has been favoured by big multinational companies as the means by which they can cut wages and weaken workers' bargaining positions. It also makes it very easy for companies to shift blame and it has established a permanent casual rort—and we know the word 'rort' is so heavily associated with this government. There has been an epidemic of casualisation and underemployment in this country, from the mining industry through to retail and hospitality. This bill goes directly against the common law definition of a casual, undoing 20 years of very careful consideration by court authority. It supports big businesses and labour hire companies, and if this bill does pass it will allow the legitimisation of the permanent casual. The problems of being a permanent casual are widely recognised: absence of paid leave and job security make it difficult for employees to go on holidays and, more importantly, to obtain a mortgage to buy a house. And it also affects those who are trying to rent a home. Housing affordability is already a problem in this country, in particular in my home state of Tasmania. This bill will make it harder for working families to obtain a mortgage and to get their foot in the door.

What else is wrong with the plan? Employers must make a written offer of conversion to casual employees after 12 months if, for the previous six months, there has been a regular pattern of work. However, the employer does not have to make the offer if there are reasonable grounds not to. Do you remember that I said you've got to watch the fine print from this government? This is another example of it. An example would be if the employer had reasonable grounds to think the job might not be there in 12 months. The gap is so wide that it allows employers to not convert.

As we've seen from an analysis of the actual nature of casual employment, very little is about flexibility in most cases. Rather, the decision to engage workers as casuals is about creating precarious employment for its own sake. There is no arbitration of disputes other than by agreement. An employee who wants to dispute the decision can only do so by applying to the Federal Court. The bill introduces a new simplified additional hours agreement. The provision will be initially applied to 12 modern awards. These represent permanent changes and are effectively a reduction in the award safety net and are not temporary COVID-19 measures. This is an agreement between an employer and a part-time employee for the employee to work additional hours with little or no notice without being paid overtime. The new provision applies to employees who work an average 16 hours per week on a roster arrangement or, simply, 16 hours per week. The longer-term potential impact, or the risk of this arrangement becoming normalised, is that future part-time jobs will become a standard 16-hours commitment, with simplified additional hours being used to top up on an as-needs basis. This reduces job security and effectively casualises part-time work.

Of particular concern to me is the aged-care workforce. Eighty-eight per cent of aged-care workers are employed part time or casually, and roughly the same percentage are women, and the Liberal Party's agenda is a real kick in the guts for all the hard work that they, as a frontline workers, did throughout the pandemic. There is already chronic understaffing in this sector and this reform will only make it worse. It is hard enough to attract people into the aged-care and disability service industry. This bill will disincentivise workers from coming and working in aged care. As it is, workers need to put their lives on hold to make themselves available for that extra work and, if they can't, there is usually retribution. But things like child care are hard to organise at short notice. It's hard to enjoy your life if you are potentially waiting anxiously to get a call for an extra shift.

The Liberals' policy will entrench the permanent casual rort already rampant in this country under their watch. Those sitting opposite have held, and rushed, a truncated inquiry to try to push through the legislation by stealth. A major theme of the hearing was that this bill will erode job security in this country. People want certainty in their lives, and certainty comes with a permanent job. The Morrison government is doing all that it can to undermine work in this country and to undermine workers, and we on this side will always stand up for Australian workers.

This omnibus bill also includes flexible work directions that allow an employer to give directions to an employee about their duties and their location of work. This is a two-year provision based on the original JobKeeper stand-down directions that were introduced on the basis that they would be temporary and only connected to employees in receipt of JobKeeper. Since then, the provision has been extended to the so-called legacy employers. Now they apply to the 12 modern awards, but the minister has the authority to expand the list, thereby exposing all workers. This means that, for workplaces covered by identified awards, the special flexibility will be available to every employer who seeks to revive their business, even if they never qualified for JobKeeper.

In its analysis of this legislation the Scrutiny of Bills Committee, which I chair, has highlighted its concerns about the amount of significant matters in the bill that are set out in delegated legislation. This legislative instrument is not subject to the full range of parliamentary scrutiny, and we questioned why the government is doing this—and it's a habit with legislation after legislation of this government. We need to be able to scrutinise legislation. Regarding the changes in definition of casual employment, the committee has also expressed longstanding scrutiny concerns about provisions that have the effect of applying retrospectively, as it challenges a basic value of the rule of law that, in general, laws should only operate prospectively. The committee has a particular concern that the legislation will or might have a detrimental impact on individuals.

In essence, the bill will casualise permanent employment, restrict unions to intervening for workers who have no representation, reduce scrutiny of enterprise agreements, and completely undo the common law definition of a casual employee. It will also shift most of the risk in employer-employee relationships onto the employee. If workers have to bear all the risk, that makes it hard to get certainty. If workers don't have certainty, they cannot afford to contribute to our economy and they will not support Australia's jobs and economic recovery.

The government has rushed this inquiry. It's rushing this legislation. The minister responsible for this bill is on indefinite leave. We must question the need for this bill. A plethora of expert opinion has warned against it—and warned against it for good reason: it is all about undermining Australian workers and casualising the workforce in this country, and it deserves to be defeated.

Ben Small (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I rise to speak in support of the important reforms under this bill, the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia’s Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021. As the Morrison government has demonstrated throughout this pandemic, this government is determined to implement measures that will help business to regrow jobs—and they are coming back strongly, with more than 93 per cent of the jobs lost with this once-in-a-century pandemic already being filled by hardworking Australians. We are about boosting wages, enhancing productivity and implementing measures that benefit both employers and employees.

Before I go through the reforms in detail, it's worth reflecting on what we've heard from the contributions so far, which I've been listening to very carefully. Thus far, I've heard from those opposite on the Labor benches that they didn't turn up to work during the pandemic, when over here on the government benches the Morrison government was all about protecting lives and livelihoods through a once-in-a-century pandemic. We've also heard hyperbole, unsubstantiated misrepresentation and a misconstruing of basic statistics. Senator Polley referred to the December quarter growth figures. It is worth reflecting that as Josh Frydenberg, the federal Treasurer, has very pleasingly been able to announce to the Australian people in recent days, the December quarter was the second consecutive quarter, for the first time since 1959, that the Australian economy achieved a growth rate of more than three per cent—the first time since 1959.

The government's modest, sensible, non-ideological and incremental changes that are being contemplated here today are reflective of the cooperative spirit that we so successfully embraced in this nation's approach to the pandemic. The fair work amendments address known problems with Labor's Fair Work Act that are currently stifling job creation and wages growth in this country. The changes made will provide certainty for both businesses and employees, clearly defining casual employment and giving casual employees a statutory pathway for converting their employment to permanent full-time or permanent part-time employment should they so choose. I find it staggering that those opposite have suggested here today that defining the nature of employment at the start, with clarity for both the employer and the employee, is somehow unfair. Nothing could be father from the truth. At the same time, the Morrison government is for the first time providing every worker in Australia who works under a casual employment arrangement a clear, consistent and defined pathway to convert that employment to permanency.

I've also heard claims today about legitimising permanent casual arrangements. I find it staggeringly arrogant and so typical of those opposite that they would seek to tell those Australians who instead choose to work under casual arrangements on an ongoing basis that they can't. In fact, it reflects the recent rhetoric out of the Labor Party that they would seek to impose a $153-a-week pay cut for those Australians who would lose the 25 per cent casual loading on their earnings. Indeed, we would extend our successful JobKeeper flexibilities around duties and location of work to businesses in the retail and hospitality sectors that were so terribly hit during the course of the pandemic.

We give employers greater confidence to offer secure, part-time employment, facilitating additional hours of work for part-time employees in the retail and hospitality sectors who want more hours, and for the first time those hours, under these flexibility arrangements, would include the leave entitlements and workplace entitlements with regard to unfair dismissal protections that are currently declined to them. Those hours are currently filled by casuals. So, basically, Labor and the Greens are entrenching casualisation in the Australian economy by opposing these very sensible reforms.

These amendments are the result of thorough and extensive consultation with unions, employers and industry. Sadly, Labor has decided to oppose every single one of these modest, incremental and non-ideological changes. Have we heard yet today a single element of reform that could be improved with a suggestion from those opposite? No, we have not. We have heard mistruths. We have heard misrepresentations and hyperbole. Those on the government benches are actually focused on delivering outcomes that put more money into the pockets of Australian workers and take less tax from them. It is Labor and the Greens who currently stand in the way of these needed reforms, because who do these reforms most impact? Who are Labor and the Greens currently blocking from more wages in their pockets? It's those casual workers who need flexibility; younger Australians who were hit hardest by the job losses at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic; those Australians who are crying out for the ability to work extra hours under flexible arrangements, who desire having for the first time the right to convert casual employment to full-time or permanent part-time work.

So apparently it is too much to ask that the Labor Party adopt a mature approach to industrial relations and focus on the needs of Australians rather than keep their union masters happy. We don't live in the fantasy world of the Greens. We live in the real world, where pennies are actually earned here rather than raining down from heaven. We're a healthy and wealthy society, and that enables us to focus on the needs of those who are most disadvantaged in our communities. Indeed, for those workers in the gig economy that the Greens seem particularly focused on when we talk of a minimum wage or a floor, imposing those sorts of arrangements imposes a cap on their maximum earning potential.

With regard to casual employees, we are fixing Labor's failure to define 'casual employees' more than a decade ago now. We are introducing that clear definition of what it means. It provides certainty around when a person is a casual employee and certainty to both them and their employer as to the rights and obligations that accompany that.

The government firmly believes that all employees should be classified and paid correctly. Wage theft and exploitation are never acceptable, and we'll turn to the improvements and enhancements that the government seeks to make with respect to enforcement provisions in a little while. The ability for some employees to double dip on their entitlements, by being paid a casual loading as compensation for not receiving leave entitlements and then being paid those leave entitlements on top of that, is grossly unfair, and I think any objective assessment in the mind of the average Australian would certainly agree.

In the event that an ongoing employee is misclassified as casual, the bill will ensure that casual loading amounts paid to that employee can offset against claims for leave and other entitlements, eliminating any potential for double dipping. This potential for double dipping represents a $39 billion liability for Australian business. We're not just talking about big business and corporations here; we're talking about small and medium-sized enterprises across Australia that are the backbone of the Australian economy.

By opposing these changes, Labor has decided that it is standing in the way of casual employees who want to become full-time employees for the first time. We've heard claims today about an explosion in the level of casual employment across the Australian economy. That is simply false. Since the early 1990s casual employment arrangements have applied to approximately 25 per cent of the Australian workforce. So let's not cherrypick from the December quarter just a few months ago; let's look at the statistics that are borne out over the course of decades.

We've heard claims that these reforms are racist and sexist. Frankly, those sorts of claims have no place in a debate that's focused on putting more money into the pockets of hardworking Australians. Has Labor actually read this bill? I wonder, because earlier today we heard claims that employees would have no right to arbitration in anything other than pursuing action through the Federal Court, when, instead, employees have protections around the right to convert at section 66L and have the detail surrounding the dispute process—including that initiation from a discussion with the employer the whole way through the process—at section 66M, and the Fair Work Commission have the arbitration process to prevent employers abusing any limitations on the conversion right, described at section 66H.

Under schedule 2 of the proposed reforms, the government's greater flexibility will improve the opportunities for Australians to work more hours in the hardest-hit sectors post-COVID. The bill allows those workers in those sectors, who together employ more than one-third of casual employees, to work together to agree on additional hours for part-time employees who want them. This will increase working hours and wages and encourage employers to offer more permanent secure roles with benefits paid, including sick leave, over more traditionally flexible arrangements like casual roles. That is what this government is about. Those opposite, by standing between these reforms and those Australian workers who want them, seek to show their true cause.

With respect to enterprise agreements, these enterprise agreements encourage job creation, wage increases and productivity growth. We know this because enterprise agreements, on average, put 69 per cent extra earnings in the pockets of Australians when compared to the awards that would apply in other cases. We have seen reports suggesting that Labor sees those employees wanting those higher wages provided by enterprise agreements as merely collateral damage in this fallacious and unsubstantiated war. So much for Labor being on your side—not if you want higher wages, higher productivity, higher flexibility and more control in your own life.

To assert that the Fair Work Commission needs to approve these agreements in 21 days, in a tick-and-flick exercise, is patently false. The Fair Work Commission very clearly has the ability to extend that approval process where the merits of the application bear that out. But make no mistake: these reforms don't allow the Fair Work Commission to stand between Australian workers who desire more money in their pockets and an expedited agreement-making process. There's no automatic union involvement in that, but it's not precluded in any way. Should any single Australian entering into a negotiation process appoint a union, then so be it; they're at the bargaining table. When nine per cent of the Australian private sector is covered by unions, why on earth would we listen to those opposite and tell the other 90 per cent of Australians that they need to have a union between them and their employer? It's not borne out by the choices that Australians make every day when they choose to keep their hard-earned money in their pocket or spend it on their families, rather than giving it to the union movement, who keep our colleagues over there on the opposition benches in check.

From the Western Australian perspective, the greenfields agreements changes are essential for securing the ongoing massive infrastructure investment in the resources and energy sectors that we desperately need as we recover from COVID-19. The maximum period of time that an agreement can run for is eight years. It's not automatically eight years; it is a maximum of eight years, and only when it includes a mandated increase in salary annually. What prevents that sort of very positive arrangement that facilitates investment in massive projects, generates jobs and drives taxation revenue that pays for the sorts of things that keep the Greens in this chamber? It is the opposition to these sorts of reforms.

We talked about compliance and enforcement before. The changes in schedule 5 introduce stronger protections for employees through measures that not only include tougher penalties and orders to deter noncompliance but, when noncompliance occurs, get wages underpayments recovered and into e pockets sooner. What stands between employees and that money that they would have in their pockets sooner? Again, it is the opposition and the Greens who stand between us and very sensible, incremental and non-ideological reforms. The Morrison government is about jobs and more money in the pockets of Australians. I commend these reforms to the Senate.

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

I'm very pleased to talk on the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia’s Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021. Before I do that, Senator Small, I appreciate that you've given an outline of what's happening in the gig economy, but I'd like to give an outline from this morning at 11.30. After a series of strikes by Hungry Panda workers—the first strike was because they were not getting paid the minimum wage and the company effectively had taken a third of their income from them—the company's response was to terminate a number of people who had held meetings to talk about the abuse they were receiving at the hands of the company. They had no commission to go to and they had no workers comp arrangements for when they were injured—and a number of their colleagues had been killed or injured. You're saying that somehow these people have a capacity under our system to earn a higher income and, by having regulation, we're holding them back. No, your proposal is killing them. I say this quite clearly in opposing the bill, with the rest of my colleagues.

Since the beginning of this pandemic, Labor has set a consistent test for legislation proposed by this government: will it create good, secure, well-paying jobs? It was to protect these jobs that Labor supported the JobKeeper wage subsidy, a program intended to keep workers connected to their employers. But, cruelly, the government's implementation of the program excluded thousands of workers at dnata and did nothing to stop Qantas outsourcing thousands of others. Despite this bill's title, the bill includes not a single provision that would create secure jobs, increase wages or enable Australia to recover from the economic consequences of COVID-19. Instead, this bill will prolong the worst, most debilitating aspects of Australia's economic landscape by further entrenching insecure work. It will cripple already sluggish wage growth and, by watering down existing laws in Victoria and Queensland, it will fail to deter rampant wage theft.

The economics of this bill are simply bad, which makes this bill so exceptional, because the economics of recovery are abundantly clear. We know that the labour market is the foundation of the economy. When the foundation is weak and insecure, so too is the economy. When workers are underpaid, they spend less, and demand goes down. When they have no choice but insecure employment, they don't spend. When they have few rights and are forced to accept lower pay and lower conditions, consumer confidence is undermined. Instead, what we need are quality jobs, secure employment and fair pay. These are the conditions of a strong labour market, one that provides consumers the confidence to consume and invest. You cannot bet Australia's economic recovery on a pay cut. You cannot rebuild our labour market on more insecure work. A good economy doesn't drive good jobs; good jobs drive a good economy.

We cannot ignore that this bill sits, in the time line of government policy, 12 days from the end of JobKeeper and with no policy of support in sight. As a Labor dissenting report correctly points out, the government says the economy is doing well enough that business no longer needs JobKeeper. Then they say the economy is doing so badly that they need to cut the pay of workers. They can't have it both ways. COVID-19 should have been a wake-up call for Australia's policymakers.

Since the 1980s casual employment has doubled to a quarter of all workers. It has become an industrial norm with grave consequences. Most notably, insecure employment has become a feature of our aged-care industry. There's a lack of sick leave. Workers have been forced to work across multiple centres. It was a recipe for disaster at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Miss Sherree Clarke, an aged care worker for more than 20 years, told her story to the inquiry into this bill. She said:

Because most of my work is so insecure, I can only plan to live on my minimum contracted hours, and a contract of 16 hours per fortnight is not enough to live on. This impacts all aspects of my lifestyle, including health. My budget does not allow me to choose healthy options and I often miss meals. Paying my car registration or visiting my dentist is a day-to-day decision for me.

Workers in the gig economy are in a similar position. Without sick leave to fall back on, without entitlements to use, workers in the gig economy couldn't afford to isolate and couldn't afford to socially distance. A recent survey of gig workers conducted by the Transport Workers Union of Australia found that they were paid as little as $10 an hour; 90 per cent had seen their pay decrease over time and 70 per cent were struggling to pay their bills and buy food.

Any government would have seen these issues, heard these stories and said, 'Enough is enough.' But, no, the Attorney-General, the Minister for Workplace Relations, said, 'It's all too complicated to pay people a minimum wage.' Senator Small just reconfirmed this government's view about exploitation. Let it rip, let it keep going and now they have a bill to encourage it. They could have chosen to reset the trend, fostering a labour market rich in well-paying secure jobs that give workers confidence and freedom to isolate when needed, to raise a family and to get by. Instead, this government looks at insecure work and calls it 'flexibility'. I can tell you, it's not flexibility when a worker has their wages stolen. It's certainly not flexibility when you have no ability or rights to negotiate a liveable wage. It's certainly not flexibility when you're forced to take a second or third job in order to make ends meet.

We cannot forget that this bill is just the second act in the government's attack on working people. First was their failed ensuring integrity bill, a bill to attack working people and their representatives to undermine their ability to argue for higher wages. Fresh from their defeat in the Senate, this government declared a new compact, a new accord, with working people. They established, they said, industrial relations working groups for unions and businesses to come together and form genuine proposals for reform.

In the context of COVID-19, the ACTU and its affiliates took this offer seriously. They sat down. They laid out issues that needed to be addressed. They even found an area of compromise. The ACTU and the Business Council of Australia hashed out some areas of reform only to have the other business groups boycott the meetings and the Liberals just abandon the whole process. This bill is the response, a bill to deliver an ideological industrial relations agenda on behalf of the most reactionary of the employer groups. It's one that paves the way for employers to cut the wages and conditions of workers like Sherree. How do we know this? Because not a single employer group that appeared at the hearings into the bill could give a guarantee that employees would not be left worse off under this bill. When asked, the representative of the National Retail Association said, 'I cannot give you that guarantee.' The Australian Hotels Association, when asked, replied no. The representative of the Australian Retailers Association replied, 'I don't think we can make any guarantees about reductions.' Of course, the Australian mines and metals association replied, 'It's very hard to answer complex relations matters with a yes or no.'

There should be nothing complex about whether or not the legislation will leave workers better off. If the industry and business community are so uncertain about the effect on workers then why were they so supportive of this in the first place? Maybe because they know what will happen under these laws. We know employers like to talk about complexity—well, some employers, certainly the ones that have been caught for wage theft—and say it's all too hard. They don't seem to have a problem with the complexity of this bill, do they? They operate under the same false assumption that you can get economic growth going only when wages are lower—when workers are cheaper and profits are higher. We recognise this for what it is: a lie.

It's the same lie that was told by this government when it sought to remove penalty rates. It made claims that this would create hundreds of thousands of jobs. That noise is still ringing in my ears. It claimed that employers unburdened with paying their workers extra for shifts would suddenly take on new staff. What happened? Nothing. The cut in penalty rates resulted in no more jobs, not a single one. No industry group, employer group or government has been able to demonstrate that any jobs at all have been created. Instead, according to the McKell Institute, some $2.87 billion in income was ripped from the pay slips of workers, further undermining consumption, confidence and demand.

This bill will entrench casual employment as a permanent feature of our industrial relations landscape, one in which a worker is a casual not because of the nature of their employment but because of a word inserted in the terms of their contract. Those employees that want to do the right thing will be left to the mercy of those who do the wrong thing. Those who want to do the right thing will not be able to bargain when they're trying to win contracts because of the undermining by those employers who do the wrong thing—and the new norm begins. It ignores the reality of modern work, assumes that employers will never use this definition to exploit workers, and seems primarily concerned with overturning the recent WorkPac decision. A myth promoted by this government is that the recent decision will see workers double dipping with entitlements and casual loading. This bill's new definition of casual is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. The WorkPac case, from the outset, said: any back pay of annual leave entitlements against any casual loading that was paid. The problem was that the company was calling him a casual employee and not paying him any casual loading.

A number of labour lawyers raised this point during the hearings. The bill proposes a new definition of casual employment that would create a pathway for employers to declare a worker a casual on day one and then ignore those conditions for the length of their employment. As Per Capita outlined, at its worst interpretation the new definition and conversion clause could encourage employers to offer casual employment to all new employees, giving all employees a year of 'try before you buy' employment regardless of the eventual hours worked. It's said there are mechanisms to ensure an employer genuinely holds this view and will rectify it if it turns out to be incorrect. There's no mechanism. Under this legislation there is no right to arbitration unless the employer agrees. So here we have the exploitative employer having to agree that they can turn around and take the matter to arbitration. My goodness, is that the rule of law?

As the Law Council of Australia has rightly pointed out, without defined arbitration clauses there is no absolute power for the Fair Work Commission to settle disputes over the provisions of the bill. Instead, workers have to rely on the ability of the commission to remediate a dispute and, if the employer doesn't agree, well, then, tough luck.

There is no point having a right unless you have the power to enforce it. This bill's casual conversion rights are just that: rights in name only. The bill will make it easier for employers to cut the pay and conditions for their employees through amending a number of existing modern awards, adding new, simplified additional agreements to 11 awards, covering everything from pharmacies to restaurants, the meat industry and vehicle repair. Of course there's minimal parliamentary oversight. The minister responsible, the Attorney-General, can just increase the number of awards to be covered by these provisions. Of course, it doesn't stop there. The cat's already out of the bag. Business SA has proposed another 11 awards to be amended as such.

It's not just awards they're undercutting. It's the entire process of bargaining and agreements and the use of the Fair Work Commission as the rule of law. This bill will shift the burden of proof onto unions when seeking to strike an agreement. They will now have to make the argument that better pay and conditions for workers won't stand in the way of the employers' profits. This bill will also certainly prevent unions from intervening in the proposal of agreements to meet the better off overall test. One only needs to look at A1 Earthworx Mining & Civil, which, had the CFMMEU not sought leave to intervene and prevent its approval, would have seen workers paid as much as $180 a week less than the award. The striking of the approval agreement should play a fundamental role. This bill would seem to make this much harder. The effect of this will lower wages, and worse conditions and more wage theft will exist.

Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm very pleased to rise today to speak on the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021. This bill has been developed with input from a range of stakeholders, including unions and employers, to ensure that reforms are appropriately balanced, providing flexibility and certainty to businesses and important protections for employees. This bill is not ideological. It's not some experiment in economic theory. Rather, it's designed to tear down the barriers to creating jobs.

If I were to boil down my aims in coming into this place and being a senator for Western Australia, they could be summarised in this way. I want to see as many Australians as possible get a job and stay in a job for as long as they can and earn as much as possible while being in that job. This is key, whether it's in the metro areas, the regional areas or even our remote areas. This is key to as many Australians achieving as high a standard of living as possible.

I've seen firsthand how jobs can change lives. Many on this side of the chamber have experience in creating jobs across all sectors of the economy. We see that as a good thing, not as some form of exploitation. I've seen the difference firsthand in countless numbers of lives when people have been able to get a job, many of them for the very first time. Many of you know, as I've spoken about this previously here in the Senate, that prior to coming into parliament I was involved in an organisation called Generation One that worked across Australia to create jobs for Indigenous people, whether in remote locations, in regional areas or in our cities. Through the work that I was doing, I saw over 28,000 long-term unemployed Indigenous jobseekers take up sustainable work.

But that wouldn't be possible if those jobs were not there. It wouldn't be possible if we didn't have an environment in which to create jobs. I want to see more of these opportunities created. I want to see more of these opportunities able to transform and change lives. Employment won't change everything, but, without it, nothing will change. If we're going to truly deal with the systemic issue of entrenched welfare dependency, we have to have an environment where the jobs are there so that people can take up those opportunities, so that they can be fulfilled by engaging in a meaningful career, so that they can see the benefit of work not only for themselves but for their families and, in many cases, their whole community. But it's only possible if the jobs are there. The government engaged with employers as part of this process. We also engaged with the unions, to hear about how we could create the flexibility that is required, create the right environment that is required, create more jobs and ensure that those jobs are sustainable.

This is one of many bills which the government is strengthening and which are hastening our economic recovery from COVID. At the height of the pandemic, 1.3 million Australians lost their jobs or were stood down on zero hours. Just think about the impact of that. It's a big number, 1.3 million, but it actually represents the lives of individuals and families. This government has been singly focused on doing everything that is possible to ensure that those jobs are returned. We've seen remarkable figures throughout these last 12 months, in both the decreases in unemployment and the increases in economic activity. In fact, the Treasurer has told us that over 90 per cent of the jobs that were lost due to COVID have been returned. This is due in large part to the underlying strength of our economy before we even went into the pandemic, but it's also due to the support of the economy with measures such as JobKeeper, temporary or targeted increases to JobSeeker, small-business cash-flow support and the HomeBuilder program. It's also due, in large part, to our handling of the health aspects of this pandemic.

Australia was the first country in the world to close its international borders, to stem the flow of the virus. The second most important factor in the health area was procuring our own sovereign production of a vaccine, to help us get out from this situation that we find ourselves in. We have managed our way through this, but part of the recovery out of this is to ensure that we create the right environment for more and better-paid jobs. That has always been the imperative of this government, since we were first elected. As more people return to work, our accelerated tax cuts will also have an increasing effect of economic stimulus. Over $2 billion a month in extra take-home pay is flowing into the economy due to our accelerated tax cuts. These were implemented long before the pandemic even hit, and thank goodness they were, because they're now having a real impact on the economy and its ability to recover.

There is so much more to the economic recovery and reform than just stimulus and tax. One factor which has remained largely untouched is industrial relations. It's a dangerous area for a Liberal government to attempt to reform, some would say, but courage is required to keep this country on a road of continuous employment. I commend the Minister for Industrial Relations for all his work on this bill, as well as his partners in consultation, including the unions, employer groups and experts in the field. The breadth of cooperation achieved is one of the lasting silver linings—if there are any—from COVID. Long may this spirit endure, and may the mortal combat that has long been present in this sector end.

It's extremely disappointing, I've got to say, to hear that the Labor Party is opposing this bill, after such rigorous consultation was undertaken—consultation that was undertaken in good faith. The changes contained within this bill build upon the same cooperative spirit the country so successfully embraced during our approach to the pandemic. We've heard some very dramatic language from the Labor Party, harking back to the Labor Party of old, with a worker-versus-employer mentality. This dramatic language just does not fit with the reality of this bill, which is not extreme in any way and in no way represents a drastic departure from the current industrial relations regime—which, it must be said, was implemented by the Labor Party when they were last in government. Work Choices this not.

We also heard from Senator Faruqi of the Greens describing the unions as experts in industrial relations. That would be akin to describing the Greens as experts in economics! We had hoped that 2021 would see the Labor leader, Mr Albanese, adopt a more mature approach to industrial relations. Sadly, the Labor Party's opposition to all of the government's industrial relations reforms shows that they remain fixated not on solving problems but on playing politics and turning workplaces into battlegrounds. This is unacceptable. This bill will support the government's commitment to Australian jobs and our continuing economic recovery by providing certainty to businesses and employees in relation to casual employment; by giving regular casual employees a statutory pathway to ongoing employment by including a casual conversion entitlement in the National Employment Standards—a very important reform; by extending temporary JobKeeper flexibilities; by giving employers the confidence to offer part-time employment and additional hours to employees; by streamlining and improving the enterprise-agreement-making and approval processes; and by ensuring that industrial instruments do not transfer when an employee transfers between associated entities at the employer's initiative, and I could go on.

It provides greater certainty for investors, employers and employees by allowing the nominal life of greenfield agreements made in relation to the construction of major projects to be extended and it strengthens the Fair Work Act compliance and enforcement framework to address wage underpayments. Wage underpayment—we hear those opposite point out, rightly, the need to address the issues of wage theft in this country. They rightly point that out, and here's an opportunity to actually do something about it; but because of the ideology of those opposite, they stand against it. Businesses must have the confidence to hire and ensure that employees receive their correct entitlements. And this bill also seeks to introduce measures to support more efficient Fair Work Commission processes. This is important as well.

As we've shown throughout the pandemic, the government is determined to implement measures that will regrow jobs, boost wages, enhance productivity and benefit both employers and employees by providing the best possible outcomes for all. Let's hear from some of the stakeholders, shall we? In the Master Grocers Association's submission to the inquiry on this bill, they said:

… unless these reform measures are implemented our economy will continue to stagnate. Reform of the industrial relations system is imperative.

The jobs in that industry—in retail and grocery—are, for many, the first jobs that they may get. There are great careers working in that sector, but there are also great first jobs. If we don't create the environment or the flexibility—particularly for young people, something that I know you're also very committed to seeing, Madam Deputy President Chandler: young people being given the opportunity to get ahead—if we don't have the right environment and support, then how can these opportunities be made?

We heard from the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Western Australia, my home state, in their submission on this bill:

Modern awards failed to provide the flexibility to facilitate alternative work arrangements necessary to accommodate government restrictions, with limited capacity to obtain timely and meaningful variations through the Fair Work Commission (FWC).

The efficiencies in this bill mean that the commission can respond in a timely and efficient way and are absolutely essential. This bill goes to remedy that problem.

The Fair Work Ombudsman welcomed the funding announced by the government in this bill. It will provide support to the ombudsman's role in achieving better workplace compliance. The Australian Industry Group pointed out in its submission to the bill that over 80 per cent of casuals do not work for large corporations. This is the beloved bogeyman of those opposite—that the large employers are evil people. The reality is that over 80 per cent of these jobs are with small and medium enterprises. They submit that the current cost risks are threatening to drive many small businesses into insolvency and threatening to destroy the livelihood of a large number of small business owners.

Let's not forget that much of this bill would not be necessary were it not for Labor's complete failure to legislate competently in this space. We are fixing Labor's mess and their inability to define 'casual employees' a decade ago. We're introducing a clear definition of what it means to be a casual employee. The lack of wage growth bemoaned by many years is in fact occurring under an industrial relations regime that those opposite put in place. It really beggars belief.

Before I close I want to touch on the provision in this bill relating to compliance and enforcement. By introducing tougher penalties, this bill will better protect employees from wage theft and it will deter dishonest employers from undercutting their competitors. It will facilitate more efficient recovery of wage underpayments and encourage businesses to identify and address underpayments more quickly. But we're seeing Labor oppose this. What a shame. What a travesty. So much for being the party of workers. They gave that up decades ago. We will introduce stronger protections for employees through measures, including tougher penalties and orders to deter noncompliance.

This bill will put downward pressure on unemployment. It will work to simplify awards and make it easier to recover unpaid wages. It will codify a pathway for casuals to transition to permanent employment. All of these things will benefit the Australian economy and Australian workers, despite those opposite pontificating. I commend this bill to the Senate. (Time expired)

Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021. To be frank, I find profoundly offensive the use of the phrase 'supporting Australia's jobs and economic recovery' in relation to this bill, which is a deep and hypocritical betrayal of working Australians. This bill does nothing to support secure jobs and it does nothing to support the long-term economy. More than ever, working Australians know that you can't trust Scott Morrison, the Liberals and the Nationals with their wages and conditions.

During COVID-19 we witnessed extraordinary service and sacrifice from our essential workers, coupled with a realisation that an essential worker extends beyond those who protect our health and rescue us from natural disasters. They are cleaners, truck drivers, security guards, aged-care workers, public servants and workers in our ports. They deliver food, they care for us, they protect our borders, they make sure we get our support payments, they unload ships, they stack shelves and they keep us safe, all the while taking risks with their own safety. Yet, as we emerge from this pandemic, our essential workers are being rewarded for their dedication and sacrifice with a deep betrayal from the Morrison government with this bill, which purports to support Australia's job and economic recovery but which is absolutely intent on reigniting the industrial relations wars that Australians are so very tired of.

Hundreds of thousands of workers experienced the brutal reality of insecure work during the worst of this pandemic. They were stood down or lost their jobs without compensation. Others struggled without income in self-isolation or in quarantine with no paid leave. Aged-care workers, cleaners, hospital staff and security workers who were holding down multiple casual jobs to make ends meet faced extreme pressure to restrict themselves to one workplace, with little or no financial compensation. That's not to mention the travel agents who help bring people home, help them get their money back and assist them in so many ways. The whole experience taught us a great deal about the value of having a secure job. We know now more than ever that we need more jobs, not fewer.

In April 2020 Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared, 'We're all in this together and we've got to put down the weapons.' It is now quite clear that he has picked up those weapons in the form of this industrial relations bill, claiming it is necessary to support economic recovery. That claim is rubbish. We need only remember the disaster of the Howard government's Work Choices experiment back in 2006 and 2007 to hear alarm bells ringing. The Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill scraped through the House of Representatives and is now with us in this place and we are faced with all its ugliness and naked ideology. It is a grubby sellout that will not protect workers or provide secure jobs. It will not lead to economic recovery. It creates a pathway for employers to cut pay. It wipes out back pay claims for misclassified casuals and proposes new so-called flexibility for part-time workers to pick up shifts without overtime rates.

This bill will allow part-time employees covered by awards in the retail, food and accommodation industries to work extra shifts at ordinary rates. This has been referred to as part-time flexibility, but in truth it's casual employment by another name and allowing extra work without paid overtime that will cut take-home pay. Basically, it will allow employers to use part-time workers as yet another form of casual labour. What about creating secure full-time jobs? Why would anyone hire an employee in a full-time secure job when they can hire them as a part-time worker for, say, 16 hours a week and then just demand that they work extra hours on a business-needs basis at no extra cost or penalty to the business? Under this bill, any job can be casual so long as a worker is desperate enough to accept it. This will feed the further spread of insecure employment without paid leave entitlements.

In terms of the pandemic, a significant group of public health experts from the Australian National University have called these IR exchanges an 'immediate threat to public health', a significant threat to public health. I urge every member to let that sink in for a moment. Casuals with no sick leave have already borne the brunt of this pandemic, and now the government is shamelessly attempting to legislate to have as many casual workers as possible. In reality the changes in both part-time and casual employment rules will discourage new hiring. If existing employees can be flexibly required to cover overtime shifts without costing employers any extra, why would they hire anyone else?

This IR bill has been spruiked by two hollow men, our Prime Minister and his Attorney-General, Christian Porter. It's being sold to us as a trigger for post-pandemic job creation. This claim is as hollow as they are. This government cannot accept that the best way to ensure economic recovery is by making sure that workers have a secure job, a regular pay packet, paid leave and fair superannuation to allow them dignity in retirement. Our economy will be buoyed by workers spending their pay, taking holidays and getting home loans, not by cutting wages and job security. The Liberal government is back to its old ways, once again declaring war on working people and using the pandemic as an excuse to scapegoat unions, casualise more jobs, drive down wages and fatten profits. To add insult to injury, they are now attempting to freeze the next rise in the superannuation levy. ACTU secretary Sally McManus pretty much summed it up when she said, 'You can't heal the economy by hurting working people'.

Since the Prime Minister won't listen to sound economic arguments, perhaps we could get Jenny to talk to him about it. Let us just consider the possible working life of a young person moving into work in 2021. Their first job in their teenage years is usually a casual one, and casual at that time in life is probably what suits them best as they juggle study and all the changes and decisions of those formative years. But this government would have that worker look forward to a lifetime of casual work. This bill entrenches casualisation. It makes it easier for employers to make you a casual worker when you don't want to be and gives you no effective right to challenge an employer's decision to block your conversion to permanent work.

A few years later, when this worker is keen to buy their first house, there is no home loan, because banks don't like lending money to casuals. So there they are, stuck in a rent cycle in a world of escalating rents and house prices. If a pandemic or an economic disaster hits, their casual job is most likely to disappear. Maybe then they decide that they're ready to start a family. What's the prospect of them having a decent amount of paid parental leave as a casual worker? Well, it would be very, very low. After that, maybe they decide to return to work on a part-time basis, to balance family and caring responsibilities. Well, under the changes that this bill proposes, they can be pressured to work endless amounts of overtime without being paid overtime rates.

Let's say they end up in a workplace where there's an enterprise agreement. Under this bill their employer won't have to tell them that they have started bargaining that agreement for a whole month and won't have to give the worker a comprehensive explanation of the agreement they will be voting on. If that worker is younger, has lower-level English skills or is unrepresented, their employer will no longer have to explain that agreement to them. To add insult to injury, unions will not be allowed to assist the Fair Work Commission in assessing non-union agreements, and the commission will be forced to tick and flick agreements, under severe time pressure.

There is no reasonable argument that this bill is good for economic recovery, job creation or economic growth. We do not know—but will know very soon—how each member of the crossbench will vote on this bill. However, I understand that it is highly likely that the future security and prosperity of every Australian worker will soon rest on the shoulders of one senator, one member of the crossbench. I hope every member of this chamber is thinking right now of the millions of Australian working people this bill will affect, possibly for their whole working lives.

We live in a democracy, and if we live in a democracy then the abiding interests of those working Australians and their families, their children, must be our guiding light. This government has absolutely no mandate from the Australian people to make these changes. It hasn't taken these profound life-changing reforms to an election. It hasn't commissioned rigorous economic modelling—or, if it has, it hasn't shown it to us. And it hasn't consulted as an honest broker with working Australians. No: it has slithered through the past seven years keeping its precious workplace reforms close to its chest, waiting for its moment, swearing black and blue that there will be no return to Work Choices and waiting until we're in a pandemic, waiting until people are desperately worried about their economic future, to quietly lay out the same old playing cards on the table.

There is simply no case, no substantive argument, to change the nature of casual work, to steal overtime from part-time workers and to undermine the enterprise bargaining process so that workers can be left completely in the dark about the agreement they are to be employed under at critical times in the negotiation process. There is no case for these grubby changes. But it's what the Liberals always do. Cutting Australians' pay is in their DNA. Their vision for Australia is one where millions of Australians struggle to pay the bills and to take care of their families, where millions of Australians are left behind. The idea that these Australians are beholden to any one man or woman, one Australian among millions, sitting on a very comfortable senator's salary with excellent superannuation, to negotiate on this grubby agenda—to think that making such a profound decision about the future of work in Australia should rest on one individual set of shoulders—should be untenable. The only way a person in that position can go is to say: 'No, it is not my place. I do not represent the millions of Australian workers now and into the future whom this will affect. I cannot possibly own a decision that affects so many for so little reason.'

Labor understands that Australians want jobs they can rely on, jobs they can buy a house on, jobs they can raise a family on, jobs that pay the bills, jobs that don't disappear overnight when disease breaks out. I urge all members of this chamber to think deeply on that, to pause and reflect very deeply on the weight that may well be sitting on one set of shoulders—an inappropriate weight, a decision that should not be one person's to make, a weight that should be and must be cast aside. Australians who work at their jobs should be rewarded, not have their pay and hours cut. Australians work hard at their jobs.

Debate interrupted.