Division Description Changes — Bills — Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020; Second Reading — 23rd Feb 2021

Change	Division
representatives vote 2021-02-23#1 Edited by mackay staff on 2021-03-05 14:47:22	Title ~~Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020 - Second Reading - Agre with bill's main idea~~ Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020 - Second Reading - Agree with bill's main idea Description
representatives vote 2021-02-23#1 Edited by mackay staff on 2021-03-05 14:47:11	Title Bills — Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020; Second Reading Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020 - Second Reading - Agre with bill's main idea Description ~~<p class="speaker">Dave Sharma</p>~~ <p>It's a pleasure to talk today on this piece of legislation, the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020, because supporting Australia's jobs and economic recovery is really the focus of the government and this side of the parliament right now. COVID-19 as a crisis has really been like no other that has hit the world, at least in the modern era. It's been a health crisis, of course, but it's also been an economic crisis. It's had elements of a supply shock and also a demand shock, and we've seen this around the world.</p> <p>Just to remind members of the House, the global economic contraction as a result of COVID-19 is estimated by the IMF, the World Bank and other international financial institutions to be in the order of 4.5 per cent over the course of 2020. Four point five per cent is a contraction such as we have not seen in decades. You have to reach back to, potentially, the global oil shocks, although they were shorter in duration, or, more likely, to the Great Depression. The most recent such event, of course, was the global financial crisis. In that period, the global economy contracted by 0.1 per cent. In this crisis, the COVID-19 crisis, the global economy has contracted by 4.5 per cent, so it's orders of magnitude bigger in its severity—almost 45 times as big, in fact.</p> The majority voted in favour of agreeing with the main idea of the bill. In other words, they voted to read it for a [second time](https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/how-parliament-works/bills-and-laws/making-a-law-in-the-australian-parliament/). This means it can now be considered in more detail. ### What is the bill's main idea? This bill is part of the Government's plans for Australia's economic recovery. The parliamentary library has not yet provided a bills digest, so there is no easy explanation for the bill's provisions available, but according to the [explanatory memorandum](https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id:legislation/billhome/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22legislation%2Fems%2Fr6653_ems_b350c2c5-3b57-4c5f-9f38-b9e157fb0e28%22;rec=0) (which is a political document prepared by whoever introduced the bill - in this case, the Government), the purpose of the bill is: *** providing certainty to businesses and employees about casual employment;** * giving regular casual employees a statutory pathway to ongoing employment by including a casual conversion entitlement in the National Employment Standards (NES) of the Fair Work Act; *** extending two temporary JobKeeper flexibilities to businesses, in identified industries significantly impacted by the pandemic;** * giving employers confidence to offer part-time employment and additional hours to employees, promoting flexibility and efficiency; * streamlining and improving the enterprise agreement making and approval process to encourage participation in collective bargaining; * ensuring industrial instruments do not transfer where an employee transfers between associated entities at the employee’s initiative; *** providing greater certainty for investors, employers and employees by allowing the nominal life of greenfields agreements made in relation to the construction of a major project to be extended;** * strengthening the Fair Work Act compliance and enforcement framework to address wage underpayments, ensure businesses have the confidence to hire and ensure employees receive their correct entitlements; and *** introducing measures to support more efficient Fair Work Commission (FWC) processes.** <p>Australia, of course, has not been immune to this. We've seen a large number of people lose their jobs or have their hours reduced to zero. One point three million Australians, at the start of this crisis or shortly thereafter, either had their hours reduced to zero or lost their jobs. We saw unemployment rise as well, of course. But, through the provisions and the support measures that the government has put in place—through programs and support measures like JobKeeper, JobSeeker and HomeBuilder—we have helped support the economy and get Australians back to work. I'm pleased to report that as of last week, of those 1.3 million Australians who had lost their jobs or had their hours reduced to zero, 93 per cent were back at work. We had 29,000 jobs created just in the month of January, and over the last four months we've had 350,000 jobs created. Unemployment now is at 6.4 per cent. So there's still further to go, but we're certainly heading in the right direction.</p> <p>But I think members here would be conscious that this is not going to be a normal or straightforward or even, dare I say it, a linear economic recovery. COVID-19 is going to be with us for some time yet. The vaccine rollout is underway in Australia and also around the world, but it's quite likely that some of the restrictions we've had put in place on our lives—be it social-distancing restrictions, limitations on public gatherings or, most importantly, border restrictions and limitations on travel—will persist with us at least for some considerable time yet, until the vaccine program is rolled out, until we can see more data on how effective the vaccine is at suppressing transmission and until other countries are prepared to resume engagement with the normal world.</p> <p>The purpose and intent of this bill—the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020—is not ideological, at least in my opinion; it's about solutions to problems. How do we get more Australians back into work? How do we support those Australians in jobs and industries that continue to suffer because of the necessary health restrictions that have been put in place because of COVID-19?</p> <p>This bill seeks to do a number of things. It's designed to present practical solutions to the practical problems that have presented themselves through this crisis. The origins of this piece of legislation are when the government brought together unions, employer groups and industrial relations experts through the Industrial Relations Working Group process to identify some of these problems. What are the disincentives to employers hiring more workers? What can we do practically in the legislation to get employers to take on more workers? This bill seeks to address these in a number of ways.</p> <p>The first is with definitions regarding casuals and fixed terms. It's clear that the current state of law in relation to casual employment is confusing and ambiguous and is causing mistakes and confusion for both employers and employees, and that has associated consequences and costs. The statutory definition that we put on casual employment in this bill seeks to incorporate key aspects of the common law as expressed in recent court decisions here and helps to ensure that casual jobs are genuinely casual and the nature of employment, whether it's casual or ongoing, is determined at the outset, as you would expect, rather than relying on periodic assessments of the relationship as it develops over time. Importantly, as well this legislation introduces a new entitlement to be included in the National Employment Standards, the NES, to allow regular casual employees to convert to full-time or part-time employment. It's providing them a pathway.</p> <p>Clearly, employees should be characterised appropriately and receive the entitlements reflecting that characterisation at law. If they are casual employees, they should be paid as such and treated as such. If they are part-time or full-time employees, they should be given and afforded the protections that that status deserves. This legislation seeks to clarify exactly that, to reduce confusion and to give employers the confidence they need when taking on new workers to know what their status is and what they need to pay those workers. If we don't address and clarify this issue, costly and time-intensive court processes would be needed to determine the appropriate rights and obligations of individual workers in potentially every individual case.</p> <p>This bill also addresses award simplification. As we heard through the Industrial Relations Working Group process, award complexity is a significant issue and a significant burden for many businesses, especially small businesses. It's critical in the industries that have been hit the hardest by COVID-19, particularly the hospitality and retail industries, that the government makes it as simple as possible for business to regrow jobs and to hire new workers. This bill adapts specific elements of the successful COVID-19 JobKeeper flexibilities for employers and employees covered by 12 identified awards in distressed industries for a further two years. As members would be aware, these flexibilities have already helped to save literally thousands of jobs during this pandemic, by allowing employers and employees to work together and negotiate details regarding duties and work location to help navigate some of the challenges of working through the pandemic and working in a post-pandemic environment.</p> <p>This bill also addresses enterprise bargaining. Members opposite, of course, would know that it was one of their heroes—Paul Keating—who abolished compulsory arbitration and introduced enterprise bargaining as part of a suite of microeconomic reforms when he was Prime Minister in 1992. This is one of the reforms he's most proud of. Unfortunately, this signature reform by former prime minister Paul Keating—</p> ~~<p class="speaker">Honourable Member</p>~~ ~~<p>An honourable member interjecting—</p>~~ ~~<p class="speaker">Dave Sharma</p>~~ ~~<p>He's not, in fact, a constituent. I've checked that. He's just outside the boundary. He's a constituent of the member for Sydney.</p>~~ <p>Mr Keating abolished compulsory arbitration and introduced enterprise bargaining—for which he deserves full credit, and I'm happy to give it to him in this House. This system has really declined, particularly since 2010. There are now fewer employees covered by enterprise agreements, and few new enterprise agreements are being made. Over the last 10 years the number of enterprise agreements between employers and employees has been steadily declining. In fact, it has fallen by 57½ per cent, which means that the number of employees being covered by enterprise agreements has decreased from its historical peak of 43½ per cent in 2010 to just 38 per cent in 2019.</p> <p>This bill aims to increase the number of Australians covered by enterprise agreements and help them capture the productivity and wage benefits that these agreements entail. The bill will reduce the level of prescription currently imposed by the Fair Work Act and provide greater flexibility as to the methods by which employees may be provided with a fair and reasonable opportunity to consider whether an enterprise agreement can be made. Enterprise agreements pay, on average, 69 per cent more per week—that's $542 on average weekly earnings—than the award wage. So this is a system that we support to help improve not only choice and flexibility for employers but ultimately wages and take-home income for employees.</p> <p>The bill also addresses greenfield agreements. Members here would be aware that the construction of major projects in Australia—mining and resources projects and things like that—make a significant contribution to jobs and economic growth in Australia. But there has been a risk of agreements that expire during the construction of a major project because of the time lines around these agreements. That creates uncertainty—uncertainty for investors and uncertainty for employers, including over unexpected delays of protracted negotiations and what the overall wage or salary will be for a particular project. This bill will double the maximum nominal expiry date for greenfield agreements that are made in relation to the construction of major projects from four years up to eight years. It also requires longer-term greenfield agreements to include annual wage increases for employees over the nominal life of the agreement. This will support Australia's economic recovery by attracting investment and driving job growth. It will be good for investors, it will be good for employers and it will be good for employees.</p> <p>Finally, on compliance and enforcement, here the bill makes a number of amendments designed to do three things: to help businesses comply with the law, as they always should; to enable employees to recover any underpayments faster when they do occur; and to ensure that the maximum penalties for noncompliance are proportionate and are a meaningful deterrent for employers who might engage in that. Part of this is the establishment of an employer advisory service in the Fair Work Commission, with $12.9 million provided in this legislation to help fund the establishment of that office. That employer advisory service will be able to provide employers with authoritative written advice tailored to their individual circumstances. This will provide businesses with certainty about their obligations and how to apply award and agreement provisions and should help reduce the likelihood of wage underpayments occurring in the first place.</p> <p>The bill will also allow underpaid employees to get repaid faster. Businesses will be encouraged to self-identify and self-report underpayment breaches. The bill will also make it easier and faster for employees to recover unpaid wages by increasing the small claims cap from $20,000 to $50,000, and courts will be able to refer small claims matters to the Fair Work Commission for conciliation. To help respond to exploitation and to better deter noncompliance, the bill introduces a new criminal offence for dishonestly engaging in systematic wage underpayments—as it should—and increases the value and scope of civil penalties and orders that can be imposed for noncompliance. The bill provides further protection to employees by prohibiting businesses from publishing advertisements for jobs with pay rates below the minimum wage and increases the penalties for practices like sham contracting that are used by employers to avoid paying full entitlements.</p> <p>Finally, the bill also provides improvements to the Fair Work Commission process to help enacting amendments that will enable the Fair Work Commission to deal with certain matters more efficiently and more expeditiously than is currently permitted under the act. The bill will give the commission appropriate powers to deal with vexatious applications more effectively, modelled on the Administrative Appeals Tribunal's powers to deal with vexatious applications. The bill will also confer greater discretion on the commission to decide to deal with an appeal on the papers when it considers a hearing to be unnecessary.</p> <p>COVID-19 has challenged many aspects of Australian life, and this bill delivers on the government's commitments to put Australians and Australian jobs first on the road to economic recovery. The bill removes barriers that stifle the job growth of today and limit the job creation of tomorrow. If we want Australians to have access to the prosperous jobs they aspire to, we must remove these barriers today, and this is what this bill does.</p> <p>I've been surprised that those opposite have decided to oppose not just particular elements of the government's bill but all elements of the government's bill. In May last year, we heard the opposition's industrial relations spokesperson saying, in relation to enterprise bargaining: 'Bargaining is much harder at the moment and taking much longer than it should. Policies that get bargaining moving again are going to be really important. And, you know, I don't think that anyone says every rule that's there at the moment should remain unchanged.' I agree. Bargaining is much harder at the moment and is taking much longer than it should, and this is one element that this bill seeks to address. On greenfields agreements, for instance, which those opposite have also decided to oppose, in May 2019, the member for Maribyrnong, then the opposition leader, said:</p> ~~<p class="italic">We want to look at the ability for companies to negotiate with unions for extended greenfields agreements, project life, you can go to the global investors who will back it</p>~~ ~~<p>Again, this bill does exactly that; it addresses greenfields agreements.</p>~~ <p>I know those opposite have said over the last several weeks that they're on your side or they're on someone's side. They're taking a slogan from Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the United Kingdom. I read it today in <i>The Australian</i>, and I was a bit shocked to read it. This was taken from Jeremy Corbyn's campaign, and I was reminded that that was actually his phrase. It begs the question: if you're on someone's side, you're always against someone else. This government, through this legislation, is seeking to govern for all Australians and support all Australians to get back to work and recover from COVID.</p> ~~<p class='motion-notice motion-notice-truncated'>Long debate text truncated.</p>~~

~~Dave Sharma~~
It's a pleasure to talk today on this piece of legislation, the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020, because supporting Australia's jobs and economic recovery is really the focus of the government and this side of the parliament right now. COVID-19 as a crisis has really been like no other that has hit the world, at least in the modern era. It's been a health crisis, of course, but it's also been an economic crisis. It's had elements of a supply shock and also a demand shock, and we've seen this around the world.
Just to remind members of the House, the global economic contraction as a result of COVID-19 is estimated by the IMF, the World Bank and other international financial institutions to be in the order of 4.5 per cent over the course of 2020. Four point five per cent is a contraction such as we have not seen in decades. You have to reach back to, potentially, the global oil shocks, although they were shorter in duration, or, more likely, to the Great Depression. The most recent such event, of course, was the global financial crisis. In that period, the global economy contracted by 0.1 per cent. In this crisis, the COVID-19 crisis, the global economy has contracted by 4.5 per cent, so it's orders of magnitude bigger in its severity—almost 45 times as big, in fact.
The majority voted in favour of agreeing with the main idea of the bill. In other words, they voted to read it for a [second time](https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/how-parliament-works/bills-and-laws/making-a-law-in-the-australian-parliament/). This means it can now be considered in more detail.
### What is the bill's main idea?
This bill is part of the Government's plans for Australia's economic recovery. The parliamentary library has not yet provided a bills digest, so there is no easy explanation for the bill's provisions available, but according to the [explanatory memorandum](https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id:legislation/billhome/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22legislation%2Fems%2Fr6653_ems_b350c2c5-3b57-4c5f-9f38-b9e157fb0e28%22;rec=0) (which is a political document prepared by whoever introduced the bill - in this case, the Government), the purpose of the bill is:
* *providing certainty to businesses and employees about casual employment;*
* *giving regular casual employees a statutory pathway to ongoing employment by including a casual conversion entitlement in the National Employment Standards (NES) of the Fair Work Act;*
* *extending two temporary JobKeeper flexibilities to businesses, in identified industries significantly impacted by the pandemic;*
* *giving employers confidence to offer part-time employment and additional hours to employees, promoting flexibility and efficiency;*
* *streamlining and improving the enterprise agreement making and approval process to encourage participation in collective bargaining;*
* *ensuring industrial instruments do not transfer where an employee transfers between associated entities at the employee’s initiative;*
* *providing greater certainty for investors, employers and employees by allowing the nominal life of greenfields agreements made in relation to the construction of a major project to be extended;*
* *strengthening the Fair Work Act compliance and enforcement framework to address wage underpayments, ensure businesses have the confidence to hire and ensure employees receive their correct entitlements; and*
* *introducing measures to support more efficient Fair Work Commission (FWC) processes.*
Australia, of course, has not been immune to this. We've seen a large number of people lose their jobs or have their hours reduced to zero. One point three million Australians, at the start of this crisis or shortly thereafter, either had their hours reduced to zero or lost their jobs. We saw unemployment rise as well, of course. But, through the provisions and the support measures that the government has put in place—through programs and support measures like JobKeeper, JobSeeker and HomeBuilder—we have helped support the economy and get Australians back to work. I'm pleased to report that as of last week, of those 1.3 million Australians who had lost their jobs or had their hours reduced to zero, 93 per cent were back at work. We had 29,000 jobs created just in the month of January, and over the last four months we've had 350,000 jobs created. Unemployment now is at 6.4 per cent. So there's still further to go, but we're certainly heading in the right direction.
But I think members here would be conscious that this is not going to be a normal or straightforward or even, dare I say it, a linear economic recovery. COVID-19 is going to be with us for some time yet. The vaccine rollout is underway in Australia and also around the world, but it's quite likely that some of the restrictions we've had put in place on our lives—be it social-distancing restrictions, limitations on public gatherings or, most importantly, border restrictions and limitations on travel—will persist with us at least for some considerable time yet, until the vaccine program is rolled out, until we can see more data on how effective the vaccine is at suppressing transmission and until other countries are prepared to resume engagement with the normal world.
The purpose and intent of this bill—the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020—is not ideological, at least in my opinion; it's about solutions to problems. How do we get more Australians back into work? How do we support those Australians in jobs and industries that continue to suffer because of the necessary health restrictions that have been put in place because of COVID-19?
This bill seeks to do a number of things. It's designed to present practical solutions to the practical problems that have presented themselves through this crisis. The origins of this piece of legislation are when the government brought together unions, employer groups and industrial relations experts through the Industrial Relations Working Group process to identify some of these problems. What are the disincentives to employers hiring more workers? What can we do practically in the legislation to get employers to take on more workers? This bill seeks to address these in a number of ways.
The first is with definitions regarding casuals and fixed terms. It's clear that the current state of law in relation to casual employment is confusing and ambiguous and is causing mistakes and confusion for both employers and employees, and that has associated consequences and costs. The statutory definition that we put on casual employment in this bill seeks to incorporate key aspects of the common law as expressed in recent court decisions here and helps to ensure that casual jobs are genuinely casual and the nature of employment, whether it's casual or ongoing, is determined at the outset, as you would expect, rather than relying on periodic assessments of the relationship as it develops over time. Importantly, as well this legislation introduces a new entitlement to be included in the National Employment Standards, the NES, to allow regular casual employees to convert to full-time or part-time employment. It's providing them a pathway.
Clearly, employees should be characterised appropriately and receive the entitlements reflecting that characterisation at law. If they are casual employees, they should be paid as such and treated as such. If they are part-time or full-time employees, they should be given and afforded the protections that that status deserves. This legislation seeks to clarify exactly that, to reduce confusion and to give employers the confidence they need when taking on new workers to know what their status is and what they need to pay those workers. If we don't address and clarify this issue, costly and time-intensive court processes would be needed to determine the appropriate rights and obligations of individual workers in potentially every individual case.
This bill also addresses award simplification. As we heard through the Industrial Relations Working Group process, award complexity is a significant issue and a significant burden for many businesses, especially small businesses. It's critical in the industries that have been hit the hardest by COVID-19, particularly the hospitality and retail industries, that the government makes it as simple as possible for business to regrow jobs and to hire new workers. This bill adapts specific elements of the successful COVID-19 JobKeeper flexibilities for employers and employees covered by 12 identified awards in distressed industries for a further two years. As members would be aware, these flexibilities have already helped to save literally thousands of jobs during this pandemic, by allowing employers and employees to work together and negotiate details regarding duties and work location to help navigate some of the challenges of working through the pandemic and working in a post-pandemic environment.
This bill also addresses enterprise bargaining. Members opposite, of course, would know that it was one of their heroes—Paul Keating—who abolished compulsory arbitration and introduced enterprise bargaining as part of a suite of microeconomic reforms when he was Prime Minister in 1992. This is one of the reforms he's most proud of. Unfortunately, this signature reform by former prime minister Paul Keating—
~~Honourable Member~~
~~An honourable member interjecting—~~
~~Dave Sharma~~
~~He's not, in fact, a constituent. I've checked that. He's just outside the boundary. He's a constituent of the member for Sydney.~~
Mr Keating abolished compulsory arbitration and introduced enterprise bargaining—for which he deserves full credit, and I'm happy to give it to him in this House. This system has really declined, particularly since 2010. There are now fewer employees covered by enterprise agreements, and few new enterprise agreements are being made. Over the last 10 years the number of enterprise agreements between employers and employees has been steadily declining. In fact, it has fallen by 57½ per cent, which means that the number of employees being covered by enterprise agreements has decreased from its historical peak of 43½ per cent in 2010 to just 38 per cent in 2019.
This bill aims to increase the number of Australians covered by enterprise agreements and help them capture the productivity and wage benefits that these agreements entail. The bill will reduce the level of prescription currently imposed by the Fair Work Act and provide greater flexibility as to the methods by which employees may be provided with a fair and reasonable opportunity to consider whether an enterprise agreement can be made. Enterprise agreements pay, on average, 69 per cent more per week—that's $542 on average weekly earnings—than the award wage. So this is a system that we support to help improve not only choice and flexibility for employers but ultimately wages and take-home income for employees.
The bill also addresses greenfield agreements. Members here would be aware that the construction of major projects in Australia—mining and resources projects and things like that—make a significant contribution to jobs and economic growth in Australia. But there has been a risk of agreements that expire during the construction of a major project because of the time lines around these agreements. That creates uncertainty—uncertainty for investors and uncertainty for employers, including over unexpected delays of protracted negotiations and what the overall wage or salary will be for a particular project. This bill will double the maximum nominal expiry date for greenfield agreements that are made in relation to the construction of major projects from four years up to eight years. It also requires longer-term greenfield agreements to include annual wage increases for employees over the nominal life of the agreement. This will support Australia's economic recovery by attracting investment and driving job growth. It will be good for investors, it will be good for employers and it will be good for employees.
Finally, on compliance and enforcement, here the bill makes a number of amendments designed to do three things: to help businesses comply with the law, as they always should; to enable employees to recover any underpayments faster when they do occur; and to ensure that the maximum penalties for noncompliance are proportionate and are a meaningful deterrent for employers who might engage in that. Part of this is the establishment of an employer advisory service in the Fair Work Commission, with $12.9 million provided in this legislation to help fund the establishment of that office. That employer advisory service will be able to provide employers with authoritative written advice tailored to their individual circumstances. This will provide businesses with certainty about their obligations and how to apply award and agreement provisions and should help reduce the likelihood of wage underpayments occurring in the first place.
The bill will also allow underpaid employees to get repaid faster. Businesses will be encouraged to self-identify and self-report underpayment breaches. The bill will also make it easier and faster for employees to recover unpaid wages by increasing the small claims cap from $20,000 to $50,000, and courts will be able to refer small claims matters to the Fair Work Commission for conciliation. To help respond to exploitation and to better deter noncompliance, the bill introduces a new criminal offence for dishonestly engaging in systematic wage underpayments—as it should—and increases the value and scope of civil penalties and orders that can be imposed for noncompliance. The bill provides further protection to employees by prohibiting businesses from publishing advertisements for jobs with pay rates below the minimum wage and increases the penalties for practices like sham contracting that are used by employers to avoid paying full entitlements.
Finally, the bill also provides improvements to the Fair Work Commission process to help enacting amendments that will enable the Fair Work Commission to deal with certain matters more efficiently and more expeditiously than is currently permitted under the act. The bill will give the commission appropriate powers to deal with vexatious applications more effectively, modelled on the Administrative Appeals Tribunal's powers to deal with vexatious applications. The bill will also confer greater discretion on the commission to decide to deal with an appeal on the papers when it considers a hearing to be unnecessary.
COVID-19 has challenged many aspects of Australian life, and this bill delivers on the government's commitments to put Australians and Australian jobs first on the road to economic recovery. The bill removes barriers that stifle the job growth of today and limit the job creation of tomorrow. If we want Australians to have access to the prosperous jobs they aspire to, we must remove these barriers today, and this is what this bill does.
I've been surprised that those opposite have decided to oppose not just particular elements of the government's bill but all elements of the government's bill. In May last year, we heard the opposition's industrial relations spokesperson saying, in relation to enterprise bargaining: 'Bargaining is much harder at the moment and taking much longer than it should. Policies that get bargaining moving again are going to be really important. And, you know, I don't think that anyone says every rule that's there at the moment should remain unchanged.' I agree. Bargaining is much harder at the moment and is taking much longer than it should, and this is one element that this bill seeks to address. On greenfields agreements, for instance, which those opposite have also decided to oppose, in May 2019, the member for Maribyrnong, then the opposition leader, said:
~~We want to look at the ability for companies to negotiate with unions for extended greenfields agreements, project life, you can go to the global investors who will back it~~
~~Again, this bill does exactly that; it addresses greenfields agreements.~~
I know those opposite have said over the last several weeks that they're on your side or they're on someone's side. They're taking a slogan from Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the United Kingdom. I read it today in The Australian, and I was a bit shocked to read it. This was taken from Jeremy Corbyn's campaign, and I was reminded that that was actually his phrase. It begs the question: if you're on someone's side, you're always against someone else. This government, through this legislation, is seeking to govern for all Australians and support all Australians to get back to work and recover from COVID.
~~Long debate text truncated.~~