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representatives vote 2024-02-12#3
Edited by
mackay staff
on
2024-04-05 16:02:02
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Title
Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Bill 2023 - Consideration of Senate Message - Removal of certain parts- Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Bill 2023 - Consideration of Senate Message - Removal of certain parts from the Senate amendments
Description
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- The majority voted against [amendments (1), (3) and (8)](https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard/Hansard_Display?bid=chamber/hansardr/27600/&sid=0000) introduced by Bradfield MP [Paul Fletcher](https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/people/representatives/bradfield/paul_fletcher) (Bradfield), which means they failed.
- ### What do these amendments do?
- Mr Fletcher [explained that](https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard/Hansard_Display?bid=chamber/hansardr/27600/&sid=0000):
- > *I will explain to the House what these amendments do. Their combined impact, if the amendments are passed, will be to remove a series of objectionable provisions in the bill, particularly the bill as amended by the Senate. The first effect would be to remove the lengthy, multipage, 15-plus factor provisions dealing with casual employment, which have done a remarkable job of casting darkness and confusion where before there was light and clarity after several High Court decisions that made the law very clear. The opposition's amendments, if passed, would allow the certainty which the High Court has established to continue to prevail.*
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- > *They would remove the intractable bargaining provisions, which are another set of provisions which essentially wholly undermine the operation of enterprise bargaining, and for that reason the opposition believes those provisions should be removed.*
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- > *They would remove the union demerger provisions.*
- ### Amendment text
- > *(1) Senate amendment (1) (proposed new table items 2, 6A, 17 and 21 in subclause 2(1) of the Bill), omit the table items.*
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- > *(2) Senate amendment (2) (proposed new Divisions 2 and 5 of Part 16 of the Fair Work Act 2009), omit the Divisions.*
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- > *(3) Senate amendment (2) (proposed new Part 17 of the Fair Work Act 2009), omit the Part.*
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> *(8) Senate amendment (52), omit the amendment.*- > *(8) Senate amendment (52), omit the amendment.*
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representatives vote 2024-02-12#3
Edited by
mackay staff
on
2024-04-05 15:50:04
|
Title
Bills — Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Bill 2023; Consideration of Senate Message- Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Bill 2023 - Consideration of Senate Message - Removal of certain parts
Description
<p class="speaker">Tony Burke</p><p>I move:</p>-
- The majority voted against [amendments (1), (3) and (8)](https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard/Hansard_Display?bid=chamber/hansardr/27600/&sid=0000) introduced by Bradfield MP [Paul Fletcher](https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/people/representatives/bradfield/paul_fletcher) (Bradfield), which means they failed.
- ### What do these amendments do?
- Mr Fletcher [explained that](https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard/Hansard_Display?bid=chamber/hansardr/27600/&sid=0000):
- > *I will explain to the House what these amendments do. Their combined impact, if the amendments are passed, will be to remove a series of objectionable provisions in the bill, particularly the bill as amended by the Senate. The first effect would be to remove the lengthy, multipage, 15-plus factor provisions dealing with casual employment, which have done a remarkable job of casting darkness and confusion where before there was light and clarity after several High Court decisions that made the law very clear. The opposition's amendments, if passed, would allow the certainty which the High Court has established to continue to prevail.*
- >
- > *They would remove the intractable bargaining provisions, which are another set of provisions which essentially wholly undermine the operation of enterprise bargaining, and for that reason the opposition believes those provisions should be removed.*
- >
- > *They would remove the union demerger provisions.*
- ### Amendment text
- > *(1) Senate amendment (1) (proposed new table items 2, 6A, 17 and 21 in subclause 2(1) of the Bill), omit the table items.*
- >
- > *(2) Senate amendment (2) (proposed new Divisions 2 and 5 of Part 16 of the Fair Work Act 2009), omit the Divisions.*
- >
- > *(3) Senate amendment (2) (proposed new Part 17 of the Fair Work Act 2009), omit the Part.*
- >
- > *(8) Senate amendment (52), omit the amendment.*
<p class="italic">That the amendments be agreed to.</p><p>This legislation is a critical part of the government's agenda to fight to get wages moving. While those opposite want people to work longer for less, we want people to earn more and keep more of what they earn. People have been waiting too long for these provisions, for rights for casuals, for minimum standards in the gig economy, for minimum standards in road transport and to be able to have some rights to your weekends and your time off.</p><p>These are basic rights that are contained in this bill, which is why it's no surprise that those opposite are fighting tooth and nail to prevent them. They fought tooth and nail against us when we said we would argue for an improvement in the minimum wage. They fought tooth and nail against the secure jobs and better pay bill. They did it with closing loopholes No. 1 and they are doing it again now with closing loopholes No.2. We are simply talking about basic rights—the concept that a casual, who is already working completely consistent hours, should have a right to say, 'I would like some job security.' Why on earth is that controversial? Try getting a mortgage or try getting a rental property if you've only got a casual job. It's about giving people some security in their lives. Our entire workplace relations system in Australia is based on the concept of having minimum standards. Yet, if you are a gig worker when you first get asked, 'Are you are an employee?' and the answer is, 'No,' all of those rights fall off a cliff. What we're doing today is turning that cliff into a ramp. The parliament is deciding today that Australia should not be a nation where you need to rely on tips to make ends meet.</p><p>The road transport industry has been fighting for 20 years for a workable system of minimum standards, like payment times to make sure that people aren't waiting endlessly for the money they are owed to be paid while all the bills for the money they owe are coming in one after another after another. This is thanks to the work of both industry and the Transport Workers Union, working together. They have come up with a project, a program, a plan to be able to do this through the Fair Work Commission that will deliver whether you are an employer, an employee, an owner-driver or just a motorist who wants to make sure that those driving heavy vehicles aren't under unreasonable pressure.</p><p>So today we should act. A further bill will be introduced on Thursday by me, because of what happened in the Senate last week, one of the most extraordinary things that I've ever seen. The right to disconnect is an important right. Where flexibility already exists in the workplace, where workers and employers already have cooperative arrangements, this legislation will make no difference to those arrangements at all. But there are some bad actors, some employers, who do take advantage and constantly reach into people's personal time and stop them from ever being able to get a weekend or reasonable time off. Those workers will finally have a right to ignore incessant unreasonable contact when it's being made.</p><p>It's not a ban on the employer reaching out, but it does mean that if you're on your weekend you don't have to constantly have your phone with you. If you want to have your phone off at night, that's not an unreasonable thing to do. If you've got a work email account, you can wait until your work hours before you check back in. Of course there'll be some people for whom regular checking in or keeping in contact is part of their award or agreement, where they're paid an allowance or paid a salary and that's part of the deal, and nothing changes in those circumstances. Effectively to argue against this is to argue that it should be okay for people to be working without being paid, because that's the alternative. And the position of those opposite, the one thing in this bill that they thought they would immediately declare they would repeal, was the thing that deals with people having to work for free. That was the bit they thought was outrageous. It just says how one-sided their view is to what the laws at the workplace should be.</p><p>Part of the way that the right to disconnect has been introduced is the same way that we deal with a series of other rights, including some anti-bullying provisions that are in the Fair Work Act. <i>(</i><i>Time expired</i><i>)</i></p> <p class="speaker">Milton Dick</p><p>The minister in continuation.</p> <p class="speaker">Tony Burke</p><p>That means that there is a pathway open to potential criminal penalties many months down the track, but I haven't found anyone who actually supports the possibility of that. And those opposite—you hear the Manager of Opposition Business, 'Come in spinner', you sort of know he's going to do it. There's one reason that that issue hasn't already been fixed. It is because the government went into the Senate and said, 'This issue can be corrected and we should correct it immediately so there's no doubt for business.' Guess why it wasn't corrected? Did the Greens party block its being introduced? No. Did Senator Lambie block its being introduced? No. Did any of the crossbench, even One Nation, say, 'No, no, no, you shouldn't be allowed to fix that'? No. It was Senator Cash. Senator Cash, on behalf of the Liberal and National parties, said, 'How dare you try to make sure that employers are not exposed to criminal penalties?' Now, I know they're addicted to saying no to everything, but when they get to the point where they are so determined to say no that, when no other member of parliament thinks there should be criminal penalties for employers in this area, they will block that just for the hell of it—just to say no, just to feel good about themselves—that is one of the most pathetic examples of self-indulgence you will ever see in this place.</p><p>The employers of Australia deserve better than for that to have ever been a fear campaign, and it was only the Liberal and National parties that stood in the way of it. It will be fixed in legislation that I'll introduced later this week. The provisions themselves don't start for six months, so it'll all be fixed in time. But the obsession of those opposite is in saying no to fixing a simple issue for employers, in the same way that they say no to job security for casuals, to minimum standards for gig workers, to minimum standards for the road transport industry and, simply, to a standard where workers can say, 'If it gets completely out of hand, I've got the right to not monitor my phone 24/7.' If you ask most Australians about the concept of whether there should be minimum standards, whether some casuals should be able to convert if they want to or whether you should not have to be on call 24/7, they will say they are all reasonable things. But reasonable doesn't cut it for the Liberal and National parties. They are determined to undermine job security. They are determined to undermine minimum rates of pay.</p><p>I say to the House: before we get to 1.30 today, let's get this done. Let's close the loopholes.</p> <p class="speaker">Paul Fletcher</p><p>Amazingly, the Albanese Labor government has managed to take a terrible bill and make it worse, with the amendments that passed the Senate last week and that the House is now determining whether it should support. This is terrible legislation that businesses and employers across Australians are saying will create extreme uncertainty for businesses, particularly small businesses, that employ casual workers. We have a cost-of-living crisis, we have high inflation, we have businesses struggling with staff shortages and rapidly increasing power costs, and Labor is making a bad situation worse.</p><p>None of the measures in this bill are designed to improve productivity, generate more jobs, drive growth or drive investment, all of which are the ingredients of a successful economy. On the contrary, these changes are part of the most radical shake-up of Australia's industrial relations system in decades. We're only starting now to see some of the consequences of the multi-employer bargaining changes that were rammed through by this government in late 2022. Those consequences will increase as the months and years roll on. It's clear from Labor's industrial relations agenda that they want to hand over every workplace, including small and family businesses, to the unions.</p><p>The small and family business enterprise business community is already under significant pressure from rapidly rising costs and will be hit hard by these new laws. The legislation will also impact the prospects for the very employees that it purports to protect. Small and medium businesses employ millions of Australians, and the government is burdening them with extra costs—costs that will result in more costs going to customers or the loss of jobs or both.</p><p>I want to speak in particular about the intractable bargaining provisions. They were the subject of a dirty deal with the Greens which actually undermines the concepts that underpin bargaining. This is one of the worst elements of this antibusiness, antigrowth legislation. The arbitration of bargaining deadlocks by the Fair Work Commission cannot reduce workers' existing conditions on a clause-by-clause basis. This reverses decades of good-faith bargaining where a package of better terms and conditions could be put on the table and traded off against operational and productivity improvements. It will simply incentivise unions to drag out a bargaining dispute for as long as possible and force matters to be arbitrated. This is very bad news for the nation and very bad news for our prospects for inflation.</p><p>When it comes to casual employment, the definition of 'casual employee' is three pages long, with 15 different factors in the new legal test. To employ a casual, a business has to go through a complicated series of tests just to work out if they're doing the right thing by law. Until the Fair Work Commission makes the determination, employers will face substantial risk when employing casuals. The irony is that this may well make hiring casual employees less attractive, impacting job creation and also adversely impacting the many Australians who embrace and prefer the flexibility of a casual job. It will be an enormously complex process with somewhere between 15 and 25 steps depending upon how you read this legislation and which lawyer you listen to. At the very least, what this will mean is many employers needing to get much more expensive legal advice.</p><p>We've also got the provisions dealing with employee-like forms of work. We know that Labor does not like self-employed people, and these provisions are simply an attack on Australians who want to be their own bosses. It's clear to everybody who wants to make that choice that Labor is refusing to support their choice.</p><p>We know, when it comes to the issue of the provisions that were rushed through in relation to the so-called right to disconnect, that employees already have legal protections against working unreasonable additional hours outside work. The extraordinary mishandling of this—the extraordinarily rushed nature of this—means that Labor rushed through legislation and voted for legislation which would impose jail penalties on employers who breach Fair Work Commission orders not to contact their employees outside of work hours—just one example of what a chaotic, disordered process this has been. In Labor's desperation to get this through, dancing to the tune of their union paymasters, they did a dodgy deal with the Greens over the right-to-disconnect laws.</p><p>Of course, this bill also dramatically increases the powers of union officials, including the right to enter a workplace without notice, despite only eight per cent of private-sector employees being union members. Australians have made their choice. This bill is a terrible bill. The amendments are terrible. The coalition opposes them.</p> <p class='motion-notice motion-notice-truncated'>Long debate text truncated.</p>-
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