Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, I was almost too small to push it—the member for Mayo is helping me out. But I was younger and stronger in those days. The company I worked for ended up in receivership, and I remember my friend, who worked at the company at that time, telling me about the scenes out the front of the company of people who had not been paid in months. We would all have stories and examples from our electorate and from personal experience of where this has occurred, and it is terribly unfair to those concerned.

We heard the member for Farrer talk about the benign generosity of the previous government, about how they magically arrived at GEERS: one day, Tony Abbott rolled out of bed and thought, 'I might set up a scheme protecting workers' entitlements.' That is the proposition they want to put to the House, but we all remember the circumstances in which GEERS was created. We all remember what prompted it—it was the fact that one of the then prime minister's relations, as I remember, was the director of a textile company. That was what happened, wasn't it?

Mr Briggs interjecting—

I am just telling of the circumstances that led to the Australian people becoming aware of this terrible situation, and that is what happened. I cannot remember the year—I do not remember if the member for Mayo was working for the prime minister at that time. Maybe GEERS would have been a better scheme if he had been.

It was not some sort of government program, or some sort of deliberate review by the Howard government that brought GEERS into place; it was politics. It was political pressure by the Australian people. It was the site of hundreds of workers being left without their entitlements. The Australian people demanded that something be done, and what we ended up with was GEERS.

GEERS is a taxpayer funded scheme, and I tend to agree with the previous speaker that it is of concern that taxpayers are picking up the bill for failed companies. There are other ways you could set up entitlement guarantee schemes, and if we were starting from year zero with a blank sheet of paper we might not get the taxpayers of Australia to underwrite such schemes—we might make industry do it itself. It is truly extraordinary for industry to make these complaints when at the same time they ask the taxpayer to fund schemes like GEERS.

But we are dealing with the structure as it is, and so we have put these entitlements into a legislative guarantee so that workers do not have to worry about people like the member for Mayo and others, one day in the distant future, being in government and ripping into entitlement schemes and the like. We know they go through periods of generosity towards workers, periods of being benign towards workers, and we know that at some point they tend to turn on workers, as Work Choices proves. I remember Work Choices; that apparently guaranteed all your entitlements as well—guaranteed that you might lose them, that is. We know it is important that we have some legislative guarantee for people's entitlements.

The previous speaker said that this is all about union bosses, and some sort of arrangement with them. It is actually about our relationship with workers. That is why we want to guarantee wages up to 13 weeks. That is why we want to make sure that workers get their redundancy entitlement capped at a maximum of four weeks of service per year. This is not some sort of rolled gold union guarantee—that is not uncommon, and certainly not at the top end of town. We know what kind of payouts they take when they leave companies.

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