Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Vulnerable Workers) Bill 2017. I do so though with a sense that picks up a fair amount of the sentiment that we have just heard from the member for Wakefield. This is a bill put forward by the government when their hearts are hardly in it. Whilst, on the face of it, the issues it addresses are worthy and deserve support hence the fact that we are supporting it, what really shines out from this proposed piece of legislation is the opportunity that is lost.

Sure, it is a welcome development to increase penalties for serious contraventions of the Fair Work Act. It is of course important to increase penalties for failures in record keeping. We do welcome greater responsibility on franchisors in the franchisor-franchisee relationship; although what is proposed here is pretty limited. It is a good thing to prohibit employers from putting in place unfair demands on employees, which, in essence, ask people to pay for a job, particularly in a context where you are talking about noncitizens who are working in the Australian labour market under some form of temporary work visa. Those are good things to do. But there is so much more to be done than to pretend that those measures alone will address the kinds of abuses and exploitation that we have seen in recent years in the Australian workplace. It is plain fantasy. This is not a Band-Aid; it is not even that. What we have is a really significant issue out there and this was an opportunity for the government to come forward and meaningfully address it. Whilst the specific measures in the bill are okay for what they are, they go only a small way down the road of actually dealing with the tremendous issue of worker exploitation and, particularly, of people who are noncitizens who are working in Australia under a temporary working visa and who often do not know our laws and are unable to access services that represent them in the workplace in the same way that citizens do. Measures could be put in place to stop those people, who are very vulnerable, from being exploited.

We do not see those measures in this bill, because, as I said, the government's heart is not in it. They are not serious about putting in place measures in the workplace that could really promote workplace rights and fairness. The governing party today are the party of Work Choices. We saw, in their heart of hearts, what they truly believe should occur in the workplace through that legislation, which is now infamous in Australian political and industrial history. Whilst we have not seen all of that re-emerge, be under no illusion that the fantasies of going down that path are still very much harboured in the hearts of those opposite.

As the member for Wakefield rightly said, if you were serious about actually trying to deal with issues of workplace rights and fairness in the workplace, you would do something towards empowering collective action, collective bargaining and trade unions. Trade unions have been the most important phenomenon in this country's history for providing balance and equality in the workplace. They are the most important phenomenon in this country for providing what has been, over the journey, a relative equality of wage outcomes in Australia compared to the rest of the world, although that equality is fast eroding. Unions matter deeply in terms of promoting fairness and rights in the workplace.

The government is run by a party that is plainly opposed to all of what I have just said. They do not believe in collective rights. They would like workplaces that are based on individual workers having to negotiate one on one with large multinational companies, as if there is something remotely fair or equal about that. Of course, it is worth spending a moment of this, because it goes to how deeply illogical and unfair that proposition is. In a commercial context, the Trade Practices Act prohibits moments of unequal bargaining power and situations that give rise to that. The Trade Practices Act seeks to regulate agreements that are struck in those situations. There is a notion of equality of bargaining power contained in the Trade Practices Act. When you are talking about company to company, that notion is there. It ought to apply in an industrial context as well. There is no way that anyone would think it is remotely fair that a single individual on a wage of $50,000 or $60,000 a year can negotiate on any kind of equal footing with a company with revenues of tens of millions of dollars. There is nothing fair or equal about that, which is why collective bargaining is so important in the workplace and the role of unions is so important. If this government was serious about addressing the kinds of issues that they say need to be addressed in the context of this bill, they would go there. But we will see pigs fly across this chamber before that day ever comes, because it is not in their DNA. Fundamentally, they do not believe it and, as a result, what we have on the table now as a proposed bill is really a shallow, skin-deep attempt to deal with what is a really significant problem.

Make no mistake, there is a real problem out there. You only need to look at the events that we have seen over the past few years, including the incident of Myer, who were using cleaners that were employed by sham contractors, and the really appalling situation that we saw at 7-Eleven with a systematic exploitation of vulnerable workers who were here under temporary work arrangements, which effectively saw their exploitation at the heart of a business model. That is the kind of thing which needs to be dealt with. We saw in respect of Pizza Hut—

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