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

Clean Event is not remotely the same kind of proposition as what we are talking about here. There we were talking about people who were being paid in accordance with the law, but this is not what we are talking about in any of what I have just described. That just shows how little is understood about the industrial situation and how, when there is an opportunity to go to the politics of a matter, that is where the coalition will go. In terms of actually dealing with real people's rights, they understand nothing.

We saw in the Pizza Hut situation people being paid as little as $6 an hour under sham contracting arrangements. We saw supply chain arrangements which were put in place by Baiada Group which involved gross exploitation of those who were working under temporary visa working right arrangements in Australia. At Caltex people were being paid $13 an hour—half the legal rate—and not receiving tax returns. At Domino's there were allegations of franchisees actually selling visas to prospective overseas workers, again in a manner which involved pretty well a systematic underpayment of wages. That is what is going on out there. There is a genuine issue of exploitation of working people. It is particularly acute for those who are here working under temporary visa arrangements. As I said earlier, I think that is a function of those people not necessarily knowing their rights.

When I was working in the previous portfolio as the Labor spokesperson for immigration, I had—without naming the country—representatives of foreign countries coming to talk to me about the concern they had about the way their citizens were being treated in workplaces in our country. That says something about the significance of what is going on here. It goes to our standing in the world when you have got those kinds of representation being made, which is why we need to deal with this issue in a substantive and deep way rather than what we have got going on with this particular bill at the moment.

The lost opportunity that was provided here could have been taken up by looking at the kinds of proposals that Labor has been championing for many years now. At the beginning of 2016 Labor put out its Rights at Work policy. A number of the elements of that were contained in a private member's bill: the Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Australian Workers) Bill 2016. That was introduced in March 2016 but was reintroduced on the Notice Paper in August of last year after the election.

It contains a whole lot of measures which would go significantly to dealing with the kinds of issues that this bill purports to deal with and deals with the kinds of problems that I have outlined such as ensuring that the Fair Work Act applies to all people in the Australian labour market irrespective of their immigration status. It required the Fair Work Ombudsman to publish information and provide material about workplace rights and, particularly, the relationship between rights that people have under our industrial laws, rights that exist under our immigration laws and how those relate to each other. It sought to put in place added protections for those in the workplace who speak out or, indeed, even ask questions about what their industrial rights may be. It sought to put in place a reasonable person test when applying a standard to determining whether a sham contract existed or did not. It sought to ensure that directors of phoenix companies could be pursued personally for the payment of unpaid wages to those workers who had not received the proper payment of their wages. Indeed, it would have provided a threefold increase of penalties for a failure to pay the correct wages. It would have provided for a power to disqualify directors of companies which had been involved in breaches of the Fair Work Act. It would have placed new criminal offences in relation to coercive conduct which led to slave-like conditions.

At the election last year, Labor announced a second tranche of policies going to this particular area in the workplace, such as reversing the onus of proof in respect of the accessorial liability provisions of the Fair Work Act—in other words, making it the case that a franchisor would need to prove that they were not involved in a breach of workplace laws that was undertaken by a franchisee—and also, and this goes to a point I mentioned earlier, broadening the way that operated so that it was not simply applied to the franchisee-franchisor model, which is one of the deficiencies of the bill that we have in front of us right now. Additional responsibilities for franchisors is a good thing, but it is limited to that particular kind of legal arrangement or a legal arrangement involving holding companies. But in fact there is a much broader range of legal arrangements where similar phenomena can occur. What we sought to do was to deal with all of those.

We wanted to put in place a legal burden on the accessory, the principal, if you like, to take all reasonable steps to ensure that the direct employer—in the context of the franchisee-franchisor model this is the franchisee—to act consistently with Fair Work Australia. We were also seeking to put in place greater rights to pursue underpayment claims against franchisors and greater standing for workers for their representatives and indeed for the Fair Work Ombudsman.

In the time I have left, can I perhaps briefly mention that one of the greatest opportunities missed in this is of course dealing with the question of the Fair Work Australia penalty rates decision and the potential that has to undermine the take-home pay of so many thousands of Australians. We have a private member's bill put into this parliament by the Leader of the Opposition, as the member for Wakefield said. This was a perfect opportunity to support that bill, which would have protected the take-home pay of all Australians so that the decision of Fair Work Australia in relation to penalty rates would not apply and reduce take-home pay for those people.

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