Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am here to please, Mr Deputy President. That is a goal I have set myself. But what does not please me is the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2015. As I was saying in my remarks yesterday evening, I worry that the sheer damage and danger being proposed by this legislation has perhaps in part failed to be recognised, given the way in which the government has fairly cleverly used and clouded the language around some of these matters.

It is important to reiterate the framework of what is being proposed. At the last election a series of commitments were given by this government. The commitments that were given were that these amendments would not go any further than the government's pre-election promises and that it would implement specific recommendations directly from the 2012 Fair Work review. The government on both those counts has broken its promise. This bill goes further than its pre-election promises in a number of places. Three in particular need to be explored: firstly, individual flexibility arrangements; secondly, greenfields agreements; and finally, the issues relating to rights of entry. More broadly than that, the bill as a whole demonstrates an ideological agenda that has been run by this government against trade unionism, against workers and against the right of workers to collectively bargain.

Individual flexibility arrangements, IFAs, were introduced by Labor in 2009. Labor introduced IFAs because we believe that flexible work practices can deliver benefits to both employees and employers if—and this is the big if—they are applied appropriately. At the same time Labor wanted to protect the vulnerable low-paid workers and families who could least afford cuts to the bottom line of their budget, by ensuring that sufficient safeguards were in the legislation. But—and this is what is so worrying about the aims of this legislation—IFAs should not be imposed on unsuspecting employees as a means of taking away their conditions and taking away their penalty rates.

We have all heard examples where an employee swaps a relatively insignificant monetary benefit for a non-financial benefit. In those cases it can be a win for employers and employees. But the point in relation to this legislation is that the relevant expert panel recommendation states that if a non-monetary benefit is being traded for a monetary benefit, the value of the monetary benefit forgone must be relatively insignificant and the value of the non-monetary benefit must be proportionate. We do not want to see a situation where IFAs are being used to exploit and rip people off. Despite the clear prescription of relative insignificance and proportion, those two words are missing from the government's bill.

I want to draw the Senate's attention to the work that has been done by the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee and their fantastic report on the provisions of the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014, which gives a fairly detailed analysis. We are not going to have the opportunity here to go through it in detail but it gives a detailed analysis of what is so worrying about these IFA arrangements and why they go so much further than was ever the initial intention of the legislation.

The provisions on greenfields agreements are also concerning. The government's proposed amendments to greenfields agreements pave the way for employers to essentially negotiate with themselves. The opposition opposes these amendments because the bargaining process will not be improved by simply removing one party, trade unions, from the negotiating table. These amendments give employers the absolute advantage in negotiating. I will quickly run through some of the powers that this bill will give them. Employers will gain absolute control over which unions they themselves are able to negotiate with, taking that power away from the workers. After an employer agrees to bargain with an employee organisation, the employer at any time can issue notice to commence a three-month notified negotiation period. The countdown clock does not stop once it starts. An employer could essentially walk away from the negotiating table and simply wait for those three months to expire. Finally, at the end of the three months, the employer and only the employer could take a proposed agreement to the Fair Work Commission for assessment and approval. The concern here is that these agreements, these relationships, on greenfields sites are most effective when it is a two-way street, not simply an employer-driven dead end.

The other big concern here relates to the issue of rights of entry. Labor expect anyone afforded the right to enter a workplace to act properly at all times. Let's be clear: within the act, within the current provisions, there are strict rules about what is and is not appropriate behaviour for a person entering a worksite. But let's also remember that all Australian workers also deserve rights to access independent advice and advocacy at their workplace. So it is important that right of entry provisions are sensible but not weighted too heavily in favour of either group—unions or employers.

The government's proposed changes to the right of entry provisions heavily favour one group, and that is employers. The coalition said they would adopt recommendation 35 of the expert panel, which provides Fair Work Australia with greater power to resolve disputes about the frequency of visits. The government's inclusion of a provision that requires Fair Work Commission to consider 'the combined impact on the employer's operations' is clearly intended to exclude all unions from a site if only one union has been found to have entered too frequently. For the government, it is a case of 'punish one, punish all'. That really goes to the heart of some of the problems with this legislation—this entire idea that you should class everyone together and use an occasional exemption that is already very well covered by provisions in other acts to simply prevent the right of workers to have access to the representation.

The government is suggesting that, if an employee would like his or her union to come to their workplace and they wish to remain anonymous, the union must apply to the Fair Work Commission to obtain an invitation certificate. Does the coalition honestly believe that in a small business with, say, 15 or fewer employees the boss will not be able to find out who sought the union's presence at that workplace? Another of the government's claims is that employers have to pay for the cost of union boss 'joy riders' to remote worksites. What the coalition does not tell anyone is that employers are required to facilitate access only where premises are not reasonably accessible by transport other than by the employer or that the nature of the premises means the union is required to stay overnight. This is an exception, not a common rule.

As a whole, this bill goes too far. It introduces measures that go against what the government itself had promised before the election and it fundamentally represents what has been a continuation of nothing more than an ideologically driven attack on the rights of workers to organise and work together. I urge the Senate to vote down this bill.