David Leyonhjelm (NSW, Liberal Democratic Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Take-Home Pay) Bill 2017. The bill would prevent the Fair Work Commission from varying an award if this is likely to reduce the pay an employee receives or the pay a potential employee could receive. This would prevent the Fair Work Commission from ever reducing any award wage, penalty rate or casual loading. This would cost jobs. It is bad enough that we still have so much government wage setting, but this would make the job of the government's wage setter nigh on impossible.

I oppose the bill, and I strongly suspect that Bob Hawke and Paul Keating also oppose the bill, because the bill is a betrayal of their legacy. Bob Hawke and Paul Keating spent years dismantling the idea that government sets your pay rate. They spent years dismantling the idea that wages should be the same across an industry. And they spent years dismantling the idea that if one wage goes up all wages go up. Because of the efforts of Hawke and Keating, we saw fewer people have the government set their wage over the 1990s and 2000s. This meant that pay rises increasingly depended on a worker's performance and the performance of the business they work for, rather than on government rulings covering the entire industry and economy.

But over the past decade more and more people have had the government set their wages. This is a result of Gillard's 'modern' awards, which ramped up award wages, leaving less room for businesses to pay above award wages. It is also the result of a rigid interpretation of the better-off-overall test in enterprise bargaining, which has made enterprise bargaining inflexible and therefore pointless.

With this bill, Mr Shorten and Labor want to further repudiate enterprise bargaining and further impose government wage-setting. It is backwards economics, and if Hawke and Keating were dead, they would be rolling in their graves.