Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration) Share this | Hansard source

That is right—101 could well have been the answer, or 102 and we will take any advances. We do not even know if the independent contractors association has more members than there are members of the House of Representatives. There has been a lot of talk about sham contractors; what we have here is a sham organisation with a very clever name which means they are able to get media grabs by saying, ‘This is what independent contractors want.’ You cannot blame the media when the name of the association is the Independent Contractors of Australia. You would think it is a fair call that they might know something about it, until you look, firstly, at their membership and, secondly, at what they are trying to do.

I want to meet the independent contractor who wants his or her rates to be driven down. I want to find someone who is actually arguing for that entitlement, because they are about to be given it. They are about to be given that entitlement and nothing else. We have this all being framed as an issue of choice. Yes, choice is important, and so is feeding your family. You do not get a tremendous amount of choice, when it comes to making ends meet, as to what your minimum requirements for survival are. I do not want to see their families put in a situation of having real difficulties making ends meet—that is bad enough—but you then add to that the threat to their own safety and the threat to the safety of everybody who is either sharing a work site or a road with them.

These are actually really important, significant issues which were heralded to the election campaign audience as: ‘We’ll provide protection for independent contractors. They will be provided with protection from a safety net.’ When it comes to things you want to be protected from, a safety net is rarely on the list. But that is what is being provided here, and it happens in two ways. It happens first of all by taking people who have always been viewed as independent contractors and saying: ‘Right, you’re now not going to have any of these other rights which you might have been able to get under different parts of state awards. They’re gone. So, if you were enjoying having minimum rates, sorry, you’re going to enjoy more not having minimum rates. If you were enjoying an entitlement to workers compensation, well, you’re going to enjoy even more that you don’t get these entitlements anymore. Every entitlement you lose is a right you gain, and the right you gain is to earn less.’ That is what happens to the people who have always been known as independent contractors.

We then have the other group of people in what have been called sham relationships who have always been regarded as employees, and have seen themselves as such, who are now going to be told, ‘Guess what? You’re part of the new economy too. You’re also going to be an independent contractor. As such you get a new right. You get the right to charge as little as your most competitive competitor.’ This is less of a problem when people are running a bigger corporation, when people are running a business. When I ran my business we had three partners. It was a situation where you could bid lower than your competitors. You had a genuine tendering process and you had multiple contractors whom you were trying to gain business from. That was fine. That was just a straight open market, no worries.

It is much more difficult if you are tied to one head contractor, and that is the only relationship you are going to have. It is much more difficult saying, ‘I’ll pick up whatever courier work I can,’ if you already have Toll written on the side of your van. You do not have the same opportunity as other business people to just shop around and pick up whatever business you want wherever you want. In those situations, what the government says is, ‘You’re on your own and whatever rights you might have thought you had are now gone for good, be it superannuation or be it workers comp. And for the small group that we’ll give it to and say, “Yeah, you’re in a special situation,” we’ll tie it down to two states for a handful of years, and have a review date just after an election.’

The government should be up-front about what they are trying to do. If you want to have an argument in this House about, ‘Is it fair for independent contractors to have an absolute race to the bottom and undercut each other as far as they want, and if that ends up hurting them and making workplaces and roads dangerous, then so be it?’ then let us have the argument. But the government should not pretend to be on the side of independent contractors and do it by bringing in legislation that gives them nothing. It gives the dodgiest independent contractor the chance to undercut. It gives the dodgiest operator the chance to take contracts from others and operate in an unsafe way, to not spend money maintaining their equipment, or their vehicle if a vehicle is involved. It gives the dodgy operator the opportunity to do that. But what honest, hardworking people—the vast majority of people in contracting arrangements—will have by the time this legislation goes through is simple: they get less and they end up on their own.

So we end up with three pieces of legislation working together. We get the Work Choices legislation. We get the Dawson review legislation about collective bargaining under the Trade Practices Act. In that legislation, the government decided to abandon its rhetoric of choice and decided that independent contractors would be the one group that was not allowed to have a trade union represent them and would actually be banned from making that choice—a choice available to everybody else. I have to say, I used to believe the Prime Minister on his rhetoric that he was not against trade unions, that he just wanted to provide choice and that it was just compulsory unionism he objected to.

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