Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak today on the Workplace Relations Amendment (Transition to Forward with Fairness) Bill 2008. We know that, as previous speakers have outlined, this bill seeks to amend the Workplace Relations Act of 1996, make a number of changes to the framework for workplace agreements and enable the process of award modernisation to commence. I am speaking on this bill today because I have a vested interest on behalf of my electorate. Many people would not be aware that in the Canning electorate there are more than 20,000 people on registered individual agreements, AWAs—whatever you want to describe them as. It has one of the highest numbers of people on AWAs in Australia. The highest number of people registered on AWAs in this country is in the electorate of Kalgoorlie, held by my friend Mr Barry Haase. We will examine why this is more of a Western Australian phenomenon in a moment but, suffice to say, the new member for Brand, Gary Gray, has one of the highest numbers of people on AWAs as well—individual agreements that are negotiated in the workplace.

For those who think this is all about the mining industry, let me put their minds at rest. In Canning, there is one large miner and it is Alcoa. Interestingly, most of the workers at Alcoa are on union inspired agreements on behalf of the Australian Workers Union—something I will tease out further when I get my address-in-reply speech, because we know that the current member for Maribyrnong had something to do with activity around that area. I will further elaborate on that later. The fact is that many contractors around Alcoa are on individual flexible agreements. So the workers at Alcoa are not, but the contractors in and around the area are.

But the greater number of people that are on flexible agreements in the Canning electorate are not in mining; they are in areas like hospitality, construction, customer service, the tourism sector and even local government. I say to the journalists who stop us at the door in the morning on a regular basis: most of the journalists in this country are on individual agreements or AWAs. Many of them have said to me just privately, ‘Gee, I don’t want my flexible awards and conditions being disrupted by the interference on behalf of the unions by the Rudd Labor government.’

But let us talk more about the bill before the House today. This bill is designed to remove Australian workplace agreements from the industrial relations scene of this country. The government want them terminated as an industrial instrument. In her second reading speech, Minister Gillard announced that from 13 February 2008 the Australian Public Service would no longer offer AWAs. That is because she can do that. Why has the Australian Public Service been singled out? The reason is that it is heavily unionised. We know that most of the public service organisations in this country have almost 100 per cent union membership, so it is pretty easy to do it at that sort of workplace. But we also know that in this country less than 17 per cent of people in the non-public sector have decided to be a member of a union.

For my part, I used to be a union rep when I was a schoolteacher. I see the role of the union often to be quite constructive in terms of bargaining on behalf of their members when there are issues in the workplace. But when the unions decide to become political operatives, as they have done over the last few years, and inject themselves into the workplace purely for craven political reasons then they have gone beyond their brief. They are not there for the workers; they are there for themselves. Most of the union bosses, if they are not in this place, are out there as hereditary peers of the Labor Party, feathering their own nests. How many union bosses do you ever see sitting in cattle class? They are mostly up in the front of the planes while their workers are sitting towards the tail.

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