Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Throsby is certainly irrelevant. There is no doubt about that. This bill is irrelevant to the safety of Australians on the roads. This bill is not about the safety of Australians on the roads; this bill is about dragging independent contractors—small business people, entrepreneurs—into the employment net so that these people opposite can drag them into union membership and increase the amount they can get out of contributions. It is a revolving slush fund. That is what this bill is about.

There is no evidence at all, anywhere, that this bill is about increasing the safety of Australians on the roads. All we have heard from those opposite is rhetoric—that this is about safety and fairness. One question this legislation raises is: why do we need a separate set of employment arrangements outside of the Fair Work Act? If the Fair Work Act is so good and is working so well, why do we need another law? We have heard for years, ever since the Howard government pursued very sound reforms to address the thuggery and intimidation which went on for so long in the building industry, that we did not need two laws—we only needed one set of industrial laws in this country. But now, somehow, we need two sets of laws. We need another set of laws for the transport industry to address safety. If the Fair Work Act is such a failure, why not just amend it?

There is a perverse aspect of this bill and its relationship with the Fair Work Act. If a truck company is appropriately paying its workers under the relevant award but this new body finds the truck company should be paying more, that implies that the Fair Work provisions have led to the workers being underpaid—by the Labor Party's own law. By the Labor Party's own standard, this is a farce. It is a farce because this bill is not about safety; it is about union power. It is about giving Mr Sheldon and his mates at the TWU access to more people. With more people on the books, you have more people to pay contributions and more people to pay for the union credit cards—and we have seen what they pay for.

The way the lowest paid workers in our society have been represented and treated is a disgrace. Those opposite are about vested interests. They are not about higher wages. They are not about a high road for Australian workers. They are about looking after their mates and looking after the vested interests. They cloak it in spin. They cloak it in the spin of safety and they cloak it in the spin of fairness.

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