Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate. The Fair Work Amendment Bill 2013 provides us with an opportunity to protect people's rights at work and to Abbott-proof the Fair Work Act in the event that there is a change in government in September—which, looking at the polls, looks very likely.

The Greens for many years have been staunch supporters of legislation that protects people's rights at work, gives them the opportunity to strike a better work-life balance and gives them some comfort that they are going to have a secure job. Part of the problem with the this bill is that it represents a missed opportunity. Instead of legislating early on in the life of this parliament to remove some of the last vestiges of Work Choices, we have a bill that, sadly, is being left until five minutes to midnight and that, unfortunately, looks like it is going to be amended by agreement between the government and the opposition to remove some important elements.

As many of us have been saying for some time, the Fair Work Act carries over a large number of the provisions of the provisions from Work Choices that people campaigned so strongly against. The provisions that allow workers and their unions to bargain and to organise, as respected in international law, find themselves, with the Fair Work Act, under almost identical form to that under Work Choices. Many people have been campaigning for a long time to have those provisions finally removed. One would have thought that after five years of the Labor government we would have seen some of those elements of the John Howard laws removed, but no, they remain, and it looks like they are going to remain after today.

But the Greens will try to improve this legislation. One respect in which it can be improved is by giving people better access to work-life balance. We have a situation in this country where one in four employees has no sick leave. That is an extraordinary situation. Of the OECD countries, Australia is second only to Spain when it comes to the use of a temporary workforce. Spain has a large rural workforce, so you can understand why they have so many seasonal labourers, but there is absolutely no reason for Australia to do that. As a result, we have increasing job insecurity and people working large numbers of jobs just to earn enough income. We also have people working extraordinarily long hours. Not only is it insecure work but also many people are working long hours. Half of the people in this country would rather work a different set of hours to those they are currently working, even taking into account the fact that it might mean that they will lose pay.

What can we do about that? We can do a number of things. We can amend this legislation to ensure that people have an enforceable right to request flexible working arrangements. Flexibility should work both ways. Over the last two or three decades we have seen a lot of flexibility from the employers' side, but it should be a two-way street. We are not arguing to go back to days when everything was regulated and there was a uniform standard, but we are saying that if we are serious about flexibility then it should work both ways. We will be seeking to amend the bill to ensure that if people, especially carers, ask for a better work-life balance, and if the employer unreasonably says no, then people are able to have the right of appeal and have it tested.

There will be many instances in which it is not appropriate to allow an employee to work a certain set of hours. You should not necessarily be able to, for example, clock off halfway through fighting a fire because you have external events. There will be some businesses which simply would not be able to afford to accommodate a particular employee's needs. There will be some businesses, especially small businesses, which would find it extremely difficult. However, there are many others for which it would be very easy with a bit of creativity to do that. At the moment, under the government's bill, you can ask and the employer just has to say no for that to be it. That is it; that is the end of the line. It could be the most unreasonable of all requests or it could have an enormous impact on you and the people that you are looking after, but the employer is able to say no. We will be proposing that the bill has some teeth in that respect and that the Fair Work Commission is able to balance the legitimate needs of employees with the legitimate needs of the businesses that employ them.

What we have also seen during the last few years of this government are some holes in the Fair Work Act. We have seen with the Qantas dispute, for example, the use of tactical industrial action by employers. We have seen Qantas realise that it was not going to be able to negotiate a satisfactory outcome and that some of the things the employees wanted—for example, clauses around job security—were not going to be able to be reached as an outcome. So what did it do? It fast-tracked arbitration by holding a gun to the nation's head. It grounded its airline fleet, and as a result we ended up in Fair Work Australia within a very short period and it got the arbitrated outcome it wanted, with nothing in it as far as job security was concerned.

We have also seen, in my home state of Victoria, an opposite tactic being employed with nurses, for example. The government says, 'We know that if we get to arbitration there will be some things where we will get a good deal and there will be some things that nurses are seeking that aren't even going to be delivered at the arbitral outcome—for example, nurse/patient ratios.' There are constitutional issues at the moment as to whether the Fair Work Commission has the power to arbitrate such things. The government knows this, so what does it do? It strings out the dispute, hoping that at some stage that nurses or the teachers will get so frustrated that they take industrial action—then you end up at Fair Work with only half the claim being arbitrated, and all the important issues, like minimum ratios, do not find their way into the decision.

It is possible to fix that. We have seen that these are flaws in the act, and it is possible to fix that by saying, 'No, you can't come here seeking orders to terminate industrial action unless you're going to settle the whole dispute.' It is possible to fix it by saying: 'You can't come here unless you have clean hands. If you have just grounded your whole fleet in an attempt to get an arbitrated outcome that you like then we're going to send you back to keep bargaining—you must come to the Fair Work Commission with clean hands.' We will be moving amendments to fix that.

One of the other missed opportunities in this bill is the ability to address the growing problem of job insecurity. As I said at the start, when one in four workers in this country does not have sick leave because they are on some form of casual arrangement, we have a problem. When in the higher education sector, for example, only about a third of the people are in ongoing employment—and we are not talking here about the lifetime tenure professor that people might think of; we are talking about simple ongoing employment—and the other two-thirds are on some form of rolling contracts or casual work, we have a problem.

In some businesses, of course, it is going to be appropriate to use casual labour or fixed-term labour—of course; no problem with that. But why is it that in our schools and in our universities, where we know there is going to be work from year to year, some people find themselves at the end of the year not knowing if they are going to have a job the next year for a 10-year cycle? Why should a university researcher or lecturer be waiting until October to find out whether they are going to have a job next year, when they know the university has secure funding for a number of years to come? Why is it that teachers are not able to apply for mortgages because they are on rolling contracts from year to year to year? Why is that workers around the country are unable to make decisions about starting a family or buying a house because their work is insecure? That should not be the case, and it should especially not be the case in those sectors that are reliant on government funding, like education. We will be moving amendments in an attempt to address some of those issues.

I would hope that, by the time that this legislation leaves this place, we have taken up the opportunity to right some of the wrongs that have been in our industrial laws for some time. I would very much hope that we do not have the situation where the government and the opposition work together to remove what are some good provisions of this bill. I fear that that may be the case—and a lot of people would have a quite legitimate right to be disappointed by that.

See this speech in context