Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, it might surprise you to find that I am speaking on the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2013, because I think we have strayed from the path in recent times.

It just keeps coming: the final weeks of this parliament and the mad rush from this government to jam through ill-considered legislation. It must be said that this government has an enormous track record in this area. We are used to watching the projects unravel before our eyes and, in fact, eventually inflict damage on individuals, communities, business and the economy generally.

I welcome the minister's announcement of the withdrawal of the clauses in this bill that pertained to the increased right of entry and increased obligations of employers to fly union officials in and out of remote sites. This would certainly have led to the coalition having no choice but to oppose the raft of legislation. Certainly, those two clauses in particular are totally unpalatable. Both proposals were a blatant grab to swing the industrial pendulum even further and to wind back the industrial relations time clock to the 1970s.

Before I focus on the impact of the bill as it is now presented, I might just take a moment to examine the work of the House of Representatives committees, Mr Deputy Speaker Cheeseman, which I know you have been a very active member of. One of the consequences of the unusual circumstances that this parliament has found itself in has been the huge jump in inquiries into bills referred to the House standing committees. The demands in the last few weeks have been particularly onerous, not just for the members but probably even more importantly for the staff, because in the end the quality of the reports that are returned to the parliament to consider are underwritten by the very professional conduct of the staff assigned to the various committees.

In the case of the Standing Committee on Education and Employment, it seems we have been at something of an epicentre for many of the government's last-minute attempts—after more than 5½ years in parliament, it must be said—to ram legislation through the parliament in what in effect are the dying days of the 43rd Parliament. The eleventh hour, if you like, or perhaps some would see it, in the case of this government, as five minutes to midnight.

The education and employment committee, of which I am the deputy chair, have been asked to finalise no fewer than five reports pertaining to legislation in the last few weeks and now have three more on our books that the government is demanding considered responses on by the end of next week, basically, or in those very first few days when we come back for the next sitting weeks. Clearly, this is not the way that the parliament should operate and is a sign that the government is in complete disarray. Unfortunately, in a practical sense that has impacted heavily on our report on this bill, the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2013, which was tabled in the House just yesterday.

On this bill, the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2013, the committee received 40 submissions, and 12 individuals participated in a half day of hearings in Melbourne on 24 May. Just a half day—and, for a bill that had the far-reaching ramifications that the bill presented to the committee at that time had, the half day was simply not sufficient to fully examine its full implications. Most of the consideration time, not surprisingly, was drawn to the most controversial issues, which now, as of last night, have effectively been removed from the bill. So it is disappointing to me that we did not have more time to consider those family-friendly matters that are proposed in the bill and, of course, the antibullying clause. It becomes very obvious that the chaos surrounding the government's rushed legislative program is deeply impacting on the committee's very important work of providing considered advice to the parliament. I thank the hardworking members of the secretariats that are doing their best to keep up with this almost-out-of-control flurry of activity.

Of the points that remain in the bill, I think the biggest and most controversial is the proposal to introduce an individual right of recourse for those who believe they have been bullied at work. I will spend some time focusing on that clause. Some of the very good things the committee system does provide to this parliament are the considered, in-depth analyses of major issues facing our country, and such was the case with the education and employment committee's six-month-old report Workplace bullying: we just want it to stop, in which I participated as the deputy chair. This inquiry, whose report I have here with me, was not an easy inquiry. It was very confronting for the members of the committee, primarily because we invited the public to make personal statements to the committee. We received 319 submissions, and most of them, it must be said, were from individuals who felt that they had been the victims of bullying in the workplace. Many of those were confidential. As we moved around Australia taking personal representations from the various bodies which sought to give evidence, at each hearing we allotted a time frame for individuals to come forward and tell their stories if they wished. We did not identify them apart from their initials because we felt there were possible negative impacts for them in the workplace.

It was a pretty sad story. We were not adjudicators on these individual cases and we basically only heard one side of the argument, but you could see that whether or not the bullying was real or whether or not individuals have a lower threshold for things they may consider bullying is almost irrelevant because in the end there could be no doubt that individuals were damaged by what they at least saw as bullying. But it is such a hard thing for the parliament and for that committee to actually make solid recommendations about what we should do to combat bullying in the workplace. We also had quite a revealing meeting with the parents of Brodie Panlock in Victoria. Of course, there is now a law in Victoria called Brodie's Law, and that was very influential on what the committee had to say and found in the end as well.

In any event, that inquiry made 23 recommendations to the government. I must say I am disappointed that this bill, now that it has been amended—and previously—picks up on just one of those recommendations, recommendation 23, allowing for an unspecified individual right of recourse. There was, as I said, a whole raft of different recommendations in the report, and many of them were very positive in the matter. They were looking at education and support in the workforce, informing employers of their obligations, helping employers deal with those issues within the workforce and helping the workforce understand what it is to be treated in an appropriate manner within the workforce. As I said, it is a little disappointing, then, that the minister has chosen just recommendation 23—which, if anything, is the recommendation with a bit of stick in it—and seemingly ignored the recommendations that had a bit of carrot in them.

In fact, recommendation 23 was one that the coalition members felt they could not support in the form it was presented in. I will read a short quote from our dissenting report:

Further, the Coalition Members are concerned that enabling individuals to take such action will open a door to potential abuse of the device. Frivolous actions, or even worse, actions driven by malicious intent would have the ability to tie employers up in rolling court actions for extended periods.

There is no doubt that individuals should have a way of shutting off bullying when they are affected in the workplace. They need a place to go to; we understand that. But, as it is presented in that form, it becomes the first port of call for someone who believes they are a victim of bullying. It is a concern—it was a concern to the dissenting members at least—that this would become unmanageable in the workforce and may in fact be counterproductive. If in the end the individual who feels affronted by workplace bullying decides to go to Fair Work Australia before they go to their employer, I think we have a problem.

In that light, that is why I am pleased that the coalition today is putting up an amendment to this bill which would put a filter in place and establish a prima facie case before the individual could access Fair Work Australia. It should not be seen as a shut door; it should be seen as a way of making sure individuals and employers are not accused wrongly and dragged into an industrial court without having some say in that matter. I hope that those amendments are received well in the House. I think they will improve the legislation as it is being presented.

That really is what I have to say on the bullying matter. We are broadly in support of the other matters that are brought forward—certainly the family-friendly measures. I think they actually mean very little because there is nothing to stop any employee asking for a flexible work arrangement. There are no laws in the book. In fact, in every good workplace one would expect that that is exactly what would happen. I hope once again that this is not something that becomes a case of the letter first and the approach later, because I have been an employer in the past and I know how confronting it can be to receive a letter from someone that you just saw outside the door five minutes ago. That does not lead to a friendly workforce. Certainly people with the challenges in their lives that are listed in this bill should have the right to request flexible work arrangements, but then so should everybody else that goes to work. We all have the right to request flexible working arrangements.

The other part of the bill, of course, is on the rostering. Once again, as we would hope, there seems to be no compulsion in the bill. There are no penalties for not observing what the bill is asking you to do, so once again you can ask why it is in the bill. But it is in the bill, and I do not think it is sufficiently offensive to employers Australia-wide for us to say we cannot accept that. But you do wonder, because there are no consequences, why it is in there. It would appear to me that it is largely for political purposes—marketing as we head towards the election. The government is very good at naming policies to make them sound quite different to what they are. In this case the minister—

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