House debates

Monday, 14 July 2014

Bills

Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment Bill 2014; Second Reading

6:04 pm

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

I was making the point when this matter was last before the House that the government, when you look at the various pieces of legislation that they are putting forward and what is in the budget, is coming for people's rights at work indirectly this time around. They have learnt the lesson from the John Howard era of WorkChoices that if you come and attack people's rights at work they will fight back and they will turf you out. So now, this time, the government is coming at it in a far more sly fashion. As I mentioned last time, we are seeing legislation that will enable people who work to be paid in kind by the businesses that they work for. If you work at the fish and chips shop, expect now to be paid partly in fish and chips. You cannot pay your rent with that, you cannot pay your electricity bill with that, but that is no concern of the Prime Minister's.

And then we see this bill. It is said by the minister and by those who support it that this bill is about putting corporations and unions on an even footing and saying that organisations of workers should be treated in the same way as organisations that exist to make a profit. I will come back in a moment to the functions of registered organisations that make them very, very different from corporations. But let us just take that suggestion at face value for a moment. If the government was serious about saying that we are now going to regulate corporations in the same way as unions, then what flows from that? Firstly, I can tell you that unions are required under the Fair Work Act and other legislation to be democratic organisations, which means that the people who run those organisations have to be elected to those positions.

So, assuming that the government is right that now corporations are going to be treated the same way, it is going to come as a shock to most CEOs who have been appointed by their board to find out that now they are going to have to be elected, because presumably that is what this government thinks is fair. It is also going to come as a shock to everyone who has a proprietary limited company to learn that their accounts and their financial returns for every year are now going to be published on the internet, because that is what happens with registered organisations and unions at the moment. The standard of scrutiny over their accounts is well above that of someone who sets up a Pty Ltd company.

So if the government is truly serious about this, they will be requiring everyone who incorporates their small business to now not only elect the people who run it but also publish all of their information and their financial affairs on the internet. You understand that the government, of course, is not interested in that. The government is quite happy to let companies run their own race, but feels completely legitimate about coming in and saying to organisations that represent workers, 'We deserve the right to micromanage you in a way that we would never dream of doing to a private company, but we will impose the same penalties on you as we might on a publicly listed company.'

What the government fails completely to understand is that organisations of workers do not exist for the same purposes as businesses. That is where the whole argument behind this legislation falls down. Businesses exist for a purpose. They exist to make a profit. That is what they do and they are judged on that basis. Corporations law requires directors to act in the best interests of their shareholders and continue to make a profit. They are judged accordingly. Unions do not exist that reason. Unions exist to advance the interests of the people they represent.

I very much doubt that, apart from perhaps the odd member of the AMA, anyone on the government's side of the benches has ever been a member of a union. Had they been in a union, actually been involved in a union and understood what unions do, they would not be pursuing this bill. What they would understand is that there are many, many people who work in this country who do not know their rights. There are many people who work in this country who rely on someone to advise them about what they are entitled to, and who then rely on someone to go in and enforce that basic entitlement. That is the role of a union.

Before I came to this place, I worked for many years representing some of the lowest paid workers in this country and their unions. There are people in Melbourne working in garages, sheds or their own rooms who are making the clothes that you will find being sold on Bourke Street or Swanston Street for $200 or $300 and they are getting paid $3 an hour for it. These people do not have sick pay and they do not get annual leave. They are required to look after their own workers' compensation. They usually do not speak English as a first language. If they get injured, they have to look after themselves. They are so-called independent contractors, even though they are doing all the work of employees and of workers.

The only reason that these people are able to enjoy something approaching a decent income and quality of life—which most of us would take for granted—is because they have had a union that has gone in there and told them what their rights are and then gone out and advocated for them. They have had a union that has gone out and fought for changes to our workplace laws. The unions do not do that for their own benefit. They do it for the benefit of others, and they do not get a direct financial benefit from it. That is where unions—and employer organisations as well, because they participate in the industrial sphere with the aim of advancing the conditions of others—are fundamentally different from profit-making companies such as your BHP or your corner shop. It is why they should be treated differently.

I think anyone who has been in a union or has been involved in a union would condemn any union official who breaches that fundamental principle and who starts getting involved in union activity for their own personal benefit. The government is using that as a justification for this law, but I would say two things about that. Firstly, we have seen very clearly that the current laws work when it comes to finding those people and prosecuting them. If the current laws did not work, we would not have people now facing jail sentences. The current laws do work. Secondly, the suggestion that somehow the imposition of new penalties is somehow going to make life better for the people who these organisations are supposedly representing is just fanciful, because if this were a charity the government would be getting up and saying, 'This is red tape.' In fact, that is exactly what the government is saying when it comes to the charities regulator.

With the charities regulator, you have organisations saying, 'We would much rather have a one-stop shop so that we do not have to go to multiple places of regulation and so that everyone can be assured that we are doing the right thing.' The government says, 'No, no. We are going to take that away, because it is too much red tape.' Yet when it comes to unions, they are prepared to put the kinds of regulations and oversight on them that they would never dream of doing to businesses and that they are trying to unwind for charities. So why is the government doing it? It cannot be about better regulation or better governance. They are doing it simply because they know one fundamental fact: for many, many workers and for many people who do not have the time themselves to go out and defend their own interests, because they are just too busy making ends meet or living their own lives, they know that they have unions out there in this country that look after them.

The unions have fought for shorter working weeks in this country and have helped bring us the weekend. It is thanks to unions that we have the penalty rates in this country that mean that people who work unsociable hours get to have a decent income, in recognition of the fact that their family members and their friends might be out having a good time, catching up on the weekend, and yet the workers are stuck at work. Many people know that when they see annual leave loading on their pay slip it is not there because an employer decided, 'What a good idea, I will give it to you.' It was there because it was fought for.

That is why the government is introducing this legislation. It is to tie up workers and their unions in red tape so that they do not have time to go and advance the interests of the people that they are looking after. It is a transparent piece of legislation. The day that the government comes in and says, 'Yes, we are willing to make every private company and every public company subject to the same level of scrutiny, disclosure and democracy as a trade union,' is when I will start taking them seriously that they are interested in levelling the playing field. But they are not interested in that. This is just the wind-up for the attack on people's rights at work. We, on behalf of the Greens, will be having none of that. If someone breaches the law and if someone breaches fundamental principles and starts getting involved in a union for their own personal financial benefit, they deserve to have the book thrown at them. What we are seeing every day is that they will have the book thrown at them. There is no need for this legislation.

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