Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Financial Services) Share this | Hansard source

I'm speaking in support of the amendment moved by the member for Watson to the Fair Work Laws Amendment (Proper Use of Worker Benefits) Bill 2019. Again, this bill completely highlights the government's lack of an agenda when it comes to economic management. This bill is another attempt to wedge the Labor Party and attack the rights of working Australians and their representatives.

We all know that the Australian economy is floundering. Growth is below trend. We're seeing increases in unemployment. We're seeing sluggish wage growth. We're seeing very low rates of inflation. Housing approvals have tanked. We're seeing very low rates of business investment. Consumption is sluggish in the Australian economy. And what does this government want to do? Instead of developing a plan to protect jobs and to grow the economy, all it wants to do is come in here and try and move legislation that wedges the Labor Party. But the government is too smart by half, because all this bill is about—and the Australian public should be well aware of this—is attacking and diminishing and reducing the rights of workers, their conditions at work, the people that represent them and their jobs representing them.

These laws are fundamentally unfair, and Labor will not be supporting them. They make it possible for government ministers and disgruntled employers to shut down certain elements of unions and deny working people their right to organise. Nothing like that applies to business, to the banks or to politicians. Workers should get to choose who they want to represent them, not Scott Morrison and this government. This particular piece of legislation—and other pieces of legislation that have been introduced into the parliament in recent weeks aimed at the rules of unions, their ability to form, their ability to appoint people as organisers, their ability to represent workers and their ability to effectively engage in bargaining for wages and conditions—is effectively the government attacking the average Australian union member.

Those opposite would like you to think that the average Australian union member is a building worker, but that couldn't be further from the truth. At the moment, the average Australian trade union member is female, works in a service sector and is employed in the public service. So we are talking about nurses—the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation is the largest trade union in the country at the moment. We're talking about teachers. We're talking about police officers and law enforcement officers. They are the average trade union members in this country. They are the people that this government wants to attack.

That is what this legislation does: it attacks the rights of nurses, police officers and teachers, who are the typical union members in this country at the moment. It limits their ability to organise, to bargain collectively for wages and conditions and to choose their representatives and the conditions under which they save and plan for the establishment of funds to ensure that they can be protected at work, through occupational health and safety measures, through delegates having appropriate training and through other conditions that make workplaces safer and more effective. They are the types of people that this government wants to attack through this legislation. The government is trying to wrap the notion of the building construction worker in legislation like this, when that couldn't be further from the truth. It is really attacking nurses, teachers, law enforcement officers and others, who make up the bulk of union membership in this country. The government is trying to wrap unions in red tape so that they can't do their jobs—fighting for better pay, better conditions and safer workplaces.

This bill would add to that burden by putting new restrictions around worker entitlement funds and the financial management of unions, restrictions that don't apply, by the way, to corporations and other organisations. You don't see the government applying these sorts of restrictions to the big banks, which have just been through one of the worst rip-off and scandal ridden eras in Australian history, as exposed by the royal commission. This bill will add to the burden by putting new restrictions on those funds, and that's exactly what the government wants. This is not about protecting workers; it's about using wedge issues to attack its political enemies—the union movement and the Australian Labor Party.

This bill will effectively shut down many worker-run funds while allowing employers to set up and run their own funds as alternatives. It's one set of rule for workers and another for corporations. That is exactly the modus operandi of this government, and we're not going to stand for it. We're going to call it out for what it is. If the government truly believed in corporate equivalence then this bill wouldn't exist, because the measures in the bill far exceed what applies to corporations.

We've seen many examples of employers ripping off their workers in recent years through wage theft. There's a litany of cases of mainly unorganised workers, vulnerable workers, who work in itinerant positions, on either casual or part-time bases, who haven't received their fair entitlements and haven't received the right pay, particularly for working shift work and for working on weekends. 7-Eleven, Domino's Pizza, Chatime, Michael Hill jewellers—the list goes on, and this government wants to attack the ability of unions to organise in workplaces and to establish training funds to ensure that they can train more workers to be union delegates, to identify hazards in workplaces when they exist and put in place measures to ask employers to rectify those hazards, and to ensure that people are safe at work. This is an attack on the rights of people to form those unions and to work in a safe manner in their workplaces.

If a business earns interest off worker entitlement money then they can pocket that, and this government says that's no problem; that's fine. But if a worker wants to have a say in how that money is spent then all of a sudden they get new regulations and restrictions. Worker entitlement funds are there to ensure that workers' entitlements are protected and to provide important services for workers, such as training, counselling support, suicide prevention, funding for OH&S officers and training around occupational health and safety. These are all important aspects of workplace life, particularly in the occupations that I mentioned earlier around the delivery of services—people that have to work with members of the public and have that emotional attachment to working with members of the public. I'm particularly talking about people who work in the medical services industry, particularly on the frontline in our hospitals. These are people who need counselling and suicide prevention services, who need help when they have a bad run at work. Yet this bill potentially restricts the ability of unions to raise funds to establish those important services that support workers in workplaces throughout the country. That is despicable. We've all heard of the increasing rates of mental health problems, particularly in some of those industries that I mentioned earlier around law enforcement and in the medical profession. To try and restrict the services that are available to these people, by dint of the fact that you're making the conditions for the establishment of funds to provide these services harder, is not on, in my view. It is not on in this day and age.

Even Dyson Heydon, the royal commissioner who was put in place by the former Abbott government, conceded that training funds provide a public good. This could all be put at risk by this bill. Even that royal commissioner didn't go as far as recommending these restrictions here, which are so onerous. This bill goes far beyond what was put forward by the royal commission. It is another example of this government's obsession with attacking unions, because they think that Australians believe that a union equates with a building and construction worker, when that is not the case. Really what they are doing in this bill is attacking the many workers that work in service industries and other occupations—and, indeed, building workers, who work very hard. It's all to disguise the fact that they don't have a plan to deal with a failing economy. They don't have a plan to arrest the decline in growth that's occurring in the Australian economy: the fact that 1.8 million Australians are now out of work or seeking more hours; the fact that the retail industry has been smashed by low levels of consumption expenditure; the fact that wages growth has been non-existent for many people. Many of those people that I mentioned earlier working in those difficult occupations haven't seen real increases in their incomes for a long period of time and are struggling to make ends meet and to pay the family bills. There is no assistance from the government. There is no focus in this parliament on changes and legislation that would help those people, that would boost infrastructure investment, that would provide tax cuts for people earlier than is scheduled by this government, that would look to changing some of the ridiculous forecasting scenarios that have been present in this government's forecasts, both around the budget and MYEFO. They're not interested in doing any of that, not at all. They just want to come into this place and attack the rights of unions and workers because they see an opportunity to wedge the Labor Party. That's not leadership. That's not running the country in the interests of working Australians and their families.

We maintain that this bill would give more power to some organisations, like the Registered Organisations Commission, which was thoroughly politicised by this government and discredited over its role in the AWU raid scandal. This bill would give sweeping new powers to interfere in the affairs of workers and their representatives. We maintain that allegations of serious breaches by officers of registered organisations should be dealt with by ASIC. If you believe that companies and registered organisations should be treated the same or similarly, then surely you would use the same regulator.

The bill has been amended since it was first introduced in the last parliament, but those changes are not substantive and simply don't address Labor's central concerns with this antiworker, anti-union bill. For that reason and for all the reasons I mentioned, this bill should be opposed.

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