Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you for that correction. That union's construction division will make millions of dollars in civil penalties and legal expenses in coming years. It is no wonder the CFMMEU's Victorian secretary, John Setka, said he was impressed by Tony Burke's move to scrap the ABCC and the building code. The Ernst & Young report from April this year was very clear that if the ABCC is abolished it could lead to a total economic loss of around $47.5 billion by 2030. This is all deeply concerning.

The overwhelming number of issues in Labor's bill relate to bargaining, particularly the provisions relating to multi-employer bargaining. Labor's bill explores the single-interest stream by allowing the Fair Work Commission to authorise workers with common interest to bargain together where it is in the public interest for them to do so. Business groups are united in their condemnation of the common interest provision being so broad as to be ridiculous—and they are right. This is a gift for the union movement around Australia. This will allow unions to apply to compel employers to bargain together if the move has the support of the majority of employees, and this is backed by the right to strike. Being coerced into bargaining based on some vague common interest test, which could simply be a small flower retailer in the same complex as Myer, is fundamentally unfair. That is not bargaining. It is compulsion, and it is fundamentally unfair. It is coercion. It means that once an employer becomes part of a multi-employer agreement, it can no longer pursue a single-enterprise bargain.

The Labor government knows what it's doing. It is going to kill off enterprise bargaining by stealth. What does this all mean? In time, these multi-employer agreements will be the new form of centralised wage-fixing system where the wage will be fixed by a union or the commission. Awards will become less relevant because they will be replaced by these large omnibus multi-employer agreements coercing many employers into a one-size-fits-all document called an agreement. This is all justified on the basis of getting wages moving. It may well get wages moving, but it might do so in a way that adds to inflationary pressures. It also gets wages moving with no productivity trade-offs and job losses.

This bill represents a very clear and deliberate shift by the Albanese government away from bargaining at the enterprise level towards industry level, something the unions have been long campaigning for. It all comes down to what should be the fundamentals of society: governments do not create jobs; businesses and employers do. Governments put in place frameworks that business and employers are able to lever off to prosper, grow and create more jobs for Australians. This should be the essence of fair work legislation.

Industrial relations reform is without a doubt one of the most important of all the economic reforms required to make Australia more productive and competitive. Any changes to the industrial relations framework must be designed to lift both productivity and wages. This is the last thing that this bill will do. Businesses across Australia have deep reservations that the expansion of multi-employer bargaining risks jeopardising the important focus on encouraging employers and employees to reach agreements at the enterprise level. Any broader system of multi-employer bargaining must be voluntary and cannot lead to another layer of ill suited industry-wide terms and conditions. It is critical we avoid any changes that could result in increased industrial action, supply chain bottlenecks and unsustainable wage pressures, and that is what this bill does.

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