Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Government Services and the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

Amazingly, the Albanese Labor government has managed to take a terrible bill and make it worse, with the amendments that passed the Senate last week and that the House is now determining whether it should support. This is terrible legislation that businesses and employers across Australians are saying will create extreme uncertainty for businesses, particularly small businesses, that employ casual workers. We have a cost-of-living crisis, we have high inflation, we have businesses struggling with staff shortages and rapidly increasing power costs, and Labor is making a bad situation worse.

None of the measures in this bill are designed to improve productivity, generate more jobs, drive growth or drive investment, all of which are the ingredients of a successful economy. On the contrary, these changes are part of the most radical shake-up of Australia's industrial relations system in decades. We're only starting now to see some of the consequences of the multi-employer bargaining changes that were rammed through by this government in late 2022. Those consequences will increase as the months and years roll on. It's clear from Labor's industrial relations agenda that they want to hand over every workplace, including small and family businesses, to the unions.

The small and family business enterprise business community is already under significant pressure from rapidly rising costs and will be hit hard by these new laws. The legislation will also impact the prospects for the very employees that it purports to protect. Small and medium businesses employ millions of Australians, and the government is burdening them with extra costs—costs that will result in more costs going to customers or the loss of jobs or both.

I want to speak in particular about the intractable bargaining provisions. They were the subject of a dirty deal with the Greens which actually undermines the concepts that underpin bargaining. This is one of the worst elements of this antibusiness, antigrowth legislation. The arbitration of bargaining deadlocks by the Fair Work Commission cannot reduce workers' existing conditions on a clause-by-clause basis. This reverses decades of good-faith bargaining where a package of better terms and conditions could be put on the table and traded off against operational and productivity improvements. It will simply incentivise unions to drag out a bargaining dispute for as long as possible and force matters to be arbitrated. This is very bad news for the nation and very bad news for our prospects for inflation.

When it comes to casual employment, the definition of 'casual employee' is three pages long, with 15 different factors in the new legal test. To employ a casual, a business has to go through a complicated series of tests just to work out if they're doing the right thing by law. Until the Fair Work Commission makes the determination, employers will face substantial risk when employing casuals. The irony is that this may well make hiring casual employees less attractive, impacting job creation and also adversely impacting the many Australians who embrace and prefer the flexibility of a casual job. It will be an enormously complex process with somewhere between 15 and 25 steps depending upon how you read this legislation and which lawyer you listen to. At the very least, what this will mean is many employers needing to get much more expensive legal advice.

We've also got the provisions dealing with employee-like forms of work. We know that Labor does not like self-employed people, and these provisions are simply an attack on Australians who want to be their own bosses. It's clear to everybody who wants to make that choice that Labor is refusing to support their choice.

We know, when it comes to the issue of the provisions that were rushed through in relation to the so-called right to disconnect, that employees already have legal protections against working unreasonable additional hours outside work. The extraordinary mishandling of this—the extraordinarily rushed nature of this—means that Labor rushed through legislation and voted for legislation which would impose jail penalties on employers who breach Fair Work Commission orders not to contact their employees outside of work hours—just one example of what a chaotic, disordered process this has been. In Labor's desperation to get this through, dancing to the tune of their union paymasters, they did a dodgy deal with the Greens over the right-to-disconnect laws.

Of course, this bill also dramatically increases the powers of union officials, including the right to enter a workplace without notice, despite only eight per cent of private-sector employees being union members. Australians have made their choice. This bill is a terrible bill. The amendments are terrible. The coalition opposes them.

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