Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak against the Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Penalty and Overtime Rates) Bill 2025, which was introduced yesterday and is being debated today. You may ask how I've managed to get to an informed position on this legislation in 24 hours. It would be a reasonable question. Turning legislation around in 24 hours does not give members of the House an opportunity to hear from all stakeholder groups, consider the impacts and really understand the outcomes of new laws. I've done my best, but this is not the path to passing the best legislation. I'm surprised that this is not being referred to a committee. I abstained from the member for Goldstein's motion to refer this to a committee, because the committee he referred it to doesn't exist, so it was not a practical suggestion. But I would like to see greater scrutiny on these changes.

Let me be clear. I support fair pay and decent working conditions. Penalty and overtime rates are a vital part of our industrial relations framework, especially for those working unsociable hours. But, based on the limited time I've had to review this bill, I have formed the view that this bill is not the right way to protect them. This bill introduces provisions to prevent a reduction in specified penalty or overtime rates in modern awards, preventing provisions in modern awards that allow employers to roll up penalty and overtime rates into a single pay rate if it will result in a reduction in remuneration for any employee. We have one of the most complicated workplace relations systems in the world. For businesses of all sizes, but especially small businesses, which are the powerhouse of our economy, navigating our workplace relations system is a huge headache and a drag on business growth. It's not conducive to dynamic businesses.

There's been no political impetus to reform the industrial relations framework so it becomes more functional. We've seen, over the years, that ideological overhaul wins out over pragmatic iteration. In such a complex regulatory environment, the main winners are the specialists—lawyers, unions and IR professionals, who'll have a steady stream of work ahead of them. Neither businesses nor workers benefit from complexity. Efforts have been made to rationalise the number of awards in recent years, but each award is still ridiculously complicated. No doubt there are egregious breaches of award conditions, but there are also lots of examples of awards being so complicated that employers, especially small businesses, inadvertently underpay staff, need to engage specialists to determine whether they are paying correctly or both. Even large companies with significant human resources teams frequently find they've breached some unknown or complicated term of an award.

Quite aside from the complexity issue, it appears this legislation represents a troubling overreach. The Fair Work Commission, the independent expert body established precisely to adjudicate these types of matters, is currently considering a case brought by retailers seeking to vary penalty rates for managerial positions in exchange for increased pay. That process should be allowed to run its course. Instead, we see the government pre-empting the commission's decision with legislation that undermines its independence. This is not the first time we've seen this pattern. When governments legislate to override or anticipate decisions from independent institutions, it erodes trusts in those bodies and politicises what should be impartial processes.

Unions have raised concerns that this case may be the thin end of the wedge—the beginning of a broader campaign to dismantle penalty rates. But the solution is not to bypass the commission with politically motivated legislation. We must protect workers, but we also must protect the integrity of our institutions. If we continue to legislate around the commission every time we disagree with a potential outcome, industrial relations becomes even more of a political football.

On the substance of the changes, requiring that additional remuneration cannot be reduced for any employee is an unreasonably high bar. One example of an employee who may be disadvantaged could bring down a commonsense simplification to rates. This echoes the attempts to make the Better Off Overall Test a bit more practical, which ultimately couldn't do much because of these hypothetical situations. It's also not clear how these new provisions would interact with any variation to other modern award provisions that affect when the rate is triggered.

In short, there are complexities here, and they deserve to be investigated rather than having the bill rushed through the day after it's introduced to override a potential Fair Work Commission decision. In the context of an already far-too-complicated industrial relations framework, this is just more complexity. For these reasons, I cannot support the bill. I urge the government to respect the independence of the Fair Work Commission and allow it to do the job it was created to do.

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