Alison Penfold (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I wish to support the intent and measures within the Commonwealth Workplace Protection Orders Bill 2025. Everyone is entitled to work in a workplace that is as safe as possible, and Commonwealth public servants can be in situations where their safety can be compromised. This bill provides additional legal protections for Commonwealth workers and workplaces, including a residence, and will deter acts of threatening or harmful behaviours, or violence by members of the public, by establishing a Commonwealth workplace protection orders scheme. The Commonwealth workplace protection orders are modelled on state and territory apprehended and personal violence orders.

The bill implements recommendation 17 of the Services Australia Security Risk Management Review, which considered the adequacy of security measures at Services Australia service centres and related matters, though the issue is much broader. Staff in embassies, contractors on defence bases, private security guards, Australian Federal Police officers and electorate office staff all face risks in the course of their duties. We must, in this place, acknowledge the sense of duty of the members of the Public Service, the employees of all those Commonwealth departments and agencies and their contractors. I've worked with many over my career and, while we did not always agree, I know they were, and are, most earnest in their endeavours and attempts to work in the national interest.

According to the government, as of October 2023, there were more than 170,000 Commonwealth public servants, and 100,000 of those were operational staff working in places like Services Australia, the Australian tax office, passport offices, airports and the Australian Electoral Commission. I am very grateful for the hard work and diligence of the Services Australia staff in my own electorate of Lyne. I want to acknowledge their hard work and continued service to the community during and after the May flood in difficult circumstances. I am pleased that this bill provides them with greater protections and recognition of the important work they do.

I also want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of the local Australian Electoral Commission officials under the leadership of the Lyne district returning officer. The catastrophic flood struck only a couple of weeks after polling day. It had a big impact on staff. They were unable to complete the ballot count locally, to the extent that ballots were shipped to Sydney for the count to be completed. This was a stressful period for all concerned, but it was executed with the utmost professionalism, for which our democracy is so grateful.

According to the explanatory memorandum, the bill responds to significant workplace health and safety risks to Commonwealth workers and workplaces, noting that between July 2023 and June 2024 there were 1,694 serious incidents across Services Australia face-to-face service channels, and there are reports that this unsavoury, unfair and un-Australian trend is unfortunately on the rise.

Services Australia staff say that frontline workers are regularly subjected to incidents of customer aggression. The Australian Electoral Commission says the security environment for electoral workers had deteriorated in recent times. The Community and Public Sector Union says that Commonwealth workers across several agencies have reported unacceptable instances of aggression from the public in the course of their work. Safe Work Australia reports a 56 per cent increase in the number of serious workers compensation claims for assault and exposure to workplace violence in the five years to 2022. And the Australian Federal Police reports threats to Australian federal parliamentarians had increased by 42 per cent in 2023-24, and it anticipates that the number for this financial year will increase again.

The Commonwealth Workplace Protection Orders Bill will help public servants do their job and perform their duties to serve the public to the best of their ability. The orders will allow courts to impose conditions to protect workers. Courts will be able to direct a person to not attend a particular Commonwealth workplace, to not approach an affected worker and to comply with other protective conditions. The orders can apply to an entire workplace, such as a Services Australia centre or an electorate office, or they can be tailored to protect an individual worker, including outside working hours or on their way home.

To make an order, a court must be satisfied that there have been threats or violence and that there is a risk of further issues. Orders automatically cease when the grounds for them no longer exist, and breaching an order is an offence, punishable by up to two years in prison or 120 penalty units or both. These penalties are consistent with those that apply to similar schemes in the states and territories, reinforcing the seriousness of compliance.

The bill provides for applications to be made not only by the worker but also by authorised persons within agencies. This ensures that workers who have been targeted are not forced to shoulder the burden of attending court themselves. The government has indicated that the burden on state and territory courts is expected to be minimal, as the scheme mirrors existing frameworks with which courts are familiar.

The task of balancing the protection of employees at the workplace with ensuring that those entitled to benefits and services can access them is a potentially challenging one. While the bill touches on this matter, much will rest on how administrators and courts negotiate this in practice.

This bill is personal for me. I understand what it is like to be threatened in your workplace. As the CEO of the Australian Livestock Exporters Council, I was stalked, sent threatening and explicit material and abused by phone, email and online. The CEO prior to me had received death threats. Members of the public may not have agreed or even liked our industry, but neither I nor my colleague deserved to be treated disrespectfully and harassed in our own workplace. Earlier in my career, as an adviser to the federal Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, I myself received a death threat. At the time, I was the minister's fisheries adviser, and we were going through some difficult effort reduction changes in a particular Commonwealth fishery. The threat received by phone call one day was very direct. Even if the person making it may have been doing so in jest, it was nonetheless, for me, a frightening experience and one that has lived with me to this day. The feeling of vulnerability, of not feeling safe to go about your duty and your responsibility, is not a feeling that I want any person, any public servant, to feel. This bill may not prevent this type of abusive behaviour, but it will at least give people recourse for action and protection beyond what currently exists—where the person is, of course, identifiable. So much of this abuse these days comes from keyboard warriors hiding behind their screens.

I wish to take this opportunity to make some more general comments about community attitudes to the work of the public service. These comments in no way condone poor behaviour or acts of violence or abuse. They are feelings that are expressed to me by a frustrated public, who often are left bewildered by their interactions with bureaucracy. There is a level of frustration in the community about the slowness of processing applications, the revolving door of referring constituents to senior staff or other agencies, the delays in decision-making, the requests for more documents and more detailed information, and the adherence to following a process rather than delivering an outcome. Electorate offices get to hear about such things on a pretty much daily basis.

I'm not sure if this reflects inadequate government resourcing, a cultural norm in the public service or something else. For instance, following the floods in May 2025, on the Mid North Coast, which is now 3½ months ago, there are some 738 farmers still waiting for their disaster relief and recovery payments to be made. There are concerns that New South Wales Treasury is going slow on the proposal for category D funding for small business and that, if this is so, this places budgetary particulars above ethical responsibilities. In this vein of the public service actually serving and servicing the public, when the Prime Minister, Premier and other ministers came to Taree in the aftermath of the May floods, I said to them that our area needed two things from government: information and presence. It needed information in the form of government and the public service listening to what the community was saying about its needs so good and quick decisions could be made. It needed presence in the form of boots, not suits; generous, easy-to-access support; and the presence of mind to break the cycle of red tape that haunts the traumatised seeking help after disaster.

My greatest frustration is that this call has largely gone unheeded. The anger that has been felt amongst the community has come from the silence, the slowness and the mountain of bureaucracy. Too many people and businesses have been denied support. They've not had enough or the right paperwork. There has not been enough for the primary producer or small-business operator, or they're living in an area bureaucrats say isn't affected enough. Then there are the farmers desperate to stabilise river and creek banks but wading through multiple state government agencies for approval, with no start or end point. Beyond the floods, there are the concerns amongst industry and the public that left-wing ideologues and activists inside and outside the bureaucracy have a disproportionate influence on determining national policy and coming up with radical ideas and imposts on issues, like the push to end the harvesting of native timber by changing the tenure of New South Wales state forest land to national park to create the so-called 'Great Koala National Park'.

There is the banning of the live sheep export trade rather than more simply, equitably, fairly and responsibly properly managing just three licensed live sheep exporters to ensure best practice animal welfare outcomes and meet the food security needs of our international partners, and there are restrictions on how farmers can use their land. I sense there is going to be some forthright debate in this place when the government brings on its new-look Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act amendments, with new environmental laws shaping the way the nation protects, repairs and manages Australia's natural environment and how people can use our natural resources for the national interest. I acknowledge that I am digressing a little from the intent of the bill, but please recognise my point and its relevancy. We need governments and bureaucracies to be at their best and remembering that their job is for the public and for the national interest.

Within my own workplaces—my offices in Taree and Wauchope, my mobile offices and the much larger field office that is the electorate of Lyne in its entirety whose length and breadth my team and I travel to meet constituents, attend events and stand up for its interests—we need and will appreciate these additional safety measures. I am very conscious of my obligations to my staff—to Jordan, John, Dave, Ellie, Cherryl and Rob. These people come to work with earnestness to help me serve the people of the Lyne electorate. Their work is so incredibly important and so very personal. They deal with people on a daily basis in person and over the phone on, at times, gut wrenchingly difficult issues. They deal with people who can often be at their lowest, frustrated by bureaucracy and needing their help—my help—to unscramble it and to get justice and fairness. They want a fair go and a fair hearing. I am astounded by the generosity of spirit and the respect shown by my constituents to my staff, even by those in very difficult situations, but we must be prepared for the eventuality of it all being too much for someone.

I care about my staff safety and their wellbeing and that they can work free from harassment and threat and have the resources they need to get to safety and get the response they need from the police or other emergency personnel. I am frustrated that satellite offices of MPs do not get the same level of security resourcing as Commonwealth funded offices. It is a matter that I will continue to raise with the Special Minister of State.

The coalition supports this bill. It is a sensible proposal that has been carefully scrutinised and will deliver upon the intent. But, again, while this place will do its best for the public service, it in turn must always service the public to the best of its ability.

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