House debates

Tuesday, 25 August 2020

Questions without Notice

COVID-19: Workplace Relations

2:58 pm

Photo of Gavin PearceGavin Pearce (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

My question is to the Attorney-General and Minister for Industrial Relations: Will the Attorney please update the House on how the Morrison government's temporary industrial relations flexibility will support businesses to get through the COVID-19 pandemic and grow jobs on the other side?

2:59 pm

Photo of Christian PorterChristian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | | Hansard source

I thank the member for his question and his interest in this area. In April this year our government made it possible for employers to give what were called JobKeeper enabling directions. The purpose of those directions was, simply put, to save jobs. They could be directions on hours, on duties or on locations of work, and they were all based on need. Linking the flexibilities to need provided the reason but also the great safeguard for those flexibilities. For instance, an employee's hours would only be able to be reduced if the employee cannot be usefully employed, for the employee's normal days or hours, because of changes linked to COVID-19.

In the six-month period that JobKeeper No. 1 was active, and is active, somewhere up to 3½ million employees would have, potentially, fallen under the subject of that new IR flexibility. Common sense tells us that those flexibilities would have saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, because the worst possible thing that you can do to a struggling business is force it to pay for staff to do work that doesn't exist—because of COVID-19. If you look at what has happened, restaurants and cafes, who would have had their turnover totally collapse and might have lost 70 per cent of their turnover, simply couldn't employ everyone for their standard hours, because the work just wasn't there.

To measure how well that system worked, one piece of evidence is the fact that disputes could be sent to the Fair Work Commission. You've had, potentially, up to 3½ million employees covered by this system. There were only 667 disputes lodged with the Fair Work Commission, an absolutely tiny number of the millions of employees who would have been covered by this system. The obvious problem we now face is, with JobKeeper No. 2 coming online, what do you do with a business that might have been down in its turnover by 70 per cent, and might be recovering and trading out of trouble, but still has a downturn that's not quite up to 30 per cent? It might have been 70 per cent down on its turnover and now it's 20 per cent down on its turnover. Having them need to also be able to direct their employees down to the number of hours of work that are actually available, to allow it to trade out of the problem, is critical.

What we're doing is saying that for another six months flexibilities will be available in a more modest form. If you're on JobKeeper, if you're now doing better but you're not quite out of the woods—so you've got 10 to 30 per cent down in your turnover—you can direct someone down in their hours of work to meet the work that is actually available, but subject to safeguards. You can't direct someone down beneath 60 per cent, and, importantly, the same fundamental safeguard exists. The test is: the employee cannot be usefully employed for the employee's normal days or hours because of changes linked to COVID-19. What is that going to mean? That is going to mean flexibilities continue and jobs will be saved. (Time expired)