Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

We will have a look to see if there is any case law, though I cannot recall any; it has not been widely used. This is about, if we just come back a fraction, when the Fair Work Bill allows employees to take protected industrial action within, if I could call them so, the fair-but-tough rules. You must focus on the operative provision. If you look at the current provision we are amending, which is clause 426, the FWA is required to suspend protected action if action is being engaged in and it is satisfied that clause 426(1) has been met. The clause then goes through what FWA’s actions must be. But this is about third parties—those at the margin. Looking at it in the broader sense, if there is a major supplier to a major company and that supplier is disrupted, you can see that that would quite easily fall within ‘disrupt for an extended period the supply of goods’, ‘significantly reduce the person’s capacity’ or cause serious economic harm, because the second business relies on the supply of parts or what have you from the first business. If one were to go on strike or take industrial action of any particular nature, that could disrupt the flow of goods or services to the third party. It provides guidelines for Fair Work Australia to make that assessment and judgment within those parameters.

What the current provision, though, does not take into account—and that is why we are seeking to amend those three parts there—is when a third party gets a lot further away from the major supplier. It is easy to imagine a parts manufacturer supplying parts to an assembly plant. If the employees of the parts manufacturer were to take industrial action which could stop or disrupt the supply of parts to the assembly production line then you could have a third party going to Fair Work Australia, and clearly it would fall under clause 426 quite easily under the current provisions. I have no doubt about that. But if you then go to a third party at the periphery—I think they use the supply of pies to an individual pie van as an example, though I am not a fan of pies; maybe I should not say that on the record!—and say that—