Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution on the Fair Work Amendment (Repeal of 4 Yearly Reviews and Other Measures) Bill and, as with my earlier contribution today on the protecting vulnerable workers bill, there are some aspects of this bill that we do welcome but of course there are many that we feel are deficient. We are very keen to move some amendments in relation to penalty rates, which I'll come to a little later. Firstly, to satisfy Senator Paterson, I want to make sure I begin by talking about what is in the bill as opposed to only what is not in the bill.

The general proposition in this bill is to abolish the four-yearly review of awards that currently occurs, and Senator Paterson is correct in saying that this was agreed to by employers and unions and it is a partial response to recommendation 8.1 of the Productivity Commission's report into workplace relations. The bill also contains provisions which will allow the Fair Work Commission to overlook minor technical or procedural errors when approving an enterprise agreement where those errors were not likely to have disadvantaged employees. This is also done in response to a recommendation of that same Productivity Commission report, in this case recommendation 20.1.

The Productivity Commission report that I'm referring to was handed to the then Abbott Liberal government on 30 November 2015 and was publicly released on 21 December 2015, just before the Christmas break. In what has become quite standard practice for this government, a year and a half later there has been no government response to the Productivity Commission report. We see this pattern over and over again, not just in this portfolio but across the board. Reports are handed down to the government, they languish on someone's desk or in someone's bottom drawer for a very long period of time, and eventually the government gets around to responding to them or responding to part of them, or picking up some aspects of a report and not others. This is another example of that practice that we see here.

So, we are still in the dark and the Australian public is still in the dark about which Productivity Commission recommendations the government does or does not support. And we will remain in the dark until we get government responses to individual recommendations, which are most commonly drip fed to the public via bills such as this one. Unfortunately, even though the original proposition of removing four-yearly reviews was put to the government in a joint approach by employers and unions, it appears that this bill differs from what was put to the minister in that joint approach from employer associations and the ACTU. That is of concern to us and it's a little bit unfortunate that we see some government senators misrepresenting what was put to government by employer associations and unions. There clearly has been some change in what is now being put forward by the government compared with what was originally sought in that joint approach.

The opposition has been concerned to ensure that removing the four-yearly review in the manner proposed in this bill does not have unintended consequences. It's very important that modern awards continue to be reviewed to ensure that they meet the modern award objective and that this is able to be done through a process whereby workers and employers have equal access and equal standing. That's why, if you look at the Senate committee report which examined this bill, opposition senators called for amendments to the bill in that report. And that's why the opposition supported those amendments in the House when the House considered this bill.

The bill also gives the Fair Work Commission the power to approve an enterprise agreement which would have been genuinely agreed to but for minor technical or procedural problems if the employees covered by the agreement were not likely to have been disadvantaged by the errors. We've all become used to the government and the Productivity Commission citing an example in which an enterprise agreement might be rejected because the employer stapled additional pages to the 'notice of employee representational rights' form. We were pleased to see that this bill was amended in the House to address a number of drafting concerns that the opposition raised.

Finally, the bill also applies complaint-handling powers of the minister and the president of the Fair Work Commission to Fair Work Commission members who previously held office in the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. The bill also applies the Judicial Misbehaviour and Incapacity (Parliamentary Commissions) Act 2012 in relation to Fair Work Commission members. As Senator Paterson has acknowledged, this responds to the recommendations of the report from Justice Heerey. That report was commissioned by the government in the wake of the saga concerning former commissioner Michael Lawler.

So, there are some aspects of the bill that we support, and we are pleased that some of the amendments the opposition put forward were adopted in the House. But in the remainder of my contribution I want to talk about one of the things that is not in this bill, and that is any protection for Australians who either have lost penalty rates or stand to lose their penalty rates as a result of the Fair Work Commission's decision earlier this year. People will remember the decision of the commission to reduce penalty rates to workers in the retail and hospitality sectors for Sundays and public holidays. That is already having a devastating impact on those workers' pay packets, on the incomes of the families those workers belong to and on the very businesses that are in the process of cutting those workers' wages.

While there has already been some impact on workers who have lost their penalty rates, we can only imagine the even greater impact that cut will have on more and more workers who face these cuts in the future. We know that these cuts amount to up to $77 a week when fully implemented. It is not as if the people getting these penalty rates are high-income earners. They are not the kinds of people who will be benefiting from the government's cut to tax rates for millionaires. They are not the people who were paying the deficit levy because they were earning so much money that they could afford to chip in a little bit more. No. These are low-paid workers in retail and hospitality who depend very much on the penalty rates they receive to be able to pay their basic bills—to be able to pay their rent, their electricity, their gas and their mortgage payments. These are not wealthy people that we are talking about, yet this government has been very happy to support a pay cut for those people.

It is not really that surprising that the government has taken that position. Under this government, we know that wages across the economy are stagnant. They are growing at a lower rate than under any other government we have seen in Australian history. Ever since wages growth records were first prepared, wages have always increased at a higher rate than they are doing under the current government. But this government—in pursuit of its ideological agenda to support big business, to lift corporate profits, to lift income for the top end of town and to drive down the wages of average working people—has been happy to stand by and let those wages go down and has been happy to stand by and let these cuts to penalty rates go through.

I mentioned earlier today in my contribution on another bill that the government's own employment practices are contributing to this stagnation in wages. The government is proving incredibly unwilling to come to enterprise bargaining agreements and negotiated outcomes in terms of wage rises for their own employees. I have lost count of the number of different agencies where enterprise bargaining negotiations with this government have stalled after years of negotiation. In agency after agency, overseen by the Turnbull government, we have got workers— again, not highly paid people—whether they be in admin roles, clerical roles, professional roles or policy roles, not getting any pay rise at all, year upon year, because this government is not prepared to come to an agreement to give them a pay rise simply in line with inflation. This government continues to insist on pay rises below inflation. As a result we're seeing wages across the public sector decrease, and that is contributing to an overall decrease in wage growth across the entire economy.

In terms of penalty rates, I'm very pleased to report that, in a number of the duty electorates I represent in Queensland, we are finding examples of employers who are prepared to go against the tide, who are prepared to continue paying their employees the wages they deserve and the penalty rates they deserve. In the electorate of Capricornia in Central Queensland, over the last few weeks, I have met with the owners and workers at a number of businesses where the employer has decided to continue to pay their penalty rates. Only last week I was in Rockhampton and I was very pleased to have a steak sandwich—I think it was; I can't remember now—at the Giddy Goat, an establishment I often frequent in Rockhampton and that I'll be frequenting more.