Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

Labor welcomes this amendment by the government. As I indicated in my earlier remarks, we have been concerned to ensure that the workforce of a business that is subject to divestiture is not unfairly impacted by the operation of this bill. In particular, we are concerned to ensure that entitlements that are contained in non-registered agreements, essentially agreements between management and the workers, are protected. The reasons for this were explained by the Electrical Trades Union of Australia in their evidence to the Senate Economics Legislation Committee during our inquiry into this bill. They explained that a divestiture order applied to an ageing generator that was scheduled to close would put at risk all of the good work that may have been done in planning to minimise the impacts of closure and disruption to the community. Another union went on to explain how this was particularly important in relation to Liddell, a power station in my home state of New South Wales. The committee received advice from the CFMEU that there exists:

… the commitment made by AGL Energy Ltd to "no forced retrenchments" with respect to the retirement of the Liddell power station. This means the company will, inter alia, rely on employee retirements, voluntary redundancies, redeployment to the nearby Bayswater power station and redeployment to other activities at the Liddell site.

In our earlier amendment, Labor sought to ensure that agreements like this were protected. This amendment now proposed by the government will allow regulations to be made to ensure that, when a business disposes of a power station or another asset under a divestiture order, the entity to which the assets are disposed must comply with arrangements or undertakings that were made in relation to employees. Labor expects that the government would use this regulation-making power to protect workers at power stations like Liddell if divestiture orders were made against their owners.