Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

The government's proposal for the inquiry into this legislation is for an obscenely short inquiry, obscenely rushed, and shows that this Labor government are scared of any fair dinkum scrutiny into their industrial relations proposals. They have just released this bill today, and they are seeking to push it through the Senate inquiry process in a matter of weeks. If you look at the Senate sitting calendar, when you look at estimates and other considerations, they're only effectively allowing three or four working days for any potential hearings to take place. We know they won't of course use those days; there'd be the last few days before the committee reports. So what opportunity will Australian small businesses have to get their heads around the legislative proposals of this government? What opportunity will they have to take time out of their businesses and make a submission? What opportunity will they have to appear before an inquiry and put their views and concerns about this legislation? The answer to that is: bugger all! They will have bugger all opportunity in terms of giving fair dinkum evidence, analysis and advice to the Senate about this legislation.

The government are clearly scared of scrutiny around these reforms. They're scared of allowing proper, reasonable scrutiny. If the government's reporting date is adopted by the Senate, this will be one of the shortest, most rushed processes for industrial relations reform in living memory. This will be rushed through faster and quicker than any comparable reforms we have seen, with less scrutiny, less time for senators and, most importantly, less time for Australian businesses.

Why does this matter? Because these types of reforms will matter about whether we have an economy where businesses have more confidence or less confidence to employ Australians. We already know from the hapless budget handed down by this government earlier this week that unemployment in Australia is forecast to go up under Labor. We already know there are forecast to be more Australians losing their jobs over the next year under this government. Reforms such as this run the risk of worsening that problem. They run the risk that if they get it wrong—as it appears, from the concerns of many parts of business, they might—we will have a situation where Australian businesses, particularly small businesses, will be even more hesitant to employ more Australians. If businesses are concerned about employing Australians, that means fewer Australians in work, more Australians on unemployment benefits and fewer Australians with the opportunity to get ahead. Lord knows they need every helping hand they can get in terms of work opportunities to get ahead at present. With the inflationary environment, with this government's broken promises in relation to energy prices, with this government's threat hanging over the heads of Australian workers in terms of increased taxes in the future, Australians need all the help they can get to get secure work and have certainty but to do it in an environment where those jobs exist. They only exist if businesses and small businesses are hiring.

The government claims these reforms in this bill were largely cooked up at its jobs summit, but we know that small businesses were largely absent from the jobs summit.