Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is an important opportunity for all of us to make some remarks on the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill, which is part of the Labor government's agenda for business, apparently, and for driving the economy. This is one of their major initiatives. I have often referred to this government as the government for vested interests. I will, perhaps, trademark the term at some stage. The reason I call it the government for vested interests—it will catch on, don't worry—is that, if you are a class action law firm or a big industry super fund or a union, you go to the top of the list. Your log of claims—the grievances you may have about your legal situation—are considered very carefully by this government. If you are a punter, a consumer, you've got no chance of getting your issues examined by this government, because these organisations, who are fellow travellers with the Labor Party—some of them are financial fellow travellers, some of them are perhaps social groupies—are dominating this government's agenda.

I'm not a terribly partisan person and I have sometimes agreed with the Labor Party over the years, but I'd have to say that the budget, which is supposed to be the centrepiece of any government's overall economic strategy, was extraordinary in its lack of focus on small business and on driving private investment and growth. That is because, when you are solely focused on working through a log of claims from various bloodsuckers and rent seekers, you miss the broader economic issues that the country faces. So what the budget did not have was a set of policies to drive enterprise and small business. Instead we see a hodgepodge of random pieces of legislation which have clogged up this parliament, which have all been written down at Trades Hall or Casselden Place—or wherever all the super funds people live—or down at the class action law firms. The manifestation of being the government for vested interests is legislation for vested interests.

About 120 years ago there were these two countries called Australia and Argentina, and they were both similarly quite wealthy. Then Australia and Argentina went down very different tracks in the 20th century. In the main, Australia has been run generally quite well by people who were prepared to take a broader view and take the public interest into account when creating economic policies. Some of those policies have been bad, but I think they were genuinely created with the view of taking the public interest into account. Meanwhile, our friends in Argentina had their governments overrun by vested interests—small cabals of people and groups that put their narrow self-interest ahead of the national interest. They put themselves at the centre of the economic and policy settings of that country.

We are now in a situation where a small group of organisations—unions and super funds and class action law firms—are basically being given the keys to the city. We have heard in this chamber many times over these past weeks discussion about Mr Stephen Jones, who's the Assistant Treasurer. So far, he'd be winning the gold in terms of the government for vested interests. He's the chief featherer of nests in the government for vested interests, but Mr Dreyfus is probably not too far behind, with his efforts on class action lawyers. Of course, the silver medallist here is Mr Burke, with this hodgepodge bill that we're considering here. It's all part of trying to deliver the same big plan.

As I said, I'm not a very partisan person but, being a parliamentarian, I do think about politics from time to time, and it's clear that the Labor Party's political strategy here is to pay off all these people and get them off our backs so we don't have to do any more of this crap in the next two years of our term. Their view is that this stuff is probably not too flash for the economy—I'm sure that's their real view—but they've just got to get these people off their backs. This is the pay-off: putting the unions back in the centre of the economy, stripping away transparency from super fund members and removing regulations to require class action law firms to act in the best interests of members. That's just a pay-off.

Then, when we get to year 2, we might think about what the broader issues are that the economy is facing, and we might do a budget, which might mention small business, maybe, if we can discover what a small business is—one that hasn't been unionised and run into the ground. But, of course, when you hate small business, when it's in your DNA to do so, you tend to forget about it some days. Sometimes you can hate and forget about things; trust me. So we might see a budget that mentions small business. We might even see a budget which presents some policies designed to increase private investment, because that is actually going to be the measure of whether or not this economy is going to be able to create more jobs in the future. More jobs in the future: that is their stated objective, I'm sure.

Of course, we hear about higher wages. Now, I have to say that, of all the strange things that people get away with in this building, perhaps the greatest of them all is the unions and the Labor Party talking about their concern about wages. If they were really worried about wages, they would've listened to Mr Kennedy's address to Senate estimates, in which he said that 80 per cent of the wage increases which are projected in the budget would be eaten up by increases in compulsory super. So here we are again—another scheme to enrich and refeather the nest. It's a pretty good nest. I'll tell you what: it's a pretty flash nest. It's warm. It would get you through a Canberra winter. It's a nice nest, but the nest is eating up the wage increases. They come into the chamber and talk about their concerns about the lack of wages growth. Well, 80 per cent of the wages growth is not going to the workers; it's going off to the bloodsuckers at the super funds, who charge high fees on it. It's going into a locked box that they can't get access to. But that is a blind spot for these people.

The Labor Party has a series of blind spots, and, of course, in the budget we see this hilarious policy called the Housing Accord, which is basically that we will pay the super funds $350 million to buy people's houses—and to build people's houses perhaps. This is on top of the $150 billion that they receive each and every year in compulsory contributions, as measured by APRA. So we're going to give the super funds more public money to own the people's houses. But we're against the people using their own super to have their own houses. They are so blinded by the propaganda and the ideology that they've eaten and consumed for 30 years, which is now pushed and recirculated by the vested interests which make huge donations to their party. And, of course, they're filtered through the super funds.

This takes us back to our other favourite issue: the removal of transparency from the super funds. Mr Jones's first act as the Assistant Treasurer was to remove transparency from the super funds. As a result, by the end of this decade, $30 million will have been paid from the super funds into the unions. But Mr Jones has now made a regulation which covers that up. People are now getting their annual member statements from their super funds—I got one today—and it's now aggregated so you can't actually see how much money is going where. Under our regulation, you could see that, okay, I'm in super fund A and it has sent $3 million to this union and $5 million to this related party. Now you can't see any of that information, so it is a very good example of the distorted priorities of this government with regard to vested interests.

But, in relation to these matters, you'd have to say that the chief of the vested interests is probably the ACTU—although it could be the Cbus Super fund. They have a fellow called Mr Wayne Swan as their president, and he's also the president of the Labor party. He's been out in the media this week saying that the Cbus Super fund will be giving $500 million of their money to the Housing Accord. We have no idea how it will work, but I'm thinking that maybe he could have some inside information because he's got the dual hat thing happening. He's running the Labor Party and he's running the Cbus Super fund, so he must know how the scheme works before the rest of the market knows, which is another example of these vested interests.

But, of course, this bill is designed to smash small business. Labor hates small business. They always have. They've always hated the idea that no union officials are on these sites. This is designed to try and turn the clock back, not to try and create jobs. It's certainly not designed to create a higher wage environment. If they wanted to do that, they would have made the super system voluntary in some form. This is about ensuring that there is a role, relevance, and funding for their greatest cash cow, the unions.

When the Labor Party talk about a donation reform and a campaign finance reform, I always think that's a great thing to hear about because, of course, they always want to try and capture the political parties but leave out the key campaigners, the people with the most money, who run campaigns in this country—the unions, the super funds, and all their other fellow travellers. Personally, I think we are going in the wrong direction on this particular issue. I've long favoured the idea of a very simple, very clean, small business award with basic conditions that protect people from exploitation and whatnot. But we are going in the wrong direction. We are going for full reregulation by putting these vested interests back at the centre of negotiations.

Why would a small business that doesn't have any members of the unions, that doesn't want to have anything to do with the union, have to negotiate with the union? It's absolutely insane. To think that 10 per cent of the workforce now is covered by unions, and we're trying to turn ourselves into a nimble, agile economy, competing with the rest of the world, trying to attract marginal capital and the best minds the world has to offer, and here we are trying to bung up the economy with all these additional obligations to bring the past back into the future. It is just absolutely insane. As I say, when your frame of reference is, 'Well, we don't put small business in our budget, and therefore we don't care about it. We historically haven't liked it.' It's probably not a great surprise that here we are saying, 'Okay, we're actually now going to bring the unions back into the small business world.'

The whole idea of multi-employer bargaining, which is estimated to cost up to $23,000 for a small business, which is a significant sum for a small business—when you've only ever spent your whole life working for the Public Service, I guess you don't really have any sense of that—it would cost $130,000 for a medium business and even more for a large business. The principles apply. I've always thought the segmentation between large and small was quite weird. We want small businesses to become large businesses. There's nothing wrong with big businesses. Certainly multinational corporations that engage in base erosion and tax evasion should be brought to heel, but there is nothing wrong with big business. So the idea that we try and bung up the work for big business is the same logic you would apply to small business.

In terms of the caveats that have been negotiated here, I'm not sure how good they'll be. My starting principle would be: Why do you need to have a union with these businesses in the first place, given you already have extensive legal protections in the law? And the people that are saying they're worried about wages growth are the same people that are stealing the money through the compulsory super increases. They're taking 80 per cent of the wages increases. Every time I hear these people come in here or talk out there when they're doing their silly press conferences and talk about wages, it is absolute rubbish. This whole agenda and this government's focus is on the vested interests and making that great big cushy, feathered nest a goose or down pillow and making it as best as they can for themselves. They're only interested in their own narrow self-interest. Unless we're careful, we will be the next Argentina—a once-strong country run into the ground by dodgy and dirty vested interests.