Tammy Tyrrell (Tasmania, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Straight off the bat, I support the Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Penalty and Overtime Rates) Bill 2025 and will be voting in favour of it, but, to be honest, I wish that we in the Senate knew more about it. The government has decided not to share with us a regulatory impact statement. Normally, a regulatory impact statement would tell us the impact the government is predicting that a change to the rules will have. Those effects would include how many jobs will be impacted, how many businesses will be affected or the extent to which the changes will make the regulations more or less complex. You'd think that all these effects would be important. After all, your intentions don't guarantee your outcome. If a doctor gives you a prescription that makes things worse, you don't give them a pass mark for giving it a red-hot crack. You change doctors, because, when you're playing with live ammunition, what matters isn't your intentions but your impact.

What's the impact of this bill? I would love to be able to tell you, but the truth is that I don't know. Nobody here knows. The government hasn't shared with us a regulatory impact statement that would tell us the impact of this bill, or at least its best guess. There are only two reasons why Labor would decide not to share a regulatory impact statement: one, they don't have one, and, two, they have one and they don't want anyone to see it. If they don't have one, why not? Why wouldn't they make one? Do they think one is unnecessary?

Let me tell you; there are millions of workers who wouldn't mind a bit of a clue. Retail workers, who have an active application and who have bargained with their union and with their employers to negotiate an increased base hourly rate in exchange for lower overtime and penalty rates, will find themselves back at the negotiating table. Even if workers and employers support it, Labor doesn't support it.

There are millions of businesses who would like to know what this means for them, or there are millions who—let's be honest—are too busy actually doing their jobs to be paying attention to a Tuesday afternoon Senate debate. They might not be giving this bill much thought right now. They might not even know it exists. But, when it comes into effect, they'll be expected to comply with it. What's the impact of compliance going to be? How many more minutes a day, hours a week and days a year are they going to have to spend on this?

Maybe Labor do have a regulatory impact statement and they just don't want anyone to see what it says. Then you'd be forgiven for wondering why that might be, right? What could it say that would have Labor spooked? If the statement's so dire that making it public would be detrimental to the government, then you have to wonder what's so scary about the system-wide changes they are making. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the call for a regulatory impact statement would be a bit of a spoiler tactic—some cheap political move to try and get a bill delayed, derailed and left to wither and die on the vine. But that's not what I think. I'm arguing for one not because it's a condition for my support but because it should be non-negotiable when making changes to a hugely complex system like industrial relations.

This bill has a statement of compatibility with human rights, like every other bill we consider in this place does. That's a rule set by the Legislation Act 2003. Every bill and every regulation needs a bit of paper at the start to state how it complies with our human rights obligations, because the rights of all are foundational, just like oversight. It staggers me that we don't have an equivalent rule here for regulatory impact statements. You'd think that changes impacting the ability of millions of families to pay the bills would merit the time of saying: 'Hey, let's take a minute to model how many people this is going to affect. Let's model who's better off, who's worse off and by how much.' I'm not saying this is a change that I'm proposing as part of this bill, by the way, but I think it's something that we, as the Senate, should support if we're serious about the way we talk about ourselves.

We consider the Senate to be a deliberative body. We're designed to take our time and to slow things down, check the details and spot the flaws. It's hard to marry up that obligation with some hand-wavy dismissal of the need for a basic transparency measure like a publicly disclosed regulatory impact statement. That's particularly the case if there's already one being produced, which often occurs. It would cost us nothing and it would be a valuable decision-making input. It would certainly be of more value than a statement of compatibility with human rights, which always has the same conclusion: the bill is compatible, it's great, no issues here. While I'm sympathetic to the calls from the coalition over the carve-out or exemption for small businesses, I think it's trying to apply a fix to a problem that is more fundamental.

The problem owes to the uncertainty that comes from not being given basic answers to basic questions like who wins, who loses, who's affected and who's not. That uncertainty matters, especially when you make changes to a really complex system like industrial relations. The opposition's solution is a carve-out for small businesses and a free pass to ignore all of the above, which doesn't address the uncertainty or the complexity. If anything, it amplifies it. We are in a world of multi-employer bargaining, where large and small employers are in the same agreement. Small businesses are covered by all sorts of regulations that impact big businesses too, and every time we add a carve-out—even a well-meaning one, where we try to make life easier for small businesses—we make small businesses more reliant on expert advice.

Small businesses who employ maybe two or three people are going to jump onto Google first to try and understand what their obligations are to stay on the right side of their workers and on the right side of the law. And when they come across advice that's written for the big end of business, do you think they're going to also get the advice that's suitable for them? Do you think every bit of generic advice is going to have additional paragraphs for businesses of different sizes—a what's in, what's out, Swiss cheese style of regulation advice? Of course not. A carve-out like that would make things more complex, not less. It would make the process of trying to figure out the new rules more difficult to follow rather than less difficult. If you're an accountant, you're probably quite happy with complexity, because that's your stock-in-trade. For small businesses trying to wrap their heads around a system that's not built for them, it's a different story altogether.

In an ideal world, we wouldn't have this job system that's built on these really complicated rules and laws and that puts all these different obligations on businesses. In an ideal world, a small business hiring its first employee would be a moment of celebration rather than a prolonged headache. This bill doesn't get us there. So why am I supporting it? Basically I want workers to get as much in their pockets as possible. I want businesses to be able to make a decent profit, to invest into expanding, hiring more and making products cheaper, better and smarter. I think those goals need to be treated like they're partners, not opponents, of each other. This bill will help with workers to some extent; it won't help much with businesses.

I'm supporting this bill because, on balance, I think the number of businesses that will be impacted by this is pretty tiny, at least in the short term. That means the number of employees impacted will also be pretty limited. It'll be a small improvement, but an improvement is an improvement, and that's nothing to sniff at. That's the best information I can find on this. It would be nice to have more concrete data—you know, the kind of data that might be included in a regulatory impact statement.