Page 3099 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 24 September 2014
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… the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014 does not reflect the recommendations of the report Towards more productive and equitable workplaces: An evaluation of the Fair Work legislation by the Fair Work Review Panel …
Surprise, surprise! Who instigated that review and what did it say? Let me read from an article in the Australian by Judith Sloan when the results came out. It is called “Fair Work Act review: an object lesson in spin”. I just love the second paragraph:
The conclusion of the review of the Fair Work Act was utterly predictable. All good, thumbs up, satisfactory, green light, hunky-dory, tickety-boo, she’s apples, A-OK. In fact, I predicted this conclusion at the time the review was commissioned and members of the panel were identified.
And let us remember why you had to have this review. The former Labor government rushed it through without scrutiny. They rushed it through so that automatically there was a review in place, and the panel had to do the review. I bet it was a review they did not want to do, particularly when you had the workplace relations minister at the time saying, “It’s a great piece of legislation; it’s working; we do not need a review.” Who was that? Just cast your minds back. Who is leader of the ALP now? But you really do need to have a think about what that original Labor bill that became the act has in it. It includes as one of the objects—and I quote from the Judith Sloan article again:
Weirdly, one of the objects of the act is ‘ensuring that the guaranteed safety net of fair, relevant and enforceable minimum wages and conditions can no longer be undermined by the making of statutory individual employment agreements of any kind given that such arrangements can never be part of a fair workplace relations system’.
Right? Individual employment arrangements of any kind cannot be part of a fair workplace relations system. But what was in the bill? I read on:
Given that statutory individual agreements are not allowed under the provisions of the act, I guess it was always going to be a tick for this object being met.
Goodness me! We have achieved an object which does not exist. Who would have thought that? And that is the problem with this. It is the problem with what has existed. The bill in the federal parliament attempts to fix that. In fact, the bill in the federal parliament attempts to honour Labor’s election promises in 2007. The bill is actually putting forward some of the things that the Labor Party had as policy in 2007 to get themselves into office but then ignored.
Ms Berry talks about the individual flexibility arrangements. I am told that the bill that is before the parliament has a number of provisions in it that actually put additional protections in place. We have taken what Labor has and we have put additional protections in place. Indeed, an employer cannot force an employee to sign off on an IFA or make it a condition of employment. You cannot make an IFA a condition of employment. The employee must be better off overall.
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