Page 526 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 21 February 2018
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criterion. My fear is that this will not streamline the procurement process but instead add significant burden and red tape to businesses seeking to compete for government tenders. It will be at the detriment and to the disadvantage of small local businesses who do not necessarily have the capacity, the workforce or, dare I say, the time and money to pour into additional criteria on government procurement. For that, the territory will be all the poorer because, again, local businesses will be missing out.
The additional hoops business will be required to jump through come at a cost. Those businesses that have the capacity to deal with that in the procurement phase will obviously pass that on in the product or the service they are tendering to provide to government. That will result in a higher price being paid by the territory for its procurement processes.
I recognise that there is an acceptance on the opposite side to finally tear up the MOU. But, as I said in my opening remarks, at what cost? My fear it is that as a weighted criterion the bar will be set so high that basically only a business that has done deals with unions and entered into union EBAs will satisfy that criterion in the procurement process to get those points. The question remains still: to what level will this will be a weighted criterion? My understanding is a typical construction tender has about 20 per cent weighting on prior experience, 35 per cent for safety record, 35 per cent for price and 10 per cent for local content weighting, noting that local content is given the lowest rating of the criteria. What percentage will be given for compliance with this? Ten per cent; 15 per cent? Which criteria will it be at the expense of? And will it be an all or nothing proposition, much as the local content is? Where will the bar be set?
We have been very lucky in this country to have a very rigorous industrial relations framework for so many years. There is a minimum wage, as those on the opposite side have spoken about. There are model awards in place to protect people against being taken advantage of. Where a business chooses to breach those benchmarks, absolutely they should feel the full strength of the law. No-one in this place is arguing against that being the case. I will be clear on that: where a business chooses to circumvent an award, minimum wage or commonwealth laws in this space, it deserves to feel the full brunt of the law.
But where the issues really start to come is when the ulterior motives become evident: what this local jobs plan is about. It is not about protecting a worker on a minimum wage; it is about ensuring union influence and union memberships. The relationship between the Labor Party, the Labor members in this place and the union movement is synonymous—they are one and the same.
We have significant issues around how the four industries highlighted in the local jobs package consultation paper have been identified. It says as a starting point that all contracts, regardless of their value, for the categories of labour identified as cleaning, security, building and construction and courier services, will need to comply from day one. Very little evidence has been provided by the government to this point to highlight why those four industries specifically require this new and unprecedented level of oversight and, dare I say, union involvement. Very little in the way of a business case has been made to substantiate those claims.
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