Page 3827 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 19 October 2005
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There will be fantastic material there to hand on to students and other groups in the community that gives a true insight into the man that would like to be the leader of the ACT community, should the people be so brave as to vote for him. Mr Mulcahy, as he did yesterday, talked about increased flexibility and described the plan being put forward by the federal government as exciting, positive and progressive. The question that springs to mind is: progressive and flexible in which way? All the analysis that we have seen coming out of the proposed reforms is of progression and flexibility being down for the working people. There is flexibility for the boss and flexibility for big business—there is progression there, certainly—but, for the working people, flexibility is down.
The reforms are removing conditions that are currently there to protect the working people and improve their conditions at work. They are about removing those, legislating for minimum standards only. Yes, the people under the award system now, from what we understand of the WorkChoices booklet, can stay on their awards and keep those provisions, but there is a very clear push in the WorkChoices document to get people off awards and onto AWAs. I have heard the Prime Minster talk about that.
The minute anyone goes onto an AWA, all of those award protections will go because they are up for being traded away. That is an issue that conservatives talk around when they are singing the praises of this legislation,. They do not actually get to the detail of the WorkChoices document, which is that there will be four minimum conditions. There will be award protection for those who are currently on awards, not for people who will be joining the workplace in the future, but there will be a very strong push to get those people who are currently on awards onto AWAs. The minute they move off awards, all of those award conditions that protect them will go.
Some people say that that is not going to be the reality in the workplace, but we know that it will be. We know that when those flexibilities open up for the employers they will, in the interests of profits and in the interests of competition, push to reduce people’s conditions. It will help their profit margin to do so. It is not rocket science that an employer having the alternative of reducing labour costs by taking conditions from people or keeping labour costs where they are now will choose the cheaper option and people will be forced to make those decisions.
An interesting comment that we just heard from the shadow minister for industrial relations is that he had had briefings on this legislation spanning back some months. It is very good to know that because none of us has. I cannot think of a minister around the country that has had a briefing on the legislation, but we are to believe that the federal government has given the shadow IR minister here a special briefing spanning some months on what it intends to do under its legislation. If that is the case, I think that he has a responsibility to the community to stand up and tell us all about those briefings he had and to give us the detail that he knows because the federal government has been so secretive about this legislation.
The federal government has refused to talk about the legislation with anyone. Apart from the four ministerial council meetings that it cancelled, Minister Andrews did give a commitment at the one that he attended to have a Senate inquiry, which was quickly stomped on by the Prime Minister. He also made it very clear that this drafting exercise was the most significant the federal government had ever undertaken since coming to
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