Mrs CROSIO (4:36 PM) —Earlier this year I introduced into this House a private member's bill—the Employee Protection (Wage Guarantee) Bill 1998—the sole purpose of which was to protect the entitlements of workers in the event of employer insolvency by requiring employers to take out wage insurance on their employee's behalf.

While receiving strong support from my colleagues in the opposition—and not a little furtive support from my fellow members on the other side—my bill, and subsequently the issue of protecting workers' entitlements, was allowed a paltry half an hour's worth of second reading debate before it was consigned to the dustbin of history by the Minister for Workplace Relations and Small Business.

However, under pressure to be seen to be doing something about protecting workers' entitlements, the minister referred the issue to a meeting of the Labour Ministers Council in Wellington on 1 May this year. The LMC subsequently passed the buck again, requesting that its advisory board, the Departments of Labour Standing Committee, or DOLAC, consider and prepare a report on the matter.

In doing so, the minister effectively poured cold water on one of the most important social reforms still left undone by an Australian government. Who knows when DOLAC will finish its report? Who knows how long the LMC will consider the report before making its recommendations? Who knows how long it will take for the Howard government to act on those recommendations, if ever? The minister has provided none of these answers. No commitments whatsoever have been given. In fact, the Treasurer was heard to say in a radio interview during the election campaign that the problem of protecting workers' entitlements was now completely solved—it was over and done with. To me that sounds like the matter has been well and truly swept under the carpet.

Meanwhile the parliament's, the public's and the media's interest in the subject has moved on. Nobody seems very much interested in making sure that Australian workers are protected from being robbed of their legal entitlements when employer insolvency strikes. This is an issue that is too important to let die. I, for one, will not let it, and the Labor opposition certainly agrees with me. The former shadow minister for industrial relations had prepared a bill, the Employment Security Bill, for introduction into this parliament had Labor won the previous election. This bill contained the necessary reforms to make sure, once and for all, that the wage entitlements of workers would never not be paid following insolvency. It would have also compelled companies to be more accountable and legally bound them to live up to their responsibilities to their workers. The coalition took no such policy into the last election. They did not think workers' entitlements, let alone employment security, were worth bothering about.

Australian workers, many of whom at this moment could be working for an employer nearing insolvency and subsequently facing the loss of their legal entitlements, are receiving no assistance or encouragement from this government. As for those workers who have already lost their wages and long service leave and redundancy pay due to employer insolvency, they are not receiving any comfort either.

The Cobar miners, for example, so disgracefully robbed of over $10 million of their legal wage entitlements by the multinational mining giant Ashanti in January this year, are still waiting for a full settlement of their entitlements. Former miners, the ones who have not been able to leave Cobar and their families to find a job and those who have not yet qualified for welfare benefits, are subsisting on food parcels and charity from the local churches. Some will not qualify for benefits until February 1999. I wonder what sort of Christmas these families will be having.

The failure of the current legislation to protect the Cobar miners and other workers in their predicament from unscrupulous employers like Ashanti should be a stinging embarrassment to us all as legislators in this House. For that failure, blame can be levelled at both sides in this House. But only one side now has the capacity to act so that that failure is redressed.

Ashanti's reneging on its responsibilities to pay the entitlements of the Cobar miners has not only created havoc, upheaval and severe hardship in the lives of many hundreds of miners and their families; it has ripped and teared at the very heart of Cobar itself. The small businesses of Cobar—a section of the Australian community that was meant to have a champion in the form of this government—have been crippled by this whole affair. Still the government remains deaf to their cries for help and mute as to what it intends to do to stop this carnage happening again in the future.

As many members would know, similar stories to Cobar's have been found across Australia over the last 12 months—in Grafton, in Woodlawn near Goulburn, in Stawell, in Rockhampton and in Yeppoon—just as they have been found in previous years all over this country. They will be revisited again unless something is done now. Many members would have experienced businesses in their own electorates—both big and small—becoming insolvent and are aware of the hopelessness felt by employees and their families when they are not even able to access the wages, long service leave and redundancy pay, et cetera that is legally owed to them.

Two and a half years ago in my own electorate, a large telecommunications company by the name of Exicom slipped into insolvency, leaving its 680 workers not only out of a job but without $17 million in their legal entitlements. In an area like mine, already suffering from crippling levels of unemployment, this was a devastating blow. Many of these employees had been with Exicom, or the company's previous incarnation, AWA, for over 20 years. Many of them came from non-English speaking backgrounds, had poor levels of education and had little prospect of being able to find further work. For these workers, losing their entitlements was especially cruel.

Their long service leave entitlements were to have formed a nest egg for their retirement; it disappeared before their eyes like a puff of smoke. Rudely kicked out of their jobs, they would have sought comfort in the knowledge that, after serving the one company with such faithfulness for so many years, they would receive a generous redundancy payment. Again, they would receive nothing.

Insolvency can strike through no fault of an employer. But it is the responsibility of an employer to make sure that if insolvency looms, the entitlements of the employees are protected and set aside. That is the employer's duty and obligation. Exicom betrayed that responsibility. It is because of companies like Exicom and Ashanti that we need legislation from this government that not only protects workers' entitlements but also makes companies more responsible for their actions. We need legislation that makes employers more accountable.

As it stands, the only reason that the Australian Securities Commission was able to chase Ashanti and make sure it met the obligations of its junior-company, Cobar Mines Pty Ltd, is that Ashanti sent Cobar mines a `letter of comfort', which was later withdrawn. Without such a letter, the Cobar miners would have had no recourse to the law, no recourse to getting their money back and would be in an even more desperate situation than the one in which they currently find themselves.

I am now told that the miners will not receive their majority payment, rumoured at this stage to be around 85c in the dollar, until mid-December or maybe later; they are still getting all the `maybes' in Cobar. For the full payment, the miners and their representatives will have to turn their fight towards Coopers and Lybrand, the accounting giant whose role in this whole sordid affair—which included advising Ashanti on ways that it could avoid meeting its responsibilities to pay the Cobar miners their entitlements—has been equally disgraceful.

I know that the new member for Parkes has met with the miners and their representatives and has expressed support for them and their position. I know that he has also expressed to them his support for changes to the legislation that would protect workers' entitlements once and for all. I certainly welcome this news. I would welcome even more the new member for Parkes making it one of the priorities of his first term in office to join me in lobbying the Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business for the laws to be changed so that his constituents are never robbed of their entitlements again.

But on top of any change in legislation, I think we also need to see a change of attitude in the boardrooms and managerial offices of Australia with regard to insolvency, the employer-employee relationship and the status of workers. I view the trend of employers considering taking `the Cobar option'—of legally manufacturing their own insolvency as a means of shedding their employees and their responsibilities to them—as sickening as I find it un-Australian. It is a regret that any tightening of the legislation is necessary in order to combat employers who continue to view their workers as commodities to be used and abused within the grey areas of the law. Until we rectify this situation, until there are no more Cobars, companies both in and outside Australia will view this country as a place where they can `hang out their shingle' and recklessly carry out their business without responsibility and without heeding the consequences, the most serious being the destruction of many thousands of working Australian lives.

This parliament has so far failed to provide the laws necessary to protect the entitlements of the Cobar miners and other Australian workers. The onus is on the current government to see that that failure is not revisited and does not continue. So far, I have seen nothing that makes me confident that it will do anything to effectively address this problem. I hope that members on the government side will join me in doing what they can to prod their ministers and the Prime Minister into action. I, for one, don't want to let the Cobar miners and their families and community to have suffered in vain. I also do not want to see it happen in any other areas around Australia.