Senator MURRAY(12.44 p.m.) —I appreciate the assistance of senators. I want to return to the remarks of the Parliamentary Secretary. It is not entirely true that Senator Margetts's amendment was anything other than materially technical because there is a question of the intention of the new act as moved.

Certainly I never intended a situation to arise where, if employers genuinely, individually, personally wished to—not forced to—continue to pay employees when they were taking limited action, they should be prevented or in any way pressured not to do so. The converse is the case. We do strongly support the intention of the act to prevent employees being paid when they are on strike. But this is not about people being on strike; this is about people doing a full day's work, the employer being prepared to accept it and the people being paid for it. That particularly applies, and quite frankly is in the interest of the country, when you are dealing with such areas as essential services. I would always personally encourage nurses, or police officers or those sorts of people to take limited action rather than to strike and withdraw their labour completely, because of the harm that can cause to the community.

So the act does pick up as a strike any performance of work which is different from how it is customarily performed. But the employer under the law is obliged, it seems, not to pay them. We had thought that there was common law protection in that area. When we dealt with the legislation, the government placed great emphasis on the rider to the definition of industrial action in section 4, which says, `An employer is not engaged in industrial action if the employee's action is agreed to by the employer.' You would think `agreed to' would mean acceptance by the employer of the work that was being performed. It is for this reason, Parliamentary Secretary, and I appreciate there is a difference of opinion between you and us, that we regard this as an interpretative matter arising out of the original intention of the act and not a new matter being introduced. That is why I say that, whilst it is material, we still consider it to be technical. If we turn to our amendment, we see that it reads:

For the purpose of this Part, industrial action does not include action by employees that is authorised, agreed to or accepted by the employer of the employees.

You need to have consideration as to what those words mean. `Authorised' has to be in some formal or identifiable manner that which has been authorised, and `agreed to' would have the same meaning. You then have to ask, `Where does "accepted by" take us with this? How does it add to the definition we put there?' We put that in deliberately in case `authorised' or `agreed to' was historically based—in other words, it was contractually based or in some way based on agreements in the past where `accepted' means `accepted at the time'. So if nurses, to give an example, take limited action and that is accepted by the employer, then our view is that the employer should, if they wish to, pay them and should not be obliged by direction from the government not to pay them.

It most affects employers where the relevant department or relevant minister may take a hard line and resist paying people who embark on some kind of limited action, such as work to rule. We have moved the amendment to try to ensure that the definition of industrial action, for the purposes of the act, does not include action which is accepted of their own volition, of their own free will, not in any standover or forced manner, by the employer of the employees. I think Senator Margetts gave a fuller motivation for these kinds of considerations, so I will not indulge the committee's time any further by motivating any more than she has with my additional remarks.