Mr BEVIS (9:16 PM) —This is the first piece of the government's industrial relations legislation in this parliament—that carries on their performance in the last parliament—which is designed to reduce the conditions of employment of ordinary Australian men and women in the work force. It is the first of three bills that were announced to be introduced before the end of this year as a precursor to a major second wave of industrial reform next year—no doubt predicated on the Des Moore paper released by the minister last Friday.

The bill before us today deals with unfair dismissals and is in many respects a simple piece of legislation. It has at its heart the intention of denying some hundreds of thousands of employees—in fact probably some millions of employees—who currently have access to unfair dismissal laws the right to continue to have access to unfair dismissal laws. Specifically, the bill imposes a six-month continuous service probationary period for those workers not presently covered by a probationary period through award, agreement or other legislative means, and it also ensures that employees who work for a company that employs 15 people or fewer lose their rights to unfair dismissal. That is, people working for an employer where there are 15 or fewer people, and who currently have access to unfair dismissal rights, will have their access to a remedy against harsh, unfair or unreasonable treatment removed from them by virtue of this bill.

It is worth reminding ourselves, having looked at the main purpose of the bill, what the Prime Minister had to say before he became Prime Minister. The famous words that all of us on this side of the House recall were:

No worker in Australia under the Howard industrial relations system can have his or her award conditions taken from him or her.

That was John Howard's commitment to the people of Australia in the lead-up to the 1996 election. Here we have the first piece of legislation in his second term in office and he is legislating to take away from employees presently working in small business any access whatsoever to unfair dismissal laws. You can add that to the list of broken promises, or you can put down the Prime Minister's comments on that occasion as non-core promises.

He made the other memorable comments in relation to industrial relations at about the same time in the lead-up to that election: that `under a Howard government you cannot be worse off'. Of course most Australians understood that they were worse off at the last election, which is why this government presides on the smallest percentage of voter support achieved by any government in the history of the national parliament. That is why we in opposition happen to have the highest vote of any opposition in the history of this parliament. Most Australians understood that, but they are now seeing that principle reinforced very directly by this government's decision to remove from their existing conditions any access to unfair dismissal proceedings.

It needs to be remembered that the matters that are before us now have largely been before the parliament on another occasion. Certainly the section of the bill dealing with small business has been before the parliament on two other occasions and has twice been rejected by the Senate, and I anticipate that it will suffer the same fate when it goes into the other place this time.

What we have here is an amendment not to Labor's laws of 1994 but an amendment to the government's laws. These are Peter Reith's laws. This is Peter Reith's unfair dismissal law that the government is now saying is ineffective. This is the outcome they wanted in the last parliament and which Peter Reith heralded as a great improvement on the previous Labor legislation. Now, in the second term of this government, they want to renege on the undertakings they gave the Australian people; they want to renege on the agreement they had with the Democrats; and they now want to introduce new provisions that will strip away even further the rights of Australian men and women.

It is worth putting on the record the changes that the Liberal government made to the Labor unfair dismissal laws in the last parliament, just to reinforce the point that what we are dealing with here is not a change to Labor's laws. We have at the moment the preferred model of Peter Reith—or at least it used to be until he decided he wanted to strip further rights away from workers. What has changed since our 1996 legislation is this: there has been a change in the onus of proof from the employer to the employee, that is, in unfair dismissal cases now, under the law the employee has the onus of proof placed upon him or her in relation to proving that there is unfair, harsh or unjust treatment of them in the dismissal process. That is a very significant change.

The hearings are now heard in the commission instead of the Federal Court and that reduces substantially the costs involved, yet costs may be awarded if the employee proceeds with a claim that is considered to be vexatious or frivolous. So, already in the first three items I have mentioned, you can see a very substantial shift in the way in which the legislation operates.

In the previous parliament, the government introduced an application fee of $50 as a disincentive to people that want to speculate on the off-chance they might get something. In dealing with unfair dismissal cases now, the commission is actually required to take into account not just the facts of whether or not a person has been harshly and unfairly treated but whether or not the employer is able to viably deal with any costs or award of damages in lieu of reinstatement. So you can actually have a circumstance where the commission is satisfied beyond all doubt that an employee was harshly and unfairly dealt with and the commission believes that a remedy should be imposed but, by virtue of Peter Reith's existing legislation, the worker can get no remedy because that particular enterprise may be deemed not to be viable enough to sustain the cost. And we have already seen the lengths to which some employers in this country will go to contrive business structures to avoid their obligations to workers. The waterfront dispute with Patrick's is the most obvious of those examples.

Procedural fairness in dealing with unfair dismissals is no longer a mandatory requirement, and that removed one of the major objections that I know was raised during the period 1994-96. Probationary employees are excluded from any access to the unfair dismissal legislation.

All that is not good enough for this government. They actually now want to legislate so that someone who does not have a probationary period in their employment will effectively be deemed to have a probationary period of six months—not three months, which is standard and applies elsewhere in the act—to apply in respect of any entitlement they might have to access to unfair dismissal laws.

At the moment, casual employees cannot apply under the unfair dismissal legislation unless they have been employed for a 12-month period. At the moment, the act precludes anyone on term contracts—that is, either by time or by specified task—from having any access to unfair dismissal laws. Of course, the current act did what it could to reinforce the state systems. I intend to return to some of those issues later.

But the major point to recognise at the outset is that the law which this bill proposes to amend is a vastly different law to that which applied in 1996. It is Peter Reith's law. It is already a law which restricts the rights of workers. The government has sought to pursue this on the basis that if we do not pass this bill the sky is going to fall in on the employment market, that if we do not do something very quickly to stop these people having access to unfair dismissal laws we are going to confront Armageddon in the labour market and unemployment will rise.

There are a couple of interesting comparisons which can be made. If you go back to when the original Labor legislation was introduced in April 1994—remember, this is not the current law; these are the laws before all of those changes I just described—you will find an interesting thing happened to unemployment. In the year 1993-94, unemployment was 10 per cent. In the first full year after we introduced the unfair dismissal legislation, it fell to 8.4 per cent—the biggest drop in unemployment in this country for some years.

So the year after this dreaded unfair dismissal law came in, what was the impact on the labour market? It created more jobs. If you want to argue that, if you want to actually have a look at the graphs and you want to argue the linkage, the simple fact is: if you track it since it was introduced in the federal parliament in 1994, you will find unemployment has gone down; jobs have gone up. It is a bit hard to run the argument that Peter Reith and the government do when that is the case. But it did not just go down in the following year. In 1995-96, it was maintained at that low level of 8.4 per cent. In fact, it did not start to go up until the Howard government got elected the following year. In 1996-97, unemployment actually went up. So, if you want to find a correlation with what caused unemployment to rise, it was not the introduction of unfair dismissal legislation, because in the two years that followed the introduction of unfair dismissal legislation unemployment fell quite markedly. Unemployment went up the following year when John Howard became Prime Minister.

I just quickly want to make a comment about the six-month probationary period. I do not intend to dwell on that but, given that it is in the bill, I just want to make a couple of quick observations. Six months is an arbitrary period. I think the minister would admit that it has been plucked out of the air. It is more than exists at the moment and less than Des Moore and the lunatics in the H.R. Nicholls Society are advocating, so you strike a happy medium and you think that you have come some way to being reasonable. The minister well knows, as do the members in this chamber, that when it comes to employing people you do not need six months to find out whether you have got the wrong person in the job. Any employer who needs more than three months to figure out whether they made the right decision needs to get themselves a new personnel manager or a bit of in-house training in a hurry. The six-month period is arbitrary. There is no justification for it. It is beyond the period that customarily applies in Australia for probationary periods, and we will oppose it.

Let me return to the central theme of the government's case for this bill, and that is to create jobs. The Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business has on many occasions in this parliament and in the media stated that the Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia have claimed that 50,000 jobs will be created by virtue of the passing of this legislation. I was a bit intrigued by that. I have written to COSBOA and I have asked them if they could provide me with the details of the research and survey work they did to substantiate that. My office has rung COSBOA, putting that question to them. I have not actually got a reply to my letter, but my staff did get a reply over the phone. And—wouldn't you know it?—the staff at COSBOA said, `Actually, there is no survey. There was no research done. That 50,000 figure just happens to be a figure which our president, Mr Bastian, decided to quote in public, but there is no work we have done and no evidence that we have to support it.'

So the minister has stood in this parliament in question time, and even in his second reading speech, relying for this move on figures from Rob Bastian, on behalf of COSBOA, that COSBOA publicly wiped their hands of and said, `It was really a figure Bastian picked off the top of his head.' This figure that has been plucked out of the air by Mr Bastian happens to be one of the pillars of the government's argument for introducing this legislation and further reducing the rights of Australian men and women.

If you try to actually get some empirical data on it, you find that it falls into a couple of categories. There are the surveys that ask basically open-ended questions of business, such as, `What is important to you?' Then there are the push polling survey questions, the ones that ask things like, `Do you believe it would be better for your business if unfair dismissals were removed?' Questions asked in push polling surveys of course get predictable responses. It is a bit like going to any factory and asking the workers, `Do you think you would be better off if you had a pay increase?' But questions asked in genuine surveys get a totally different response.

What does the government's own department research show? A major survey that was done, admittedly, in 1995, was released only last year by the government. That survey was the Australian workplace industrial relations survey, which was put to small business firms, workplaces with 20 or fewer employees. That is an interesting point; the legislation deals with workplaces with 15 or fewer employees. This is another figure the minister has plucked out of the air. For all other purposes, the ABS and the department itself use the figure of 20 in the definition of small business, so one of the lovely ironies of the government picking 15 is that it is not possible to make direct statistical comparisons. If the government had wanted to stick with its definition of small business it would have used the figure of 20, but it has not.

The department's own survey of small business asked people in small business to identify the reasons for not recruiting employees during the previous 12 months. The response `not recruited due to unfair dismissal legislation' equated to 0.9 per cent of respondents. Not even one per cent of respondents to the government's own small business survey regard unfair dismissal as an impediment to them engaging employees. Not surprisingly, the answer that topped the poll was that they did not have enough work to warrant putting on extra staff; that response accounted for 89.2 per cent of respondents.

If the government were genuinely concerned about generating jobs, they would stop this attack on the rights of workers and they would set about doing something to generate job growth, job training and export development. But there is none of that from this government; the work on that is a little bit demanding.

I wanted to mention one other research document that is regarded authoritatively and that looked at this question more recently.

Remember, though, that that 1995 survey that was released last year dealt with Labor's legislation. Under unfair dismissal version one—before John Howard and Peter Reith had made the changes that I described at the outset of my address—you could not muster one per cent of small business people to say it was a problem for them. These were the very rights that were conferred on workers by the former Labor government that were so decried by the then opposition—the Liberal Party—and the business community. Since then the Liberal Party has been running around trying to beat up this issue.

There is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy in this. You go around and try to make an issue of it. Maybe that is the tactic; it may be that the Minister for Workplace Relations and Small Business adopts the view that the best way to make yourself a hero and conduct a cold war with the Treasurer and look good is to create a problem if one does not exist and, then, having created the problem, set about solving it. He has done his best to get out there and light the bushfires and try to tell small business—who do not think it is an issue—that it really is an issue. How successful has he been in doing that?

The Yellow Pages conduct business surveys that members of this House would be familiar with. In May this year they asked small businesses to nominate the most important issue the government should be tackling to assist small business. Changing unfair dismissal laws managed to get a six per cent response. So the high water mark is six per cent. In their most recent survey in August this year, proprietors were again asked what the most important small business issue for government should be. Unfair dismissal laws again got a six per cent response. So after about four years of beating it up as much as they can out there, getting Rob Bastian to come out with ridiculous off the top of the head statements about 50,000 jobs being created, a massive six per cent of the small business community responded that unfair dismissals were a problem for them.

This is not a debate about the problems in the labour market. This is not about creating jobs. The minister has been asked repeatedly to identify small businesses that would benefit if he were to succeed. My fancy was rather taken by an answer he gave to a question on notice by the member for Barton in the last parliament. On 15 July this year Hansard records the minister, in replying to a question from the member for Barton about where these new jobs were going to be created, as stating:

It is not possible to specify the number of small businesses which would directly benefit from the government's proposed exemption from unfair dismissal laws for small business.

`It is not possible', he said. So although he trumpets about there being 50,000 jobs every second day in answer to a dorothy dixer in question time, he is not able to nominate a single one of them or a single employer—not one job, not one employer anywhere in Australia—when he is put to the task of actually coming up with the goods. But he continues to rely on Rob Bastian's off the top of the head figure of 50,000. That is simply no way to conduct public affairs.

What is the magnitude of this problem? Let us look at how many unfair dismissal cases are run. Many of the respondents in the Yellow Pages survey who say that unfair dismissals are a concern to them do not distinguish between state and federal unfair dismissal laws. I have had employers in my constituency complain to me about unfair dismissal laws, yet they do not employ a single person under the federal jurisdiction. So it does not matter what we do, they are not affected by it. The simple fact of life is that the majority of workers in all states except Victoria are covered by state jurisdiction. These laws do not affect the majority of workers in all states bar one. So that figure of six per cent which I quoted before dramatically overstates the problem that this parliament is confronting—if, indeed, there is a problem at all.

Let us have a look at the size of the problem. How many people have actually been applying under the government's laws for unfair dismissal? If you take the period from 31 December 1996 through until 24 July this year, you find that in all of Australia the total number of unfair dismissal cases that have been arbitrated by the Industrial Relations Commission for that entire period—nearly two years now—is 639. In nearly two years in all of Australia 639 people have had unfair dismissal cases arbitrated. That is what this is about. That is what this fight is about. Supposedly, that is what this bill is about. In nearly two years the princely number of 639 people in the entire country have had an unfair dismissal case arbitrated. But the people in the government would have us believe that if we did away with it 50,000 jobs would be created. What arrant nonsense!

If you have a look at those 639 cases that were arbitrated, you find that 142 of them were actually decided in the employer's favour. So the actual number of cases arbitrated in favour of the worker in Australia in the last two years has been 497. Under unfair dismissal laws, 497 people have been successfully able to prosecute their case before the Industrial Relations Commission. And for that this government wants to remove all the people in small business and impose a six-month probation period on everybody else. It is also worth noting that those figures I mentioned represent the ones that were arbitrated. Of course, there are a number of cases that are dismissed because the commission determines that it does not have jurisdiction. If you add them in, you discover that there were some 467 cases that were decided in favour of the boss and 497 for the employee—that is, 48 per cent of the cases, where the commission actually had to make a determination, went to the boss and 52 per cent to the employee. It is pretty close to a fifty-fifty break, isn't it? That is the way they have been decided.

This is no impediment to jobs. The truth is that this legislation will not help job security. What it will do is create a revolving door of unemployed people. This is the sack led recovery. This is the dismissal led recovery. The government is going to create meaningful, secure jobs for Australian families in the future by letting the boss sack more people more readily and easily and without any accountability. That is this government's prescription for the future. It is a disgraceful position that denies basic rights to ordinary Australians.

It is, however, a very different song to the one that the current minister used to sing when he was in opposition. When the member for Flinders was shadow minister for these matters, he would occasionally come out with a speech of reasonableness. He did not want to scare too many people then. He has managed to scare, I suppose, a few people since, but he did not want to scare too many people before they got elected. On this very subject of unfair dismissals, the member for Flinders, in a debate on industrial relations matters in May 1995 when he was shadow minister, said:

Right at the outset I say that there ought to be a proper course of appeal for people who are sacked so that they can ensure that their grievances are properly heard. Let us face it: from time to time some employers will do the wrong thing. They will get no truck from us. There ought to be in place a system to properly safeguard the interests of employees.

What a laudable point of view that was that Mr Reith held in 1995. It does not measure up too well with what he has done since. It certainly does not measure up with his legislation as it stands now and it certainly does not measure up with the bill that he has put into the parliament today which aims to make it worse. I move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"the Bill be withdrawn and redrafted to provide for:

(1) increased job security for all Australian workers;

(2) protection for workers from harsh, unfair or unreasonable dismissal,

regardless of the size of the business;

(3) ready access for all workers to an affordable and fair industrial umpire to

deal with unfair, unreasonable or harsh dismissal; and

(4) repeal of paragraph 170CC(1)(a) of the Workplace Relations Act 1996 to give

workers engaged under a contract of employment for a specified period of time

or a specified task protection from unfair, unreasonable or harsh dismissal".

This amendment, which has been circulated in my name, replaces some of the words in the bill and substitutes certain other words and I want to make mention of a couple of things related to it. One of those things is that, in the course of the last few years, there has been a marked change in the way in which work in this country is being undertaken. The days of having not only permanent jobs but also employee relationships is quickly being replaced by contract labour. Some of that is, if you like, a natural progression; much of it, though, is ideologically driven. At the moment, people on contracts are barred from any access to unfair dismissal. Employers are now engaging people on contract who, for all intents and purposes, are and should be employees. They are doing that to avoid their obligations as employers. One of those obligations is in this area, which is why the amendment I have moved seeks specifically to remove that provision.

I will cite an example. If you want a window into the future of how Liberal industrial relations policy is meant to operate in a Liberal mind, you go to Victoria where they no longer have a state jurisdiction. And if you really want to see how it works, you go to the Victorian public sector where there is also an extreme right-wing government imposing these extreme right-wing views on its own employees. Everyone who starts there now starts on a contract.

It is an interesting contract because you cannot get a job unless you sign it and, when you sign it, you actually write away your rights of access to the commission. The contract that you sign in the Liberal state of Victoria says that you can only go to the Industrial Relations Commission to settle a dispute if the boss agrees. That is a good deal for the ordinary worker! You have a situation where the Liberal government retains the right of veto to stop any employee getting access to the commission for anything.

They have also now moved to dramatically increase the number of people on contract. I will cite a couple of quick figures on Victoria's school teachers who are now on contracts. In 1995, six per cent of the teaching service were on contracts. That has now just about doubled. It is now 11½ per cent of teachers on contracts, and it will continue to grow at that rate because of the employment policies I just described.

In the area of TAFE in the state of South Australia—again with a conservative government—the percentage of fixed term temporary appointments, that is, contracts, for advanced skill lecturers is now 12 per cent. An amazing 75 per cent of lecturers are now on contract and 74 per cent of lecturer assistants are on contract.

Whether we like it or not, we are seeing a dramatic shift from employed status of workers to contract status of workers. The parliament needs to recognise that. We need to afford people on these contrived contracts the same rights and benefits that they would have had if they had been engaged properly as employees, and our amendment seeks to do that.

In looking at some of this stuff—and when you look at the evidence it really is overwhelmingly opposed to the government's proposition—I have wondered whether or not the minister and this government are serious about this. I have come to the conclusion that all this may just be a smokescreen for what is the real game next year, the second wave of legislation that is going to see the arbitration commission restructured and effectively removed as an arbitral body and replaced by a mediation discussion board, unions without the right to enter premises or union officials without the right to inspect time and wages books and the Des Moore approach to lower minimum wages—the ACCI submission before the Industrial Relations Commission that I raised in question time.

All of these things are main game. This may be the prelude or it may be the sideshow. But I want to make it absolutely clear to the government and to the people of Australia that the Labor Party will oppose it. We will oppose it at every opportunity at our disposal.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Hollis) —Is the amendment seconded?

Mr Fitzgibbon —I second the amendment and reserve my right to speak.