Mr FITZGIBBON (5:30 PM) —Tomorrow hundreds of coalminers will converge on Parliament House in this national capital. They are coming here not to seek more money, not to seek better working conditions, not to seek shorter working hours, not even to seek better safety conditions in the coalmines in which they toil; they are coming here simply to seek what is legally theirs; simply to seek assistance in securing the money they are losing each time a large mining corporation goes under and, as a result, fails to produce the workers' entitlements that have accrued.

Among those miners will be former employees of the now closed Oakdale colliery. They will be representing themselves and their workmates who, between them, have lost some $6.3 million worth of accrued employee entitlements. People like Trevor Lane, who worked at Oakdale for some 25 years and, as a result of the employer's actions, has lost some $110,000. Tomorrow's rally forms just one part of the CMFEU's national campaign to recover that money and to protect, in future, the entitlements of not only coalminers but all Australian workers.

One would be entitled to think that that is a campaign which will enjoy the support of every member in this place, whether they be members of the Labor Party, the Liberal Party, the National Party or indeed, Independents. But the question is: would that be a correct assumption? Sadly, it appears the answer to that question is possibly no. We may know more by this hour tomorrow, following a meeting of the CFMEU with the Prime Minister. But how hopeful can we be that the CFMEU will get a positive response from the Prime Minister? The best way to determine the answer to that question is to look at the Prime Minister's track record on this issue. On that basis, I have to say that I am not all that hopeful.

Let us take a look at that track record, at what the Howard government did for those who lost their entitlements at Cobar, Woodlawn, Grafton, Rockhampton and now at Oakdale—there are so many examples. We will find that the Prime Minister has done a big fat nothing. He indicated during question time that he wrote a letter to the ASC. That is very helpful, but what we need here is legislation. This parliament is here to produce legislation, and I would have thought legislation to protect the accrued entitlements of Australian workers would take a great priority.

It is not as if this Prime Minister has not had plenty of opportunities to support those workers. He had the opportunity to support the private member's motion put forward by the member for Prospect during 1998—a motion I understand she has once again on the Notice Paper in an attempt to drive that legislation through the parliament. That bill would, of course, make compulsory an insurance premium to protect those accrued entitlements. He had the opportunity when the member for Fraser introduced his Employment Security Bill during 1998, but again the Prime Minister and the government failed to take up that opportunity.

Now, despite telling 2UE's Alan Jones last Friday, `We are not going to do things that are going to remove existing security for workers in relation to their basic entitlements,' he is sitting back and allowing his Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business to, if you like, abolish the black coal industry's central long service leave fund. That is one of the few mechanisms we currently have to protect workers' entitlements. In the black coal industry they have a central fund. The accrued long service leave funds go into that central fund and are portable as coalminers move from one mine to the other. So, at a time when we are calling upon the government to protect the accrued entitlements of workers, the Howard government is walking off in the other direction in its determination to introduce more insecurity for Australian workers about their hard-earned employee entitlements.

The CFMEU has a plan in place of the government's failure to take up the opposition's private members' bills. We would like to see this dealt with by legislation that covers all Australian workers, and we will continue to work towards that end, but in the meantime the CFMEU has a good plan. That plan is to place a 10c per tonne levy on coal production in this country. That would produce something like a $20 million fund which would be independently administered and would be available to workers in the coal industry who have been retrenched and have found their employer unable to meet his or her commitment to accrued entitlements.

If the bill of the member for Prospect had been picked up by the government, it would not have acted retrospectively, which is a shame. It would not have helped the Cobar miners, for example, because it was introduced after that event. However, it will help those in the future. The fund the CFMEU has in mind, though, will act retrospectively. Those at Oakdale will have the ability to apply under the fund to secure the $6.3 million they have lost. That is very appropriate. I will be supporting it, and I am sure the opposition will. I call upon members of this House of all political persuasions to show some moral conscience and get behind what I think is a very effective and worthwhile scheme.

In the limited time I have left to me, I want to say something about the GST and how it affects my small business constituency. An irrefutable fact coming out of the GST debate is that the compliance costs attached to the GST will fall disproportionately and most heavily on the small business sector. That point is unchallengeable, and no member in this place could possibly argue against it. Since the deal between the government and the Democrats that situation has been exacerbated. As the Treasurer puts it, the nightmare on main street involved in differentiating between those products that will be GST liable and those that will not will put an impossible task in the path of the small business constituency.

I think that point is very relevant to the retail committee's inquiry on the ability of the small business sector to compete with the big end of town. If that inquiry is about measuring the small business sector's ability to compete in a highly concentrated market, surely the additional compliance burden of the Democrat-government deal is relevant to that committee. Last sitting Wednesday, I went to that committee—I went about it the right way; I attempted to do it in a bipartisan manner—asking it to seek some additional resources so that the committee secretariat can look at this additional compliance cost burden and factor it into its deliberations on the small business sector's ability to compete with the big end of town.

Alas, the government members of the committee were not going to have a bar of it. They were not going to expose the government any more to the impact of the GST on small business. Out of frustration, I came into this place the next morning and moved a motion to suspend the standing orders in an attempt to bring a private member's motion forward. That motion expanded the terms of reference of that committee to allow it to investigate the additional compliance costs brought on by the Democrat-government deal. Allowing it would have been appropriate. I am quite disgusted that the government, in a veiled attempt to protect its own reputation, failed to allow it to happen.

If it is serious about looking at how the small business sector is struggling to compete with the big end of town, why would the government not allow for the expansion of those terms of reference and, therefore, allow us to take into consideration the disproportionate way in which the GST impacts upon the small business sector? It again shows that this government is long on rhetoric but very short on action when it comes to the small business sector. (Time expired)