Speech - Keynote address at the Industrial Relations Society of Queensland, Brisbane

THE HON TONY BURKE MP, MINISTER FOR EMPLOYMENT AND WORKPLACE RELATIONS, MINISTER FOR THE ARTS:Thank you so much, John, and a real pleasure to be with you here on Jagera and Turrbal land, acknowledge those traditional owners, here, the people of people of Meanjin, acknowledge Elders and ancestors and any First Nations people present.

To you, John, thank you for the introduction. My office is probably still giving intros that are a bit long, but I'll talk to them. The words you read that were written by others were extremely generous, and I thank you for it.

To Faiyaz Devjee as President, to all of you, to all Commissioners in particular, state and federal, but most particularly Vice President Ingrid Asbury, first because of your seniority and because you were appointed to that role by me, I'm really glad that you're here. And in your absence, but because you're in this state I want to give a particular shout‑out to Grace Grace. Because when we talk about workplace safety, sometimes when things happen at a national level, the credit for the change goes to Australia's Minister.

I want it to be known, no one has fought harder on the changes that came into place at the start of this month on engineered stone than Grace Grace.

We have made sure as a nation that we did not repeat the mistakes that were made in the asbestos years.

With respect to the risks of silicosis and the big dangers inherent in the way in which engineered stone, for so long has been used.

The key difference between silicosis and asbestosis, being that, so often, the people who we meet who have contracted an incurable illness now are in their 30s.

I just want to give that acknowledgement, because as we look around the ministers when we meet as a Ministerial Council, Grace is the one who has really carried that through at a national level.

That is a win for workers' safety, that very much full credit belongs here in Queensland, and I want to call it out.

I want to do something that I've been wanting to have the opportunity to do. And I've decided today is it. Which is for the different pieces of legislation, they're often presented as a shopping list, some people have claimed it's 46 different measures if you do it a particular way.

There's been a lot of legislative reform that is often explained in terms of what might have been the issues that caused the biggest conflict.

What I wanted to do was to actually draw the threads together in first principles of what it is that the Government has been trying to change, and how those pieces of legislation fit together.

I want to tell the story not in terms of family domestic violence leave, Secure Jobs, Better Pay and Closing Loopholes and Protecting Worker Entitlements.

I want to tell it in terms of the first principles we've been wanting to achieve, which are secure jobs, better pay and safer workplaces. 

And to deliver those three things, in particular, I'm going to devote most of the speech to how do we get wages moving again and how has the approach of the government been critical to that.

I'm going to work through the issues in terms of what we had to do to get wages moving.

First, we had to raise the floor. Secondly, we had to modernise bargaining. Thirdly, we needed to close the loopholes. And fourthly, we needed to make sure that the changes we made, and the law, was enforced. And those issues basically explain the threads of what has often been a very messy parliamentary debate. But I'm very pleased, and it's an unusual thing in debates where the legislation has involved every measure, so many measures.

In getting those measures through the Senate, while every measure was modified in some way, every measure survived.

And so every single principle that we were wanting to effect in public policy has now made its way into law.

Some of those things did not require legislation, and when I talk about lifting the floor, some of it's legislative, some of it's not.

The first part of lifting the floor was to change the posture of the Government when we would engage with the Commission.

The posture for the previous government, during the period where low wage growth was a deliberate design feature of how they operated, was to say, "It's all up to the Commission, and we won't ask them to do much at all. We'll just provide them with a bit of economic evidence, and it's over to them."

The Prime Minister, during the election campaign, when he was Leader of the Opposition was asked the question, as the new inflation spike started, and we all need to remember with inflation, the highest quarterly figure we've had during inflation was the one which was the final quarter of the previous government; that was when inflation peaked and since that point has been moderated.

Anthony Albanese, as he then was, was asked, "Would you support a pay rise for the lowest‑paid workers that kept pace with inflation?" And he answered with one word, "Absolutely."

We were told immediately, and let's not pretend it was just the Liberal Party, the entire media machine went into what a disaster this would be.

And into arguments claiming wage-price spiral, notwithstanding that the subsequent results were that inflation moderated and wages rose in tandem, was what we subsequently saw.

But that then meant that we went to the Fair Work Commission for the Annual Wage Review, on each occasion arguing that we did not want workers to go backwards, and we didn't want the lowest‑paid workers to go backwards.

That means that in the course of just over two years, the minimum wage is now, on a full-time basis, gone up by $143 a week.

Those changes work their way through the entirety of the award system in different ways.

But remember, not only is the minimum wage relevant as a reference point for our lowest‑paid workers, it's also the rate of pay that someone gets on paid parental leave.

So that rate has a very real difference to a large number of workers as it makes its way through.

We also said that we would turn up and argue for a pay rise for aged care workers. This was significant.

In the Annual Wage Review, you're setting wages across the entire economy, so obviously it's important in that way. But the argument of saying, "We'll just leave it to the Commission on the aged care case" always was going to prevent significant wage increases from occurring.

Because unless the Commission was told the Government would fund the increase, the Commission's hands were tied regardless of the work value evidence.

Because they couldn't create a situation where employers were being given pay rises that the Commission wasn't sure if they'd go under without a guarantee that the Government would fund the increase.

Us providing that increase has now seen some of the most significant changes in aged care, a feminised industry, as you know, some of the most significant changes in people's wages across the Australian economy.

A very simple example: a worker in aged care working in Tallebudgera. Her name's Deb. I spoke to her. Her pay increase now, $500 a fortnight.

When she explained to me her circumstances on that pay increase, I said, "Oh, did the timing matter as to when it kicked in for you?" And she said, "It kicked in at the exact moment that my mortgage fell off from fixed interest rate to the new higher variable rate, and it means I'm okay."

There are a million stories like this.

I'll tell a few as we go through. But for everybody, the impact on wages has been real.

Every one of the workers I'll refer to is still under financial pressure in different ways. But you can only imagine what the financial pressure would be across the Australian economy right now had we not changed the Government's posture on wages.

You can only imagine what sort of pressure people would be under.

Paid family and domestic violence leave is often not seen in the same context but remember this: the first principle that paid family and domestic violence leave is based on is this: no worker should ever have to choose between safety and pay. That is the principle.

It’s the reason why, for example, this is a form of leave ‑ normally you don't get leave if you're a casual.

But that would have meant that casual workers would have had to choose between safety and pay.

Normally shift allowances aren't taken into account on leave, but that would have meant that workers in this circumstance would have had to choose between safety and pay.

And that's why I include paid family and domestic violence leave in this section of the reform.

Finally, the shift that will happen across the entirety of the award system. There is a remarkable coincidence in our award system in Australia. That if an occupation historically has had a majority of people working in it who are male, the awards are higher than if a majority of people working under the award have been female. This is across the whole system.

One of the things that we did in the Secure Jobs Better Pay legislation, it was a bill, now an Act, which I think will have one of the most significant impacts, no one really noticed it in the debate.

But we didn't just make job security and gender equality objectives in the Act, we made them objectives of the award system.

That meant that every award had been made already without those objectives, and the process will go on over the coming years to reassess.

This forces the assessment of each of our awards called "modern awards" to be truly modern. And to weigh up, if gender equality is an objective, what does that mean for those awards?

These are the tectonic plates that operate underneath the entirety of what you get paid in Australia.

They don't just, as you know, impact the award system, they impact every enterprise agreement, because that's the reference point from which they operate.

The work right now that's being done in the children's services, disability support, health support, pharmacy and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workers. It's happening across those first. But the Commission will have to, because of that new objective, work its way across the whole system.

We already have the gender pay gap at the lowest it has ever been in the history of the index.

I'm looking forward seeing it find its way through to single digits and to continue going down.

This reform, which got almost no public attention, made sure that we now have a direct attack on the gender pay gap in every award throughout the Australian economy.

Our bargaining system had become broken, and it needed to be modernised, and this is the second stage.

You lift the floor generally across the entire workforce, but then we had to make sure the bargaining system was working properly again.

It's the best way to target rules directly in a way that they specifically work for an enterprise or a group of enterprises.

It's also the best way of finding outcomes that lift people that little bit further, sometimes a lot further, than where they'd otherwise be on the award.

To modernise bargaining we needed to look at three different areas.

We needed to modernise the rules for enterprise agreements.

We needed to look at arrangements for supported bargaining for the funded sector and principally feminised sector.

And we needed to have the single interest stream to be able to make sure that we could replace a race to the bottom with a situation where employers were not punished for doing the right thing.

And I'll go through each of those three.

Enterprise agreements themselves always had this one logical flaw in them. The moment you get to the end of an agreement you're effectively on a pay freeze.

And it created an incentive for some employers to say, "Well, we just don't need to bargain anymore, we've got a set of rules that already work for our business, and we've got pay rates that will now be frozen until the award catches up if we don't continue to negotiate".

Lots of employers continue to negotiate in good faith. I'm not pretending everyone played this game. But a lot decided, and particularly when the better off overall test became so difficult to navigate, decided the risk of going through and then deciding it all gets blown up anyway, combined with the opportunity that was there of an effective wage freeze, meant that bargaining had frozen for many businesses. And the number of workers being covered was starting to fall.

Since those changes there are now 400,000 additional workers covered by enterprise agreements than there were when we started this project, there will continue to be significantly more.

One of the changes was that where an agreement had been in place within the last five years, it expired within the last five years, a request for negotiations to commence would commence bargaining automatically. It would just start again with those companies. That was combined with the concept that if you had bargaining become intractable and it just wasn't getting anywhere, instead of there being a situation where that just froze everybody's wages, it was instead the circumstance where after a while one party or the other could say, "It's intractable, we want to go to arbitration".

There'd be many situations where neither the employer nor those negotiating on behalf of the workers wanted to go to arbitration, but the fact that it was there would force agreements where otherwise they wouldn't happened.

One of those examples is at Bunnings. I'm going to tell a very quick story of a worker I met at Darwin in Bunnings. His name was Sunny. We had a chat, you know, there is no summer's day in Brisbane that matches this summer's day in Darwin, and with all the humidity that goes with it as well.

We were at the front of the Bunnings, you've got that second set of cash registers where they sell tools, and I was chatting to Sunny just there. He was one of the first workers in Bunnings to take up the option of changing your roster so that your hours were banked into four days. And you then have three consecutive days off, completely voluntary if you wanted it. He was one of the people that wanted it.

I wanted to get a sense of what it meant for his life, and I said to Sunny, "So have you picked up another job, have you taken up a hobby, what have you done?" And his face just lit up, and he said to me, "No, we've got a new baby boy. I'm spending every possible minute with him and more time than I ever dreamed possible".

Would it have been able to be done were it not for the fact that we got bargaining moving? The changes that happened aren't only changes to what goes into your bank account. If the work rights are working well, then everything in life can change fundamentally.

We've supported bargaining, we're in the process now with early childhood education. The most significant change with supported bargaining is this brings the fund to the table. Where early childhood education had the exact same problem that I described with aged care. Unless the funder turns up and says, "We will fund it", we've had this terrible triangle of different pressures with early childhood education for a long time. Where the workers want to get a pay increase, the employer says, "I can't give you the pay increase unless the Government gives us more money." And the Government says, "If we provide extra funding to the providers, we can't guarantee it will go to a pay increase".

Those three principles going around in circles have seen a part of the story of the gender pay gap. Now as is happening with early childhood education, the Government gets brought to the table. And we provide a provision in the budget now to be able to bring to the table, it's still in negotiations, so it hasn't landed yet. But once that lands, we will have the guarantee that the money we provide is going to the wages. And the employers will have the guarantee that the wages they agree to pay, they know they can afford to pay.

The final area goes to the non‑funded sector, and this is the race to the bottom concept with multi‑employer bargaining that we needed to deal with.

If you're ‑ it will be in this room as well ‑ any big building that you're ever in, the air conditioning systems are completely different to the split‑system air conditioners we have at home. You'll see that the sheet metal that gets put in these big air conditioning systems, you can see in every large building.

This industry has had a long history of one workplace, negotiations happening and the employer agreeing to good rates of pay. Someone else comes in with lousy rates of pay, right back at the award, undercuts that employer. They lose their market share, everybody who thought they just had better rates of pay discovers they no longer have a job and we're back to the race to the bottom and nothing has been achieved.

We now have for sheet metal workers the first of these single interest multi‑employer agreements.

Which means that if someone comes in trying to undercut it who's the same class of business, then the workforce of that business can vote.

Would they rather be paid the same as the other businesses? I think we know which way they'll vote.

And I think we know the immediate impact that this will have.

I spoke to Josh, one of the workers at Liverpool Hospital, not too far from where I live in Sydney in Punchbowl.

Josh said this, he now earns $100 a week more because of the multi‑employer agreement. He said, "It's better not just for workers, but it's better for the bosses too. They can do the right thing by us and not get undercut".

That's a sensible way for workplace relations to operate, but it couldn't operate that way were it not for what we did on multi‑employer bargaining.

Then we also needed to make sure that we would close the loopholes, so we've lifted the floor, we get bargaining moving. But there's a series of loopholes where people have been able to sidestep the entire system: the labour hire loophole, the gig economy, fixed term contracts, and also systems where people are being expected to work during hours that they're not being paid. And I'll go through each of those four as quickly as I can.

Let me start with the labour hire loophole.

In a room like this you don't need me to explain the concept of somebody having agreed to what the rates of pay would be at a workplace. And then none of that being relevant for every new worker who wasn't part of the agreement because all new workers come through a labour hire company.

Which is a different ‑ technically a different employer, and therefore, everything that was agreed to doesn't matter.

What you might not be across is the enormity of what the pay differences have been.

Mount Pleasant Mine in New South Wales, a coal mine. I spoke to Danielle. Danielle was one of the labour hire workers. The way that mine is dealing with it is they're now just employing people directly, they're not using the labour hire company anymore.

There's legitimate uses for labour hire, it's just that cutting wages isn't one.

Danielle explained to me, the labour hire workers and the direct employees, in terms of the work they do, were completely indistinguishable.

They wore the same uniform, they had the same supervisor, they had the same breaks, they were on identical rosters.

But the difference in pay for Danielle as a labour hire worker before we closed this loophole to what she is now being about to be paid as a direct employee, $33,000 a year. $33,000 a year that, for years, people working beside her were being paid and she was not.

It is no accident, and I put this within the gender pay gap as well, that her name is Danielle.

Disproportionately, those people who were not directly employed have been disproportionately women. And those who have been directly employed have been disproportionately men. And the pay gap in some of these situations is enormous.

There are pay gaps using this sort of loophole in aviation as well; there's a series of industries where they exist. The quantum won't always be as large as that, but the injustice of doing the exact same job and being paid less is the same story as Danielle's.

The gig economy ‑ we will get the cases soon on this, but put simply, it has been a complete way of avoiding every work standard where the first question that gets asked is, "Are you an employee?" If you're a gig worker, the answer is, "No" and all your rights fall off a cliff.

Some countries in the world have tried to, therefore, turn all gig workers into employees. Usually, the gig platforms have then managed to change their algorithm, change the way of operating. And they can always change their algorithm faster than we can legislate.

What we've done is, instead of turn everyone into employees, we've changed that cliff into a ramp, and created the new concept of employee‑like.

Where we accept this is a different form of engagement to what you have as an employee, but there have to be some minimum standards.

I've run my own small business, I come from a small business family, I know what it is to run a small business. Delivering pizzas on the back of a bicycle where you've got no control over your operations is not running a small business.

It might not meet all the definitions of employment, but it is something different. I expect everybody here's got one of these apps on their phone, but we must be able to have 21st century technology without bringing in 19th century working conditions.

We do not want Australia to become a country where you have to rely on tips to make ends meet. We're only a few months away from minimum standards existing in the gig economy.

Fixed‑term contracts have created a real problem with job security. It's particularly significant for teachers. For example, where for teachers for a long time, you'll find situations where because they only get employed for a 12‑month period and another 12‑month period, then another 12‑month period, they end up in a situation where they should be ready to receive long service leave. Instead they still don't have a permanent job.

What's now happened is tens of thousands of teachers across the country have started to simply be given permanent jobs, job security.

They're on the same pay, but to know that you have a permanent job is a fundamental shift in how that's operating.

And obviously, the classic example of people being unpaid for work is why we've introduced the right to disconnect. Employers will still be able to call people if there's an extra shift, "We can't find something", that sort of thing, that will all still happen.

But the concept that you are meant to be constantly monitoring your email, the concept that you have to have your phone with you at all times, the concept that you can be punished because you didn't do something during a period that you weren't working, is over.

Can I just say, in Parliament, I got huge aggro over the right to disconnect somehow being some outrageous thing, but the moment I suggested to get some industrial relations laws through a little while ago, that the Parliament might have to sit on a Saturday ‑‑

And that people opposite me might lose their right to disconnect over the weekend, the consistency wasn't necessarily the strong point.

We then get to enforcement. I'll say something very quickly about the news of the week, I don't want to dwell on it, but there are some ideas out there about enforcement that are straight out wrong.

Let me first of all say, with the news we've been dealing with of the news of the week, the concept of having another Royal Commission, another big inquiry takes us nowhere.

The last Royal Commission, for example, you had a Commissioner who was then published as a fundraising guest for a Liberal Party fundraiser.

You had Julia Gillard sitting on the stand for days. You had Bill Shorten sitting on the stand for days. You had John Setka never being called. I am not going down the path of another Royal Commission.

The ABCC is not the right regulator, and we're not bringing back the ABCC. Everything that we're ‑‑

I respect the view from some employers where they say, "Oh, but it, you know, it made it harder for people", and seeing some merit in that. Let's not forget, every behaviour that has been reported over the last week was occurring while the ABCC was there. Every single one of them. If the approach is to push people into their corners, it will always be the outcome that the most militant forces will rise to the top. If you push people into their corners, if you don't provide avenues to bring people together, that outcome will always occur. And it's exactly what we saw.

The final thing I'd say in terms of the arguments that we should have deregistration.

Deregistration would result in this; it would result in every single person, including people who the current people running the union are now saying need to be terminated in their employment, all of them will be able to stay.

You would simply have an organisation that was able to run as effectively a red union. An unregistered union, would still, because you're able to be a bargaining agent, would still be able to run enterprise agreements. And none of the issues that people are asking to be dealt with, will be able to be dealt with.

The fact that some things sound like thumping the table and being really tough, my view is outcomes.

And the other part of the outcomes that I just want to be crystal‑clear on. While we have asked the Fair Work Ombudsman to review a series of enterprise agreements, we have no interest in concepts that would somehow cancel agreements in ways that existing workers would lose pay and conditions.

This is not their fault, and it would be an idiotic outcome to punish ordinary workers on construction sites with a cut in their pay as part of this, and that's not being looked at by the Government at all.

The things that I do want to refer to though that have made a significant difference in enforcement are investing in regulators and investing in them seriously.

You would have seen ‑ a lot of people were wanting me to do what would be described as a spill and fill of the Fair Work Commission.

Of abolishing the Fair Work Commission and restarting, re‑appointing some of the commissioners. Not re‑appointing all, everybody who raised it would have had a different Commissioner in sight, some came up a few times.

My view is, has always been, that working people need strong institutions, and it is never in the interests of working people to diminish the key institutions.

The Fair Work Commission, I have to say, that some of the challenges that I have seen with particular commissioners during my time in opposition have not recurred.

Obviously, I expect the Commission itself to be a model workplace. But I am very pleased, as we've made sure, that we have gradually rebalanced the Commission in terms of the background of the commissioners, the appointments we've made, I have to say I'm incredibly proud of, they're second to none.

No one should think that it is the mission of the Government forever to only employ people from the employee side. I want to get a balanced Commission quickly, and then I want to be appointing people from both sides of the ledger. I believe in the Commission. I do not believe in stacking the Commission.

I do believe in correcting the situation where the background of commissioners was imbalanced. We are nearly there; we are not there yet.

I really look forward to the day when every second Commissioner I'm appointing has an employer background, because that's how a decent Commission at a national level ought to run.

The Fair Work Ombudsman we've provided significant additional resources to.

The final thing on enforcement that I just want to touch on, which I think will be one of the most significant changes, and not much noise has been made about it. In terms of enforcement, it's more important than my role, and I'll say that it's more important than the role of most of the people here. That's delegates' rights.

There are a near infinite number of disputes that never make it to the Commission, that never make it into formal disputes because they're sorted out at a workplace level.

It is in the interests of every worker, it is in the interests of every business to have well trained delegates who know the rules and who will have the trust of their fellow workers.

That will say to their fellow workers, when something isn't right and when something isn't.

The concept that somehow we are better off with workers not knowing is in no one's interests.

And that change in delegates' rights is something that I know from my own background as an organiser and once as a delegate simply solves the problem of do they get trained.

They will, and secondly, solves the problem of an employer who's not used to dealing with a union delegate saying, "Well, why should I listen to you at all?" It's "because I've been trained in the rules". And that will be the interest. You don't get cooperative workplaces when nobody knows the rules.

All of this that I've described is obviously at risk, all of it. Everything that I've described, every single measure, with the exception of paid family and domestic violence leave was opposed in the Parliament by my opponents.

Every action we've taken in the Commission is the opposite action to what our opponents have called for.

Real wages are now growing, the gender pay gap is the lowest it's ever been, job security, of the 930,000 extra jobs we've created, more than half a million of them are full‑time. Very different to what job growth figures normally look like.

And for those who are worried about industrial action, industrial action was running seven times higher in the final quarter of the previous government than it's running now.

We are making sure that people are getting secure jobs, that they are getting better pay and that they have safer workplaces.

Can I, as I conclude, just offer the thanks, I can see them lined up along the back, but the workers who have served us, the workers who have looked after us today, this speech is for you. Thank you for what you're doing.

ENDS