“The current review of the ‘Secure Jobs Better Pay’ laws must be a catalyst for sensible changes to the fatally flawed and misguided reversion to a highly centralised workplace relations system that we had long ago wisely moved away from,'” said Innes Willox, Chief Executive of the national employer association, the Australian Industry Group.
The Australian Industry Group (Ai Group) has filed an extensive submission to the review of the amendments contained in the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Act 2022 (SJBP Act), and Part 16A of the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Act 2023 (CL Act) dealing with right of entry to assist health and safety representatives (HSRs).
The submission provides a detailed analysis of the key elements of the relevant legislative amendments. Sensible changes must be made to many elements of the regime, ushered in through the relevant amendments, in order to restore a degree of balance to the system and mitigate the obvious problems that will inevitably evolve over time.
“The pendulum has swung too far away from employers,” Mr Willox said.
“The Act’s sweeping changes were ill-conceived and rushed, they were counterproductive and will create disharmony in the workplace. Ai Group’s submission proposes amendments to improve the workability of these changes and seek to restore a degree of balance to the system to reduce the adverse effects on businesses, employees and the community.
“The timing of the Review and its rushed timetable mean that many of the difficulties that the amendments will undoubtedly cause have not yet had time to crystalise, much less be observed. It is trite to observe that the impact of major changes to our workplace relations system will take time to be fully felt and will be hard to comprehensively demonstrate in this review. It was always going to be a slow burn.
“While the timing of the review means many submissions must be seen as speculative, it doesn’t mean the Reviewers can’t reach sensible conclusions about the operation of the new laws or the merit of suggested amendments.
“Crucially, the Review must consider whether the changes have meaningfully delivered improvements to our abysmally low productivity levels. This will be the real key to sustainably delivering ‘secure jobs’ and ‘better pay’.
“Sadly, the broad view of industry is that rather than addressing our productivity problems, the re-regulation of our system introduced by the changes will, over time, only make our challenges worse.
“Many of the changes were solutions looking for a problem and didn’t address employers’ concerns over the complexity and rigidities in our system that make running a business and employing people in Australia painfully difficult. On any reasonable assessment, the changes have taken us backwards.
“The changes made by the Secure Jobs Better Pay Laws represent a missed opportunity to address the complexity of our bargaining system and improve the nation’s stagnant productivity.
“The reality is that over time, the changes will in fact make it worse, as they hand the unions and the industrial tribunal power to set terms and conditions that should instead be co-operatively negotiated at the workplace level. Under the changes employers will be tied up in a freshly laid minefield of legal technicalities.
“Over time, these changes set the scene for a dramatic increase in union influence and recentralisation of the setting of terms and conditions,” Mr Willox said.
