Australian IR minister poised for powerbroker role

JULIA Gillard will be among the most powerful industrial umpires in the nation if the Rudd Government’s sweeping industrial relations bill is adopted in full.

Key clauses in Labor’s Fair Work Bill, introduced into the House of Representatives by the Acting Prime Minister yesterday, will give Ms Gillard a potentially dramatic and decisive role in entrenched disputes.

As the Workplace Relations Minister, Ms Gillard will, in certain circumstances, be able to make binding orders on the parties in a dispute to end strike action, or enter negotiations that could sweep her into the centre of major industrial disputes.

Industrial commentators believe the powers potentially granted to the minister will be hotly debated in the Senate.

While Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has promised not to oppose the bill in the lower house, he has foreshadowed amendments after a Senate inquiry is completed into the legislation, which formed a centrepiece of Labor’s election victory last year and which Ms Gillard said the Government had a mandate to introduce.

Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Peter Anderson said the parliament would have to decide whether the minister or Fair Work Australia, the Government’s proposed umpire, would have the power under the new industrial relations act.

The Government expects to have the draft laws pass the House of Representatives by the end of next week and through the Senate early next year, for introduction in 2010.

The legislation introduced into the house yesterday gives the minister the power to make a
“declaration” terminating protected industrial action over a proposed enterprise agreement.

The conditions allowing the termination are potentially wide, with the ministerial discretion allowed if the industrial action could threaten or endanger life or the welfare of the population. A second condition in the clause allows the minister to terminate protected industrial action if it “would threaten to cause significant damage to the Australian economy’’.

Section 433 of the act allows the minister to give written directions requiring specified bargaining representatives or employees “to take or refrain from taking specified actions’’.

The legislation allows for civil action to be taken by the minister if the directions are not followed. Section 163 of the legislation also allows the minister to “declare’’ that employers may bargain together for a proposed enterprise agreement. Under the clause, the minister may take into account any relevant matter.

But the clause would likely apply to employers in the same industry with similar interests and whose employees are governed by a common regulatory regime. The legislation says public hospitals and schools could fall into the categories available for the ministerial declaration.

Ms Gillard said the bill ensured balance and fairness in workplaces.

“With the introduction today of the Fair Work Bill, Work Choices is tantalisingly close to being gone forever, along with the careers of those who tried to foist it, without a mandate and without transparency, on an unwilling Australian people,’’ she said.

“This new framework is premised on good-faith bargaining and recognises that most workplaces already bargain in good faith without any intervention,’’ she said.

Ms Gillard said Fair Work Australia could make a determination where industrial action over bargaining was having a serious impact.