Coalition to consider laws stopping unions demanding higher pay on big projects nearing completion

The Coalition consider laws stopping unions demanding more pay on big projects near completion.

Attorney-General Christian Porter arrives for Question Time in the House of Representatives at Parliament House in Canberra this week.

Preventing unions from demanding higher pay on large construction projects when they near completion will be among legislative changes considered as part of the Coalition’s review of the workplace system.

Attorney-General Christian Porter released on Thursday the first two discussion papers of the review, which look at options to address wage theft and extending the duration of enterprise agreements on major projects from the current four-year maximum.

The government will examine legislating maximum jail terms of five to 10 years for deliberate, systemic cases of wage theft, with potential criminal penalties confined to the “most serious types of offending”.

The second paper seeks feedback on whether greenfields agreements could be extended to cover the full-life of a project.

While the majority of new projects are finalised within four years, larger projects can take longer and require cost certainty to enable them to be completed on time and on budget.

Mr Porter has told The Australian that life-of-project agreements were a logical response to companies having to renegotiate enterprise agreements before the construction phase of a major project was completed.

Employers argue the changes, supported by the Productivity Commission, would stop unions holding big resource projects “to ransom” when an agreement expires before the end of a project.

Former ACTU president and resource sector lobbyist Martin Ferguson has complained unions were able to threaten legal industrial action to push demands for more generous rosters on the Gorgon liquefied natural gas project.

Mr Porter said the government would examine what additional safeguards could be built into the agreements to ensure workers were not disadvantaged as the result of any changes.

In practice, many large greenfields projects will extend beyond the nominal expiry date of their enterprise agreement. But where an agreement has passed its nominal expiry date, employees can take protected industrial action.

Mr Porter also moved to address union claims the proposed Ensuring Integrity legislation would allow unions to be deregistered and union offcials banned for minor civil law breaches.

He said “minor infractions” would never get to the standard of deregistration.

“The fact is with the bill at the moment that less serious (breaches) will never, ever involve deregistration,’’ he said. “They just won’t. The type of persistent unlawfulness that

you’d have to reach to successfully argue for the deregistration of either whole or a part

of an organisation....the type of unlawfulness they’re talking about is the type of unlawfulness you’re seeing at the level of the CFMEU. And indeed, they’d have to re-engage in that unlawfulness into the future.”

The ACTU welcomes a move by Christian Porter to consider increasing the penalties for wage theft but warns its merely window dressing unless the enforcement regime is addressed to ensure all working people who have had their wages stolen get low-cost access to a means of recovering their stolen wages.