Business calls for Productivity Commission review of IR laws

The PM and Treasurer face calls to ‘wrest back control of the policy agenda’ from unions, with business mounting an 11th-hour bid to refer IR reforms to a Productivity Commission review.

Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Andrew McKellar. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers face calls to “wrest back control of the policy agenda” from unions, with business mounting an eleventh-hour bid to refer Labor’s workplace shake-up to a Productivity Commission review in order to avoid an economic ­“calamity”.

Ahead of the start of this week’s Senate hearings into the government’s closing loopholes legislation, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry warned Labor’s workplace changes risked dragging down the economy “for the benefits of sectional interests.”

The government has also been warned by the nation’s miners that its workplace shake-up will hand the Transport Workers Union and major companies greater power to effectively fix ­prices across entire supply chains through a new system of minimum standards orders and collective agreements.

The Minerals Council of Australia said that by applying conditions and prices to supply chains, including the rates charged by smaller transport contractors, the legislation would effectively resurrect the scrapped Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal by pricing owner-drivers out of the market while driving up costs across the economy.

“It will have enormous ramifications for inflation since it will ­affect prices for everything transported by road – including groceries, fuel, clothing and building supplies,” the MCA said in its submission to the Senate inquiry. “These provisions give effect to the longstanding ambition of certain unions to rig prices in their ­industry, increasing their power.”

ACCI chief executive Andrew McKellar said the government’s IR changes appeared to have “no policy basis other than the impatience of the trade union movement to bring about a more government-regulated employment and wages system.”

He said “one way for cabinet to avert a possible productivity ­calamity affecting all portfolios would be to pause the bill and commission a thorough assessment of the economic impacts of the draft legislation by the Productivity Commission”.

“The time has come for the Prime Minister and the Treasurer to wrest back control of the policy agenda to a more coherent and ambitious vision for economic prosperity,” Mr McKellar writes.

The Council of Small Business Organisations Australia chief executive Luke Achterstraat backed the call for a review, saying that COSBOA called for the “IR bill modelling to be conducted properly with a complete and detailed analysis of the redtape and cost of complexity to small business.”

“A proper costing would need to include the opportunity cost of lost time spent on sales and service trying to understand a highly complex piece of legislation,” he said.

Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke said most businesses did not use the “loopholes that this bill closes” and called on those who wanted to delay the legislation to “have the courage to ­defend the loopholes”.

“Every day it is delayed is another day that gig workers have no minimum standards, agreed rates are undercut and wage theft is not considered criminal,” he said.

Business Council of Australia chief executive Bran Black. Picture: Britta Campion/The Australian

Business Council of Australia chief executive Bran Black said the government’s legislation would “add to uncertainty and the cost of living at a time when Australian families can least afford it, while undermining the job security of the very people it purports to protect”.

He called on Labor to carve out the non-controversial elements from the omnibus bill, including enhanced protections for domestic violence victims, changes to small business redundancy exemptions and tougher penalties for wage theft.

But he said the changes around the new definition for casuals, ­labour hire workers and independent contractors as well as the imposition of new standards on the gig economy represented the “most significant changes in Australian workplace relations law in decades”.

“The government’s own employment white paper states that ‘real wages growth depends on productivity growth, a dynamic and competitive labour market and effective wage setting institutions’. None of this is achievable if the bill proceeds,” Mr Black said.

ACCI also warned the benefits of the employment white paper would be eclipsed, with Mr McKellar saying that the “proposed industrial relations changes are so large and damaging to the economy that they dwarf the positive measures announced in the white paper”.

The MCA warned the government’s IR legislation would not only allow unions and major companies to rig commercial markets but effectively suspend competition law by overriding key parts of the Competition and Consumer Act.

Under the legislation, the MCA suggested a supermarket chain could agree with the TWU not to engage owner-drivers where the hourly rate provided to owner-drivers was less than $50 an hour.