Facts debunk IR ‘scare campaign’, Watt says

New data shows just one multi-employer bargaining authorisation has been granted in the mining industry.

Senator Murray Watt at the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee Senate Estimates at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

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Workplace Relations Minister Murray Watt has hit back at ­employer attacks on Labor’s multi-employer bargaining laws, releasing data showing just one authorisation has been granted in the mining industry.

Declaring the facts did not back up the business “scare campaign”, Senator Watt said there had been 13 single-interest multi-employer bargaining authorisations granted by the Fair Work Commission since June last year, and only two related to matters that could not have been included in the previous single-interest multi-employer bargaining system.

“The sky is not falling in, for all the claims being made,” he said.

Senator Watt’s strong defence of the laws came as CFMEU ­national secretary Zach Smith ­accused the commission of delaying the approval of hundreds of ­enterprise agreements by up to three months.

Mr Smith called on Senator Watt to intervene to end the “farce” and urge commission president Adam Hatcher to stop the tribunal taking what he claimed was an overly-bureaucratic approach to approvals.

Ahead of a Senate estimates hearing on workplace relations on Wednesday, Senator Watt said only one multi-employer bargaining process had been authorised to start in the mining industry and that involved a very limited set of supervisory staff.

He said not one multi-­employer bargaining process had been authorised to begin covering mining production workers. Of the remaining 12 authorisations, one resulted in an agreement in the heating/airconditioning ­industry, while the rest were in the education, health and welfare, early childhood and creative ­industries sectors.

“The facts don’t back up the ongoing scare campaigns by parts of the mining industry and the ­Coalition about the impact of multi-employer bargaining,” he said. “The very same people said our workplace laws would ‘close down Australia’, which is ­patently wrong.”

CFMEU ­national secretary Zach Smith. Picture: NewsWire/Nadir Kinani

Ahead of the commission giving evidence in Senate estimates on Wednesday, Mr Smith claimed the approval of proposed enterprise agreements struck between employers and the CFMEU’s construction division were being ­delayed by months.

“We have many agreements that are taking over three months to get approved,” he said. “That’s three months that workers are waiting on the protections that the EBA gives them, waiting on wage increases in some instances and the process has become a farce.

“It’s become a farce in holding up agreements that have been lawfully made, agreements that in the normal operating processes of the commission would have been ­approved within weeks”

Unions have signed up more than 600 companies to a CFMEU 21 per cent pay deal in Victoria, but claim national employers are using the fact that the construction division was placed into administration to try to ban “egregious” pro-union clauses from agreements. Mr Smith said the commission was even taking issue with syntax and grammatical errors in applications.

“It’s overzealous, over-the-top response is punishing construction workers,” he said. “Murray Watt needs to say how he’s going to make good on his commitment that workers’ wages, conditions and protections at work would not go backwards as a result of administration.” He said he believed the commission’s scrutiny was an over-­reaction to media reporting about the union.