Employment Relations Amendment Bill

Part 2 relates to the application, savings, transitional, and consequential provisions of this bill. It is reasonably technical in nature, but it does include the insertion of new schedules—schedules 1 and 2 in this bill. Schedule 1 will ultimately become schedule 1AA in the principal Act once it is amended by this legislation. Clause 2 of schedule 1AA relates to amendments to Part 5 of the principal Act, which relates to collective bargaining. What clause 2(2) says in schedule 1AA is that the amended section 33 of the principal Act, which was amended by clause 9 of this bill, will apply “to all bargaining, whether the bargaining commenced before, on, or after the commencement of [this amendment] Act.”

This is a genuine question to the Minister: why is this legislation being applied retrospectively? For those who have forgotten, and it has been a while since we talked about clause 9 of this legislation, clause 9 refers to the duty of good faith requiring parties to conclude collective agreements unless there was genuine reason not to, which, of course, was amended to “Duty of good faith does not require collective agreements to be concluded”. So the sum total of these clauses combined is that collective bargaining that is already under way and that started before this legislation is enacted will be subject to this legislation. So employers and unions that went into collective bargaining in good faith with one another, particularly the unions that went into bargaining in good faith, now face the prospect of this legislation applying to bargaining that started under the current legislation. In other words—

Progress reported.

Report adopted.

The House adjourned at 9.56 p.m.