To say that we have just witnessed an interesting election is somewhat of an understatement. And I've probably had one of the more unusual first few weeks in the new job. But I think if anything can train you for high-stakes multi-party negotiations with people you've only just met, it's being a Victorian industrial lawyer. So it is a great pleasure to be back here and talking to many people I have worked with in one form or another. It's an honour to be asked to speak at the start of the day's proceedings.
As a good industrial lawyer, I'm not going to tell you about the content of any of the negotiations. But I think I'm probably not breaching any confidences when I tell you that in my first meeting with Bob Katter, he said to me 'You may be the Green in Parliament, but I'm the anti-Green'. I'm pleased to report that although he now sits within arm's reach of me in the chamber, to date we have managed to keep Parliament a kinder, gentler place.
It is notable that during the election campaign, industrial relations didn't feature anywhere near as strongly as in 2007. The Your Rights at Work campaign - one of the most successful campaigns in recent political history - was absent. To the extent industrial relations appeared, it was a fear campaign against Tony Abbott. For all intents and purposes, the Fair Work Act was not criticised at all in the public sphere during the election campaign.
However, The Greens and a number of individual unions and others were arguing before and during the election campaign that the change of government in 2007 had not brought with it the change in industrial regulation many of us were hoping for. For although in some important respects the new regime of industrial law is better, it is still unfair.
I have some experience in this field, as I have referred to. I was a solicitor for 10 years, representing workers and their unions, and was a partner in the industrial & employment unit of a major national law firm. I was an accredited specialist in workplace relations law and more recently a barrister working in the field. All in all, I've practiced in this area from 1997 to 2010, a period that has spanned some significant changes and events.
It is a field I have very much enjoyed working in and it is with great pleasure that I can announce here today that I will continue my engagement with the field as The Greens' national spokesperson on Employment and Workplace Relations.
I inherit the mantle from Senator Rachel Siewert who has worked tirelessly to advance Greens principles in Parliament. Thanks to her, we have in the Fair Work Act the right for carers to request flexible work practices to look after people with people a disability. She has also kept alive the issue of the unfairly coercive laws operating in the building and construction industry, as well as the failure of successive Labor and Liberal governments to ensure their laws comply with International Labour Organisation conventions. They are truly big shoes to fill and I acknowledge the great work she has done.
As we enter a Parliament where from 1 July 2011 The Greens will have the balance of power in The Senate in our own right and where we are sharing it in the lower house, this will be a significant responsibility. We will continue to try to make the Fair Work Act fairer. Given the topic of this conference, I'll use my time today to point to some of the unfairness embodied in Labor's legislation and then to briefly outline the approach we'll be taking to matters work related.
I mentioned earlier that industrial relations only appeared briefly during the election campaign in the form of a fear campaign against Tony Abbott. This prompted Tony Abbott to announce that he would not make any changes to workplace relations legislation. There then followed a further push to show that there were nonetheless significant changes he could make without requiring legislative amendment. The ACTU announced that it had 'found 198 ways that Abbott could make changes through regulations or ministerial power'. From this we were asked to conclude that workers shouldn't vote for the Coalition.
But in fact the ACTU analysis had demonstrated potentially how weak the Fair Work Act actually is. It showed that so many aspects of protection of rights at work can be undone with the stroke of a pen. This is a first fundamental concern with the legislation: it embodies a much broader trend away from broad based guaranteed protections and towards much more contingent forms of regulation. Why didn't a Labor government enshrine basic protections for workers in legislation and thus make these protections harder to remove? And why wasn't Labor being criticised for it? One of the consequences of the composition of the current House of Representatives will hopefully be a reinforcing of the supremacy of parliament over the executive. With that should come a salutary reminder that protections that are reliant on the goodwill of a Minister have far less permanence than those enshrined in law.
A second and related area of concern is the award modernisation process. I stress that my comments in this respect are directed to the legislative framework, not the tribunal or officers who are doing as one would expect by implementing the law. Because of the legislative framework, we witnessed a largely administrative (as opposed to quasi-judicial) process of review of decades of guaranteed entitlements. The legislation enabled the Minister to provide written direction to the AIRC (later FWA) to create many new awards in a very tight timeframe and to then modify those requests along the way, sometimes on the basis of successful political lobbying engaged in outside of the tribunal. The AIRC's process was one of conferences and oral submissions, not contested evidence. New awards were created in a very short time frame. These new awards almost always contained fewer provisions than the ones previously applying, and those old awards in turn had been through a previous process of simplification under the Howard legislative regime. And these new awards all contain provisions enabling the legislative floor to be varied on an individual basis.
I mentioned the award simplification process under the Workplace Relations Act. That was colloquially referred to as 'award stripping' and was roundly criticised and challenged as far as the High Court when it was driven by Howard and Peter Reith. The award modernisation process, by contrast, was hastened along with the assistance of many. The Greens have for some time drawn attention to the loss of conditions and entitlements and the fundamental inequities in the process. I know also from my experience that some in the union movement have watched with something approaching simmering resentment at the administrative and executive acts that combined to remove their legislatively guaranteed entitlements. To rub salt into the wounds, at least under Howard and Reith workers and their unions had the capacity to lead and test evidence and make oral submissions on the basis of that evidence before their conditions were removed by the tribunal. Under Labor's framework, no such rights are enshrined, and in some cases decades of protection are removed with the tribunal not having heard any evidence from the employees who will be affected by their decision.
Thirdly, there are those many sections of the Fair Work Act that are lifted almost word for word from the Workplace Relations Act: the prohibition on employers and employees bargaining at the industry or sector level if they so choose; the restrictions on the right to organise in the form of cumbersome secret ballots; the unfair restrictions in industrial action introduced by John Howard to tilt the playing field unfairly in favour of employers; and the interference in free bargaining by prohibiting people from agreeing on matters such as right of entry or social and environmental matters that do not fall within the narrow purview of matters pertaining to the employment relationship. These have all been the subject of repeated criticism by the ILO. When they were introduced by Howard, there were howls of protest but then we watched them pass almost without comment - with a few notable exceptions - into the Fair Work Act.
In short, Fair Work is cast from the same mould as WorkChoices. Many gains made by workers and their unions over a century will be removed in the name of 'simplification' or 'modernisation'. The freedom to bargain is restricted, with complex prohibitions remaining on the level, subject matter and style of bargaining available to parties. The restrictions on internationally recognised rights to organise and take industrial action are lifted almost word for word from the old legislation. Fair Work Australia's discretion to resolve disputes remains constrained, continuing Howard's transformation of the tribunal from one that would settle disputes and their underlying causes into one who simple orders disruption cease, leaving the underlying causes of that disruption unresolved. Under both WorkChoices and Fair Work, the tribunal is being moved from umpire to police officer.
Of course, it is to be welcomed that under new arrangements AWAs are no longer in existence, but I note that there are now individual flexibility arrangements and the right to effectively vary enterprise agreements and awards in some respects, provisions which need to be watched with great interest to see how they operate in practice. The new provisions around unequal pay are a vast improvement and we will await with interest the outcome of the current applications before Fair Work Australia. And it must be said that for some employees in hard to organise industries, the situation is better under Fair Work than WorkChoices, with new provisions offering unions the capacity to seek a spot at the bargaining table. However, once at the table, such workers will find the bar set pretty low for what constitutes an acceptable deal. Whilst the uniform protections in the National Employment Standards are in principle welcome, they are a shadow of the guarantees that would have been available had, for example, existing awards been made common rule.
John Buchanan said that with WorkChoices the sky didn't fall in but the floor began to rot. Under Fair Work, instead of re-stumping the house and putting down new floorboards, Labor has simply installed steel grating: enough to stop you falling further but hardly comfortable enough to live on.
These changing patterns of labour regulation, together with significant global and local changes in the way business and labour are configured, has led us to a situation Sydney University's Workplace Research Centre has recently described as one where workers and those close to them are increasingly absorbing the risks of a globally interconnected economy and where, as the ACTU President has said, 'the wages share of national income is now at its lowest point since December 1964'.
It would be somewhat disingenuous to claim that this state of affairs is simply the result of employers getting their way. More often than not, the changes to labour market regulation and the organisation of work have had the express support of both major parties and sometimes union peak bodies as well. Indeed, we are now bearing witness to the consequences of a three-decade long bipartisan love affair with neoliberalism and deregulation.
The Fair Work Act embodies all the elements of neoliberalism. A supposed commitment to the free market of bargaining, but backed up with harsh consequences for those who don't bargain the right way and a massive government-sponsored intervention to ensure employees permanently negotiate with one hand tied behind their back.
Workers and their families and dependents are absorbing enormous amounts of risk as part of this process. This is in turn causing enormous stress. The Workplace Research Centre's research is a powerful critique of where Labor's single-dimensional approach is taking us: a society of working harder, postponing retirement, taking on more risk, having weaker safety nets and less capacity to enjoy our leisure time and families.
I commend the ACTU for commissioning the WRC research and the ACTU President for giving such strong voice to it in her National Press Club speech. The subject matter expressed reflects many of the concerns that The Greens and I have been articulating for some time about the unsustainability and unfairness of current arrangements.
As The Greens, there are some important philosophical underpinnings to our approach to industrial relations. I'll talk about them in a moment. But I want to first draw attention to another aspect of something that will benefit all participants in the field of work. Much of the discussion about industrial relations reform over the years has taken place in a largely evidence-free environment. When I was practising as an industrial lawyer, it became almost folklore that the removal of unfair dismissal laws would result in an employment boom. The so-called Centre for Independent Studies, for example, was still reporting in 2002 that 'A survey conducted ... in 1999 found that 54% of small business employers might have hired more employees over the previous 12 months had it not been for the unfair dismissal laws.' (http://www.cis.org.au/media-information/opinion-pieces/article/1356-unfair-dismissal-laws-deter-firing-and-hiring-) The results of a survey apparently asking the very broad question of whether one 'might have employed' someone instantly became near gospel, repeated ad nauseum, including in political debate.
I am concerned that the debates around 'flexibility' and so-called 'work/life balance' in particular could head down the same path. Although I have spent much of this speech talking about the downsides of a flexibility driven from above, I am also acutely aware that the situation is more complicated. Much of the move is attributable to a real desire to take back some control of our working lives. To be able to do things inside of working hours that we were previously only able to do outside of them. And reflective of the fact that many of our labours are now taking place in an increasingly interconnected world and in the realms of communication, many of us don't want to be stuck in an office if we can do the work at home or elsewhere.
But this brings with its own set of problems, from aggrieved partners and family members to a sense that it is simply impossible to escape work at all. To grapple with this new world, we'll have to start rethinking how to understand the relationship between work and non-work, between paid labour and the labour we don't get paid for. And we'll need to properly understand what is happening to people when the financialisation and risk referred to by WRC intersects with low availability of childcare, increasing health costs and congested roads.
More and sustained research is essential. A priority should be the establishment of research at a national level that will not be subject to the vicissitudes of the political cycle, but will tell us in some depth and over a decent amount of time how work is changing.
Now, during the course of the campaign, as is probably well known, The Greens received some valuable support from some unions. They were, I believe, attracted not just to our principled stand on industrial relations, but also the recognition that there are many and better jobs in the transition to a sustainable & clean energy future. The countries that will do well in the 21st century are those who grasp the transition with both hands, recognising the enormous opportunities.
However, The Greens are not simply about adopting the policies of one group and making them our own. Further, unlike the Labor Party, our structure is member-driven and grassroots, with no capacity for third-party organisations - like unions - to affiliate. As such, we cannot be accused of being beholden to any particular sector. Instead, our platform is based around the four pillars of our party: social justice, grassroots democracy, environmental sustainability and peace and non-violence.
Our policy platform is comprehensive and available on our website. We will stick to it when voting in Parliament.
But in what is also a time for reflection about "where to from here" in the field of industrial relations, we will approach the shifting circumstances of this changing world of work by remaining grounded in the values that have guided The Greens for many years and seen our support grow to the point where more than 1 in 9 people in Australia voted for us at the recent election. During my first speech to parliament last week, I spoke of the importance of these values of sustainability, compassion and equality.
Real sustainability means thinking again about how we live every aspect of our lives. Many people for many years have been leading the way, showing us that a green life is a healthier, happier and more secure one, where a global outlook means bonds of the local community are strengthened. These ideas are well and truly breaking out of the private realm and taking their place firmly on the national political stage. But sustainability also offers the right prism for viewing the current tensions that sometimes go under the moniker of 'work/life balance'. Tracey from the WorkChoices ads - the harried mother on the phone to her employer - was so successful because she epitomised what so many feel: stretched between so many obligations, unable to enjoy life because of work's insecurities and intrusions, having no real control and feeling that things can't go on like this. In other words, reflecting the nagging feeling many of us have that this way of structuring our lives is unsustainable. We now have to think about how to shift this.
Compassion is vital not just in our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, but in thinking about our economy. If we're serious about talking about women working after they've had children, for example, then we need to be talking about childcare availability at the same time, which in turn means investing in childcare workers and facilities. And with an aging population, with the health threats posed by climate change, with the increasing risks being absorbed by the workforce, we should have a debate about whether we move 'care' to centre stage when considering how we will structure our economy.
Equality is more important now than ever. We now don't even blink at treating some people as less equal than others. There are so many exceptions to the principle of full equality that the exception is becoming the rule. We all have the right to get married, unless your partner is of the same gender. We pride ourselves on our great sovereign nation, and then excise parts of it as being 'not really Australia' for the purposes of migration. We say human rights are indivisible, and then suspend them for indigenous Australians.
Similarly, equality shouldn't stop at the office door, and democracy shouldn't disappear at the factory gate. The name 'The Greens' has its origins in the activism of community members and workers who in the 1970s joined together to prevent the destruction of important parts of our built and natural environment. Petra Kelly, visiting Australia at the time, was so impressed by the 'green bans' imposed by the unions and the community that she took it back with her to Germany where they founded Die Grünen, 'The Greens'. Anyone who took such a stand today for 'green bans' would face the Australian Building and Construction Commission, denied the right to silence, interrogated in secret and exposed to threats of imprisonment and fines. When members of one section of our workforce have not just fewer rights than other workers but are indeed worse off than accused criminals, we can't say we are all truly equal before the law.
This is simply the briefest of sketches of where the debate might lead over the next few years. But all the elements are there for a well-resourced, evidence driven debate about how to regulate work in a time of increasing crises.
These are exciting times. In a Parliament where no single party has a majority, it provides a great opportunity for new ideas to be debated and tested.
And with a growing sense that ideas like working fewer or more flexible hours are ripe with potential, but that as a society we haven't got it right just yet, now is the time to discuss how workers can have more control over their lives. I am optimistic that guided by these values of sustainability, compassion and equality, we can meet the current crises in the field of work.
To say that we have just witnessed an interesting election is somewhat of an understatement. And I've probably had one of the more unusual first few weeks in the new job. But I think if anything can train you for high-stakes multi-party negotiations with people you've only just met, it's being a Victorian industrial lawyer. So it is a great pleasure to be back here and talking to many people I have worked with in one form or another. It's an honour to be asked to speak at the start of the day's proceedings.
As a good industrial lawyer, I'm not going to tell you about the content of any of the negotiations. But I think I'm probably not breaching any confidences when I tell you that in my first meeting with Bob Katter, he said to me 'You may be the Green in Parliament, but I'm the anti-Green'. I'm pleased to report that although he now sits within arm's reach of me in the chamber, to date we have managed to keep Parliament a kinder, gentler place.
It is notable that during the election campaign, industrial relations didn't feature anywhere near as strongly as in 2007. The Your Rights at Work campaign - one of the most successful campaigns in recent political history - was absent. To the extent industrial relations appeared, it was a fear campaign against Tony Abbott. For all intents and purposes, the Fair Work Act was not criticised at all in the public sphere during the election campaign.
However, The Greens and a number of individual unions and others were arguing before and during the election campaign that the change of government in 2007 had not brought with it the change in industrial regulation many of us were hoping for. For although in some important respects the new regime of industrial law is better, it is still unfair.
I have some experience in this field, as I have referred to. I was a solicitor for 10 years, representing workers and their unions, and was a partner in the industrial & employment unit of a major national law firm. I was an accredited specialist in workplace relations law and more recently a barrister working in the field. All in all, I've practiced in this area from 1997 to 2010, a period that has spanned some significant changes and events.
It is a field I have very much enjoyed working in and it is with great pleasure that I can announce here today that I will continue my engagement with the field as The Greens' national spokesperson on Employment and Workplace Relations.
I inherit the mantle from Senator Rachel Siewert who has worked tirelessly to advance Greens principles in Parliament. Thanks to her, we have in the Fair Work Act the right for carers to request flexible work practices to look after people with people a disability. She has also kept alive the issue of the unfairly coercive laws operating in the building and construction industry, as well as the failure of successive Labor and Liberal governments to ensure their laws comply with International Labour Organisation conventions. They are truly big shoes to fill and I acknowledge the great work she has done.
As we enter a Parliament where from 1 July 2011 The Greens will have the balance of power in The Senate in our own right and where we are sharing it in the lower house, this will be a significant responsibility. We will continue to try to make the Fair Work Act fairer. Given the topic of this conference, I'll use my time today to point to some of the unfairness embodied in Labor's legislation and then to briefly outline the approach we'll be taking to matters work related.
I mentioned earlier that industrial relations only appeared briefly during the election campaign in the form of a fear campaign against Tony Abbott. This prompted Tony Abbott to announce that he would not make any changes to workplace relations legislation. There then followed a further push to show that there were nonetheless significant changes he could make without requiring legislative amendment. The ACTU announced that it had 'found 198 ways that Abbott could make changes through regulations or ministerial power'. From this we were asked to conclude that workers shouldn't vote for the Coalition.
But in fact the ACTU analysis had demonstrated potentially how weak the Fair Work Act actually is. It showed that so many aspects of protection of rights at work can be undone with the stroke of a pen. This is a first fundamental concern with the legislation: it embodies a much broader trend away from broad based guaranteed protections and towards much more contingent forms of regulation. Why didn't a Labor government enshrine basic protections for workers in legislation and thus make these protections harder to remove? And why wasn't Labor being criticised for it? One of the consequences of the composition of the current House of Representatives will hopefully be a reinforcing of the supremacy of parliament over the executive. With that should come a salutary reminder that protections that are reliant on the goodwill of a Minister have far less permanence than those enshrined in law.
A second and related area of concern is the award modernisation process. I stress that my comments in this respect are directed to the legislative framework, not the tribunal or officers who are doing as one would expect by implementing the law. Because of the legislative framework, we witnessed a largely administrative (as opposed to quasi-judicial) process of review of decades of guaranteed entitlements. The legislation enabled the Minister to provide written direction to the AIRC (later FWA) to create many new awards in a very tight timeframe and to then modify those requests along the way, sometimes on the basis of successful political lobbying engaged in outside of the tribunal. The AIRC's process was one of conferences and oral submissions, not contested evidence. New awards were created in a very short time frame. These new awards almost always contained fewer provisions than the ones previously applying, and those old awards in turn had been through a previous process of simplification under the Howard legislative regime. And these new awards all contain provisions enabling the legislative floor to be varied on an individual basis.
I mentioned the award simplification process under the Workplace Relations Act. That was colloquially referred to as 'award stripping' and was roundly criticised and challenged as far as the High Court when it was driven by Howard and Peter Reith. The award modernisation process, by contrast, was hastened along with the assistance of many. The Greens have for some time drawn attention to the loss of conditions and entitlements and the fundamental inequities in the process. I know also from my experience that some in the union movement have watched with something approaching simmering resentment at the administrative and executive acts that combined to remove their legislatively guaranteed entitlements. To rub salt into the wounds, at least under Howard and Reith workers and their unions had the capacity to lead and test evidence and make oral submissions on the basis of that evidence before their conditions were removed by the tribunal. Under Labor's framework, no such rights are enshrined, and in some cases decades of protection are removed with the tribunal not having heard any evidence from the employees who will be affected by their decision.
Thirdly, there are those many sections of the Fair Work Act that are lifted almost word for word from the Workplace Relations Act: the prohibition on employers and employees bargaining at the industry or sector level if they so choose; the restrictions on the right to organise in the form of cumbersome secret ballots; the unfair restrictions in industrial action introduced by John Howard to tilt the playing field unfairly in favour of employers; and the interference in free bargaining by prohibiting people from agreeing on matters such as right of entry or social and environmental matters that do not fall within the narrow purview of matters pertaining to the employment relationship. These have all been the subject of repeated criticism by the ILO. When they were introduced by Howard, there were howls of protest but then we watched them pass almost without comment - with a few notable exceptions - into the Fair Work Act.
In short, Fair Work is cast from the same mould as WorkChoices. Many gains made by workers and their unions over a century will be removed in the name of 'simplification' or 'modernisation'. The freedom to bargain is restricted, with complex prohibitions remaining on the level, subject matter and style of bargaining available to parties. The restrictions on internationally recognised rights to organise and take industrial action are lifted almost word for word from the old legislation. Fair Work Australia's discretion to resolve disputes remains constrained, continuing Howard's transformation of the tribunal from one that would settle disputes and their underlying causes into one who simple orders disruption cease, leaving the underlying causes of that disruption unresolved. Under both WorkChoices and Fair Work, the tribunal is being moved from umpire to police officer.
Of course, it is to be welcomed that under new arrangements AWAs are no longer in existence, but I note that there are now individual flexibility arrangements and the right to effectively vary enterprise agreements and awards in some respects, provisions which need to be watched with great interest to see how they operate in practice. The new provisions around unequal pay are a vast improvement and we will await with interest the outcome of the current applications before Fair Work Australia. And it must be said that for some employees in hard to organise industries, the situation is better under Fair Work than WorkChoices, with new provisions offering unions the capacity to seek a spot at the bargaining table. However, once at the table, such workers will find the bar set pretty low for what constitutes an acceptable deal. Whilst the uniform protections in the National Employment Standards are in principle welcome, they are a shadow of the guarantees that would have been available had, for example, existing awards been made common rule.
John Buchanan said that with WorkChoices the sky didn't fall in but the floor began to rot. Under Fair Work, instead of re-stumping the house and putting down new floorboards, Labor has simply installed steel grating: enough to stop you falling further but hardly comfortable enough to live on.
These changing patterns of labour regulation, together with significant global and local changes in the way business and labour are configured, has led us to a situation Sydney University's Workplace Research Centre has recently described as one where workers and those close to them are increasingly absorbing the risks of a globally interconnected economy and where, as the ACTU President has said, 'the wages share of national income is now at its lowest point since December 1964'.
It would be somewhat disingenuous to claim that this state of affairs is simply the result of employers getting their way. More often than not, the changes to labour market regulation and the organisation of work have had the express support of both major parties and sometimes union peak bodies as well. Indeed, we are now bearing witness to the consequences of a three-decade long bipartisan love affair with neoliberalism and deregulation.
The Fair Work Act embodies all the elements of neoliberalism. A supposed commitment to the free market of bargaining, but backed up with harsh consequences for those who don't bargain the right way and a massive government-sponsored intervention to ensure employees permanently negotiate with one hand tied behind their back.
Workers and their families and dependents are absorbing enormous amounts of risk as part of this process. This is in turn causing enormous stress. The Workplace Research Centre's research is a powerful critique of where Labor's single-dimensional approach is taking us: a society of working harder, postponing retirement, taking on more risk, having weaker safety nets and less capacity to enjoy our leisure time and families.
I commend the ACTU for commissioning the WRC research and the ACTU President for giving such strong voice to it in her National Press Club speech. The subject matter expressed reflects many of the concerns that The Greens and I have been articulating for some time about the unsustainability and unfairness of current arrangements.
As The Greens, there are some important philosophical underpinnings to our approach to industrial relations. I'll talk about them in a moment. But I want to first draw attention to another aspect of something that will benefit all participants in the field of work. Much of the discussion about industrial relations reform over the years has taken place in a largely evidence-free environment. When I was practising as an industrial lawyer, it became almost folklore that the removal of unfair dismissal laws would result in an employment boom. The so-called Centre for Independent Studies, for example, was still reporting in 2002 that 'A survey conducted ... in 1999 found that 54% of small business employers might have hired more employees over the previous 12 months had it not been for the unfair dismissal laws.' (http://www.cis.org.au/media-information/opinion-pieces/article/1356-unfair-dismissal-laws-deter-firing-and-hiring-) The results of a survey apparently asking the very broad question of whether one 'might have employed' someone instantly became near gospel, repeated ad nauseum, including in political debate.
I am concerned that the debates around 'flexibility' and so-called 'work/life balance' in particular could head down the same path. Although I have spent much of this speech talking about the downsides of a flexibility driven from above, I am also acutely aware that the situation is more complicated. Much of the move is attributable to a real desire to take back some control of our working lives. To be able to do things inside of working hours that we were previously only able to do outside of them. And reflective of the fact that many of our labours are now taking place in an increasingly interconnected world and in the realms of communication, many of us don't want to be stuck in an office if we can do the work at home or elsewhere.
But this brings with its own set of problems, from aggrieved partners and family members to a sense that it is simply impossible to escape work at all. To grapple with this new world, we'll have to start rethinking how to understand the relationship between work and non-work, between paid labour and the labour we don't get paid for. And we'll need to properly understand what is happening to people when the financialisation and risk referred to by WRC intersects with low availability of childcare, increasing health costs and congested roads.
More and sustained research is essential. A priority should be the establishment of research at a national level that will not be subject to the vicissitudes of the political cycle, but will tell us in some depth and over a decent amount of time how work is changing.
Now, during the course of the campaign, as is probably well known, The Greens received some valuable support from some unions. They were, I believe, attracted not just to our principled stand on industrial relations, but also the recognition that there are many and better jobs in the transition to a sustainable & clean energy future. The countries that will do well in the 21st century are those who grasp the transition with both hands, recognising the enormous opportunities.
However, The Greens are not simply about adopting the policies of one group and making them our own. Further, unlike the Labor Party, our structure is member-driven and grassroots, with no capacity for third-party organisations - like unions - to affiliate. As such, we cannot be accused of being beholden to any particular sector. Instead, our platform is based around the four pillars of our party: social justice, grassroots democracy, environmental sustainability and peace and non-violence.
Our policy platform is comprehensive and available on our website. We will stick to it when voting in Parliament.
But in what is also a time for reflection about "where to from here" in the field of industrial relations, we will approach the shifting circumstances of this changing world of work by remaining grounded in the values that have guided The Greens for many years and seen our support grow to the point where more than 1 in 9 people in Australia voted for us at the recent election. During my first speech to parliament last week, I spoke of the importance of these values of sustainability, compassion and equality.
Real sustainability means thinking again about how we live every aspect of our lives. Many people for many years have been leading the way, showing us that a green life is a healthier, happier and more secure one, where a global outlook means bonds of the local community are strengthened. These ideas are well and truly breaking out of the private realm and taking their place firmly on the national political stage. But sustainability also offers the right prism for viewing the current tensions that sometimes go under the moniker of 'work/life balance'. Tracey from the WorkChoices ads - the harried mother on the phone to her employer - was so successful because she epitomised what so many feel: stretched between so many obligations, unable to enjoy life because of work's insecurities and intrusions, having no real control and feeling that things can't go on like this. In other words, reflecting the nagging feeling many of us have that this way of structuring our lives is unsustainable. We now have to think about how to shift this.
Compassion is vital not just in our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, but in thinking about our economy. If we're serious about talking about women working after they've had children, for example, then we need to be talking about childcare availability at the same time, which in turn means investing in childcare workers and facilities. And with an aging population, with the health threats posed by climate change, with the increasing risks being absorbed by the workforce, we should have a debate about whether we move 'care' to centre stage when considering how we will structure our economy.
Equality is more important now than ever. We now don't even blink at treating some people as less equal than others. There are so many exceptions to the principle of full equality that the exception is becoming the rule. We all have the right to get married, unless your partner is of the same gender. We pride ourselves on our great sovereign nation, and then excise parts of it as being 'not really Australia' for the purposes of migration. We say human rights are indivisible, and then suspend them for indigenous Australians.
Similarly, equality shouldn't stop at the office door, and democracy shouldn't disappear at the factory gate. The name 'The Greens' has its origins in the activism of community members and workers who in the 1970s joined together to prevent the destruction of important parts of our built and natural environment. Petra Kelly, visiting Australia at the time, was so impressed by the 'green bans' imposed by the unions and the community that she took it back with her to Germany where they founded Die Grünen, 'The Greens'. Anyone who took such a stand today for 'green bans' would face the Australian Building and Construction Commission, denied the right to silence, interrogated in secret and exposed to threats of imprisonment and fines. When members of one section of our workforce have not just fewer rights than other workers but are indeed worse off than accused criminals, we can't say we are all truly equal before the law.
This is simply the briefest of sketches of where the debate might lead over the next few years. But all the elements are there for a well-resourced, evidence driven debate about how to regulate work in a time of increasing crises.
These are exciting times. In a Parliament where no single party has a majority, it provides a great opportunity for new ideas to be debated and tested.
And with a growing sense that ideas like working fewer or more flexible hours are ripe with potential, but that as a society we haven't got it right just yet, now is the time to discuss how workers can have more control over their lives. I am optimistic that guided by these values of sustainability, compassion and equality, we can meet the current crises in the field of work.