Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones says the government should be able to get a consensus on its industrial relations bill before the sitting calendar is up, and has described criticism from some sections of the business community as “hogwash”.
The contentious part of the bill deals with the expansion of workers’ right to engage in multi-employer bargaining, which allows them to negotiate across several employers for better pay and conditions.
Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
“The reforms, when they’re all boiled down, are pretty modest,” Jones told Sky News this morning.
“A lot of the noise that’s being made around this at the moment, frankly, the people who are making the most noise are the ones who are least impacted by it, because they’re already dealing with collective bargaining, they’re well-versed in how it works.“
Jones said the people who were most affected by the passage of the legislation were workers who were not in the collective bargaining system as they were subsisting on minimum award rates.
“They’re the people these reforms are aimed at,” he said.
Business groups say the expansion of multi-employer bargaining will leave them vulnerable to widespread strike action, which Jones described as “hogwash”.
“It really is hogwash. When I talk to businesses at the moment, you know what their number one concern is? They can’t get enough workers.”
