Centre Alliance says it will not support bill without amendments aimed at preventing its misuse by employers

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Economists and academics have warned that the Coalition’s controversial industrial relations bill would keep wages stagnant by further eroding collective bargaining.

John Quiggin, Jim Stanford and Anthony Forsyth told the Senate education and employment committee on Friday that the Coalition’s ensuring integrity bill would further skew negotiating outcomes in favour of employers.

The bill would give new powers to the federal court to make orders about the governance of unions and allow employers to request the deregistration or disqualification of union officials for breaches of industrial law.

Unions have been engaged in a counterattack over the parliamentary sitting fortnight, warning senators not to pass a bill that while ostensibly targeted at the CFMMEU and its controversial Victorian official John Setka would have wide-ranging impacts on all unions.

'Show some spine': Jacqui Lambie returns to parliament with John Setka ultimatum Read more

The Coalition is just one Senate vote away from passing the bill putting senator Jacqui Lambie, who has linked her support to Setka quitting, and Centre Alliance in the box seat.

At a committee inquiry hearing on Friday the Centre Alliance flagged further amendments to the bill aimed at prevent its misuse by employers seeking to improve their bargaining position.

Quiggin, an economist at the University of Queensland, told the inquiry the bill is “clearly directed at reducing the power of unions” which would “put further downward pressure on wages.

Stanford, an economist and the director of the Centre for Future Work, said it was “absolutely wrong” to claim there is a “culture of lawlessness” and “recidivism” in unions, as Coalition critics have done.

Stanford said Australia has a “uniquely intrusive” regime of regulation on unions, putting unions in breach of industrial laws for “all kinds of activities that would be considered normal … in other countries such as industrial action, recruiting members, holding protests, challenging unfair employer actions, and displaying union badges”.

John Setka warns Labor he plans to appeal court decision to allow expulsion Read more

Forsyth, a professor of labour law at RMIT, noted that the bill went even further than recommendations of the Trade Union Royal Commission, which considered deregistration only for the CFMMEU, not other unions.

Forsyth noted the government was seeking to narrow the federal court’s discretion to refuse deregistration applications, despite the fact it has not attempted to use existing deregistration powers in industrial law against the CFMMEU.

In an inquiry hearing in Brisbane, Centre Alliance’s Rex Patrick proposed a number of changes to the ensuring integrity bill.

Patrick suggested the concern could be addressed by limiting the powers to apply for disqualification and deregistration to independent regulators. Removing the power for employers to seek disqualification comes on top of Patrick’s earlier demand that the industrial relations minister, Christian Porter, should not have such a power.

Patrick told the hearing he was “absolutely convinced that there is a need to deal with the sort of misconduct that the federal court has found the [Construction Forestry Mining Maritime and Energy Union] has engaged in”.

“If I accept the current bill is a sledgehammer being used to crack a nut, what I’m most interested in is how to make the current bill a nutcracker.”

Patrick queried why the bill currently requires the federal court to deregister a union with an adverse finding against it unless it would be “unjust” to do so, suggesting this could be replaced by a discretion that the court “may” deregister a union or disqualify an official.

Guardian Australia understands Centre Alliance is also considering requiring courts to consider the gravity of breaches when assessing applications, to fix union concerns that trivial breaches of technical requirements such as lodging annual returns or failing to return right of entry permits could ground vexatious employer applications.