Government moves to blunt Labor’s attacks that it sides with employers who fail to pay workers’ entitlements

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The Coalition has committed to criminalise wage theft and has delayed a planned amnesty for employers who fail to pay workers’ superannuation.

On Wednesday the Morrison government moved to blunt Labor’s attacks that the Coalition had sided with employers who fail to pay workers’ entitlements and continued to ramp up its attacks on unions to push for increased power to disqualify officials.

But the push to pass the union penalty legislation, called the Ensuring Integrity bill, suffered a setback, with the Centre Alliance senator, Rex Patrick, calling for further changes to ensure the penalties on unions were “consistent with the corporate world”.

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On Wednesday the Australian Council of Trade Unions president, Michele O’Neil, lobbied against the bill in Canberra – citing the $200,000 “contrition payment” paid by George Calombaris’s Made Establishment company for $7.8m of underpayments of workers as evidence of the double standards between union and corporate penalties.

O’Neil told reporters in Canberra that rather than crack down on wage theft, the government was targeting unions with laws that would “make it harder for a union to check that their pay is correct”.

O’Neil said there was “no corporate equivalent” to the bill because for companies systematically underpaying workers or endangering workers’ lives “your directors don’t get struck off being directors, your business is not deregistered”. “We say to them: Where’s the ensuring integrity bill for celebrity chefs?”

In question time, Scott Morrison said the attorney general, Christian Porter, was “right now … drafting laws to deal with criminalising worker exploitation”.

Before the election the Coalition accepted recommendations from the migrant worker taskforce to introduce criminal penalties for systemic and deliberate underpayments.

But Morrison said the bills before the parliament would ban “the wage theft that’s occurring in the union movement” – a reference to deductions for workers’ entitlement funds.

Earlier in July the Coalition introduced a bill to prevent payments negotiated under enterprise agreements for unregistered workers’ benefits funds.

O’Neil said the funds were already regulated and accused the government of an “outrageous slur” on funds that pay for worker benefits including funeral cover, training and suicide prevention.

On Wednesday the assistant treasurer, Michael Sukkar, reintroduced a bill to introduce “safeguards to ensure integrity and streamline compliance” with superannuation laws.

But – unlike the version that lapsed in the 45th parliament – the new version omitted a plan to offer employers who were in arrears paying workers’ superannuation a 12-month amnesty to dob themselves in, without penalty.

Labor has begun the 46th parliament attacking the government over superannuation because of a backbench revolt calling for the superannuation guarantee to be frozen at 9.5% and the planned amnesty.

The apparent backdown led the ACTU assistant secretary, Scott Connolly, to cheer the “call to ditch a bill that would have let a bunch of serious superannuation thieves off the hook”.

But the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, told Guardian Australia: “A one-off amnesty to allow non-complying employers to self-correct any unpaid superannuation guarantee amounts remains government policy.”

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While the amnesty is on the backburner, the Coalition has pushed ahead with the union penalty bill, set to be debated in parliament this week despite the fact the Senate employment legislation committee is not due to report until October.

Labor and the Greens will need the votes of senator Jacqui Lambie and one of Centre Alliance or Pauline Hanson’s One Nation to block the legislation, which unions believe infringes the right to freedom of association by extending court powers to deregister unions and disqualify officials.

On Wednesday Patrick said that Centre Alliance agrees with the government that parliament “cannot” allow a situation where unions treat fines as “the cost of business”.

“We are asking the government to make sure that whatever is in the bill is consistent with the corporate world,” he told ABC News.

“An example, under the current union bill … the minister can make a referral to make a deregistration. That does not happen in the corporate world.”

“There is a political element today that we are uncomfortable with and would like to see it removed.”