Senator Brian Greig
Portfolio: Transport
| Dated: 26 Sep 2001
Location: Parliament
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Senator Greig speaks to the Air Passenger Ticket Levy (Imposition) Bill 2001 and Air Passenger Ticket Levy (Collection) Bill 2001: Second Reading |
Senator GREIG (Western Australia) (10.18 p.m.) —Tonight I rise on behalf of the Australian Democrats to support the Air Passenger Ticket Levy (Imposition) Bill 2001 and the Air Passenger Ticket Levy (Collection) Bill 2001. We do so on the basis that ensuring entitlements are paid to terminated Ansett workers is an immediate concern—not on the basis that this bill is necessarily the best way of doing that, nor on the basis that this bill addresses any of the underlying issues that have led to this debacle in the first place. Some 16,000 jobs have been lost as a result of the collapse of Ansett; over 72,000 other employees have been affected through related companies that have suffered losses of business as a result.
There are two related bills being considered here now. The first is the Air Passenger Ticket Levy (Imposition) Bill 2001. This bill will impose a levy on each ticket used for flights originating in Australia in order to ensure that some entitlements of Ansett employees are paid. The government will establish a special employees entitlements scheme for Ansett group employees, and this is the fund that will distribute the entitlements. The actual system for implementing the levy has not been determined and will, apparently, be determined in consultation with the airlines. Airlines will bear the cost of administration.
The second bill, which also comes into effect on 1 October, is the Air Passenger Ticket Levy (Collection) Bill 2001. The purpose of this bill is to collect the $10 levy charged to each ticket until some percentage of Ansett employee entitlements are satisfied, up to a limit of $500 million. It is with some concern that we note that the levy does not apply to inbound international visitors. According to the explanatory memorandum, the bill seeks to `minimise the impact of the levy on international inbound tourism'. Australian tourists and businesspeople travelling to Australian destinations or even to overseas destinations are effectively being told by this government that they are less important than the overseas visitor. This is doubly concerning because the overseas visitor is arriving in this country to a dollar devalued to the benefit of many overseas visitors. The bill will impose a certain level of regional disadvantage. Short haul, low cost flights will bear a disproportionate effect, and the impact on regional tourism and travel is likely to be greater.
Part 4 of the bill sets out the offence, inspection and enforcement provisions of the bill, including the penalties that attach to the failure of an operator to lodge a monthly levy return. Proposed section 22 limits the total amount of the scheme to $500 million. Should the total entitlements requirement exceed that amount, the discretion for distribution of the entitlements will rest with the Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business. The minister may determine which companies are eligible for entitlements and which entitlements are eligible for the scheme. There is no guidance in this bill as to which companies will be selected as eligible for the scheme, which entitlements will be eligible, how distributions will be made, when they should be made and in what amounts. Proposed section 22(2) permits the minister to determine the `entitlements to be covered by the scheme' and the `terms on which payments under the scheme are to be made'. The discretion in the distribution of the funds has the potential to cause additional pain to Ansett employees unless clear, accountable and equitable distribution guidelines are implemented.
We Democrats understand the need to cap the scheme—it cannot operate in perpetuity or without limit. That would benefit neither the government nor the employees. But if there is to be a cap, then the discretion given to the minister as to the entitlements is completely unacceptable. This bill needs to be far clearer regarding who gets paid, when and how much.
The Democrats originally drafted two amendments to section 22 making any determination under subsection (1) a disallowable instrument and ensuring that the basis for selecting or excluding companies from eligibility was clear. This would have ensured that the parliament had oversight in relation to any determination and would have ensured that the process of selecting eligible companies and eligible entitlements would not be politicised. The Democrats have decided, however, not to move one of those amendments simply because of timing. The amendment seeking to make determinations disallowable would require further sittings of parliament. Further sittings are unlikely, which means that the entire scheme would then have been delayed as a result. This simply points again to the chronic haphazard nature of the government, particularly in their recent lack of legislative process and accountability.
The scheme, while more generous than the situation that has traditionally faced Australian workers who have lost their jobs and entitlements through no fault of their own, will still fall far short of satisfying the actual entitlements of so many Ansett employees. Many Ansett employees are longstanding and have great loyalty to their employer. A high proportion have many years of service in the company and the offer to underwrite their entitlements to the limit of eight weeks redundancy will represent a loss of thousands of dollars to their actual legal entitlements. This is regrettable. Loyalty should have its rewards and to deny so many longstanding employees their entitlements implies a penalty for such loyalty.
It is also the case that many Ansett employees share a family loyalty and affiliation with the company. There are many examples of intergenerational employment with Ansett and of couples who both worked with the company. This means that many families and extended families are now reeling from the loss of their jobs and the loss of their legitimate entitlement to much larger redundancy pay. Of course the great majority of these employees do not want redundancy at all; they want their jobs. Our highest priority must remain getting Ansett back into the air one way or another.
Our other main priority must be to ensure that entitlements of Ansett employees are met to the greatest extent possible by their employers, Ansett companies. We must not lose sight of what these entitlements largely are. They are the earned income of employees. They are payment for services already rendered—for holidays and long service that have already been accumulated. They should be paid by the Ansett group of companies, not by the flying public or the taxpayer, as is the case in the government's other stopgap measure, the Employee Entitlements Support Scheme, which offers some protection to employee entitlements for non-Ansett workers.
We note that the government has ungraded the terms of that scheme of late to come close to those available to Ansett workers. But make no mistake: many non-Ansett workers out there are very angry because they have faced long waits in getting their entitlements paid out of this scheme and resent the government's knee-jerk response, in a highly politicised environment, to the needs of those working in a big company like Ansett when many, many employees in smaller companies, in less dramatic circumstances, have also lost.
I note the advice of the Bills Digest that points out that the entitlement payment available to Ansett workers is superior to those available to other workers who are made redundant and apply for assistance under the government's new scheme, the General Employee Entitlement Redundancy Scheme, GEERS. I ask the government to please clarify what appears to be straightforward inequity between the two schemes. Is it the case that under EESS employees are paid their entitlements at the usual weekly pay rate without any cap while under GEERS the pay rate is capped at $75,200? If this is the case, what is the rationale for the cap for one and not for the other? If this is correct, it seems straightforwardly discriminatory against non-Ansett workers and will inflame those already aware of the quick action that the government has taken in a pre-election climate for one set of workers while others face long delays and worse terms.
In some of the non-Ansett cases that have been drawn to the attention of the Democrats in recent days, employees have lost much more than their wages, long service, annual leave, pay in lieu of notice and redundancy pay. Some have lost their superannuation. In one case a group of employees discovered that their bankrupt employer had not made contributions to their superannuation fund for some years. This has understandably devastated employees and it requires very substantial legal and financial resources by these devastated employees to take action to pursue their legitimate entitlements.
All of these experiences are a powerful action for a systematic national approach to the protection of employee entitlements in Australia. We cannot have companies dipping into employees' wages and entitlements and, more than that, they should not be able to dip into their actual bank accounts. Even long established national icons like Ansett cannot, under some management regimes at least, be trusted to preserve employees' entitlements. The temptation to dip into them, when companies come under financial pressure, is too great for too many managers. We need a national scheme and we need it as soon as possible. Employers must be required to establish separate trusts for earned entitlements or to undertake appropriate insurance measures, and it is clear that we need to legislate to establish these requirements. Many European countries already do so, and we are way behind the pack.
Instead, we are establishing real expertise in the knee-jerk response. We may be feeding a corporate dependence or expectation of government bail-out in such circumstances. If companies know that the government will step into the breach when things go wrong, then some may well be encouraged to clean out the coffers before calling in the administrators. This is bad policy: it is bad for the taxpayers and, in the case of Ansett, it is bad for future travellers, regional communities and the tourism and travel industries. They are paying the price for the mismanagement of the Ansett group of companies and their failure to face up to obligations.
The first priority of the government must be to pursue these companies so that they meet as much of the debt of entitlements of their employees as possibly can be extracted. We Democrats certainly hope that the $500 million cap is sufficient to cover all entitlements that are part of the scheme, but no-one really knows how far $500 million will go. That is a massive amount of money. Employees of Ansett estimated before the company went into receivership that they would need significantly less than this in order to purchase the company and have an employee owned airline. Unfortunately, the government failed dismally to respond to opportunities to keep Ansett in the air. They failed to respond to these warnings. If they had, we may have found that this debacle cost the taxpayer nothing in the long term. Instead, the government has tried to make a virtue of their failures by agreeing to pay entitlements.
We must remember that this scheme does not find jobs for the 16,000 former employees. It does not retrain them. It does not cover the cost of mortgages, school expenses or commitments made in the expectation by many employees that they would be with the company for the long haul. It does not protect them during any period they may have to wait in order to receive their entitlements.
The response of the government has been better than nothing, but we should be under no illusion that the response has been a good one or an intelligent one. In fact, one does not have to be too cynical to say that, if Ansett employees have had any good luck in the last three weeks, it is in the fact that we are close to an election. Had an election not been on the horizon, one legitimately could have expected the government's response to be a little different.
We might remember too that the flying Australian public will be paying the earned entitlements: the past obligations of a corporate entity. This bill does not constitute a solution to the wrong people paying this particular debt. It is clear that longer term changes are needed. The government cannot continue to protect workers' rights because of corporate collapse, corporate incompetence or corporate asset stripping. A national systematic response to employer provision of entitlements is sorely needed, and we are yet to see a policy on that from either the ALP or the coalition.
After the collapse of One.Tel, the Prime Minister foreshadowed legislation that would allow bonuses paid to company directors to be reclaimed if companies failed. We have seen nothing since, and the bonuses paid to Air New Zealand directors while 16,000 workers struggle to receive earned entitlements should be haunting this government.
On three occasions since 1998, the Democrats have put forward amendments to Corporations Law to make related companies liable for the debts, including entitlements debts, of insolvent companies. Those amendments were in accordance with a recommendation of the Australian Law Reform Commission in 1988. On every occasion, the government has rejected those amendments.
How many more companies are going to collapse? How many more publicly funded rescue packages will there be, while company directors run home with large bonuses, before this government actually tackles the root of the issue? This bill is a product of exactly the sort of poll driven legislation that has produced the appalling and antidemocratic migration bills we have been debating this week.
The Democrats support this bill, with amendments, because the employees of Ansett should not be the ones made to suffer for the failures of the corporation and its parent companies and the failures of the Australian government in its determination that the best government is no government. The government's failure to face up to the long-term challenge of employee entitlements means that the Australian community is paying a high price for its policy failure.
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Information provided by the Australian Parliamentary Library.
This document is of Draft Status
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