Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Building Cooperative Workplaces No. 1) Bill 2026

Ms CHANEY (Curtin) (10:52): I rise to speak on the Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Building Cooperative Workplaces No. 1) Bill 2026. This bill bundles together measures with very different impacts. It gives the Fair Work Commission tools to manage a rising tide of applications, a tide now driven in part by paid agents and by artificial intelligence generating claims at volume.

It streamlines how dismissal disputes are handled, restoring a more efficient process. It allows the commission to decide certain matters on the papers—that is, on written submissions without a hearing—where both parties agree. It also establishes a separate, more appropriate income threshold for low paid owner-drivers in road transport, whose high operating costs can make them look better paid than they really are, giving them access to unfair termination and unfair contract protections that they would otherwise be denied.

And the bill tidies up the timing of CFMEU construction division financial reports. I'm broadly supportive of these measures. They address real pressures and they deserve to be passed.

The commission is under genuine strain, and these measures respond to it directly. Until the 2020 Federal Court decision in Coles Supply Chain Pty Ltd v Milford, also called Milford, when a worker brought a general protections claim and the employer argued that no dismissal had actually occurred, the commission could simply move the matter to conciliation and try to resolve it.

After Milford, the commission first had to run a full arbitrated hearing just to decide the threshold question of whether a dismissal had happened at all before it could even begin to deal with the dispute, and that's slow and expensive for everyone. This bill restores the earlier, more sensible process: the commission can proceed straight to conciliation, and the question of whether a dismissal occurred can still be worked through there, or later in arbitration or in court if the matter can't be resolved.

Empowering the commission to dismiss frivolous, vexatious or hopeless applications and to rein in repeat applicants who clog the system is a reasonable response to a real problem. I don't pretend that these measures are cost-free. They touch on procedural rights, and the government acknowledges as much.

But they come with safeguards. Vexatious orders may be made only by a full bench. Matters proceed on the papers only with the parties' consent, and judicial review remains.

On balance, this is the unglamorous legislative work of making an institution function, and it deserves to pass. But—and there is a 'but'—one part of this bill is doing a great deal of quiet work for a so-called efficiency measure. There's been a longstanding prohibition on discriminating between employers based on the industrial instruments covering their workers.

But part 9 of this bill creates an exemption to this prohibition. That means the Commonwealth could give preference to businesses whose employees are covered by an enterprise agreement, often a union agreement, when awarding grants and contracts. And it potentially reaches down supply chains.

A single Commonwealth project could impose these conditions on every business beneath it. This is a significant change in how we decide how taxpayer money is spent. Bundling it into a bill that is otherwise about commission housekeeping, under the reassuring banner of 'building cooperative workplaces', understates what it does.

This is precisely the kind of opaque process I've consistently criticised in this place. And there's not a lot of relevant detail about how this might work that's actually written into the bill. The bill tells us that the Commonwealth may preference employers that are covered by an enterprise agreement, but the crucial detail of exactly which contractual arrangements this power reaches and how far down a supply chain it extends isn't settled in the act itself; it's left to be determined by the minister, by legislative instrument.

So parliament is being asked to approve the principle while the substance—the part that determines who is caught and how heavily—is deferred to ministerial decision after the fact. A change of this significance deserves far more scrutiny. If the Commonwealth wants the power to steer public money in this way so it's spent on the basis of how businesses contract with their employees rather than value for money or ability to fulfil the contract, the boundaries of that power should be debated and fixed here in the primary legislation, not filled in by instrument once the bill has passed.

Industry has raised serious concerns about this aspect of the bill. The Australian Industry Group warns that it undermines freedom of association, the right of workers to join a union or not. They point to a parade of scandals and billions wasted where procurement was bent to industrial objectives at a state level.

The Business Council and Master Builders go further, to integrity. We don't have to reach back very far for the relevant lesson. Geoffrey Watson SC, examining the construction sector, found that some enterprise agreements were bought for cash and awarded to criminals and that practices like these could drive legitimate businesses out of the market altogether.

This is not a hypothetical risk; it's a documented finding about the very sector this measure would touch most directly. The timing makes it sharper still. The CFMEU's construction division is at this moment under administration, in fact dealt with separately in this bill.

So, at the same time as we're cleaning up after corruption in construction enterprise agreements, part 9 would elevate the role of these agreements in the awarding of public contracts and grants. If public money is to be steered towards companies that hold a particular type of agreement in a sector with this recent history, the safeguards against that money flowing to the wrong hands should be spelled out, and here they are not.

This also lands awkwardly against the government's own statement on 1 May this year that it had no intention of requiring union agreements as a condition of construction funding. The government must reconcile that commitment with what part 9 actually does. If businesses are complying with our very complex industrial relations laws then they should be able to compete with other businesses on a level playing field for government contracts on the basis of their ability to fulfil that contract and give value for money.

The government has said it may carve out the construction industry, but that's not what's being put before the House and not what I'm being asked to vote on. So this is a bill of good measures and one serious problem, and my position follows from that. I support the objectives of the commission efficiency reforms; the road transport income threshold, which is a fair fix for low-paid owners-drivers; and the supported bargaining streamlining, which is a sensible administrative simplification.

I'd back these readily on their own. But the principle underpinning part 9, that government should discriminate on the basis of the existence of an enterprise agreement, appears to be targeted at elevating the role of unions. For example, small and medium-sized businesses that make up the overwhelming majority of the construction industry largely operate under awards, not enterprise agreements.

They should be treated no less favourably than those with union-negotiated enterprise agreements. So I move a second reading amendment as circulated in my name: That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: "whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House: (1) notes that: (a) the bill contains a range of measures, most of which are sensible and warrant support, including efficiency reforms to the operation of the Fair Work Commission, a fairer high income threshold for road transport contractors, and administrative changes to reporting requirements; (b) Part 9 of Schedule 1 would allow the Commonwealth, and parties within a Commonwealth contractual chain, to discriminate between businesses in awarding grants or procuring goods and services on the basis of their enterprise agreement arrangements; (c) the integrity of public spending depends on decisions about grants and procurement being made transparently and on their merits, including value for money, capability, delivery and compliance, rather than on factors unrelated to a business's ability to do the work; (d) Part 9 would weaken that principle by making a business's industrial arrangements a permissible basis for preferencing in the allocation of public money; and (e) these provisions would also confer a broad power on the Minister to extend or modify their operation by legislative instrument, with limited parliamentary oversight; and (2) calls on the Government to remove such measures from the bill that would allow the Commonwealth to discriminate against businesses on the basis of their enterprise agreement arrangements".

This amendment does not decline the bill a second reading—the sensible measures in it deserve to pass—but it puts on the record my concern with part 9, which is that allowing a business's enterprise agreement arrangements to determine its access to grants and contracts cuts against the principle that public money should be allocated transparently and on merit—on value, capability, delivery and compliance—and that these provisions, with their broad ministerial power to extend their reach by instrument, should be removed from the bill.

I will not let a significant corruption-sensitive procurement change ride through on the coat-tails of sensible reform. If this procurement prioritisation remains, I'll vote against this bill. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Buchholz ): Is the amendment seconded?