Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Building Cooperative Workplaces No. 1) Bill 2026
Ms BRISKEY (Maribyrnong) (11:54): A secure job changes everything. It is the difference between building a life and just getting by. It is what lets someone take out a mortgage without laying awake over it or decide that it's finally the right time to start a family.
When your job is secure, you stop bracing for next month. You can actually plan for it. This is what people want.
It's not much when you think about it, a fair day's pay and a job you can count on. That is what the Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Building Cooperative Workplaces No. 1) Bill 2026 sets out to deliver. When we came to office, insecure work was already on the rise, and for years it had been allowed to spread, as if that was just how things worked: casual jobs that were permanent in everything but name and came without the entitlements that should have gone with them; contracts that loaded every risk onto the worker; wages that went nowhere while the price of everything went up.
None of that was by accident; it was a choice—one that those opposite made year after year—to leave working people with less power and fewer protections. It is a choice we are undoing, piece by piece, and this bill is the next piece. When government puts the nation's money to work it should make sure that the money backs secure jobs and a workplace relations system that protects the fair go.
The Australian government is the biggest customer in the country. Every year we invest in everything from construction to transport to security to catering to IT to the care of our loved ones. There is no bigger buyer of goods and services anywhere in Australia.
So this bill asks a fair question: when we spend all that money, what kind of work are we paying for, and what is the standard we seek to set? Every dollar is a choice, and I think we should spend hours investing in the employers who are doing the right thing—those who pay properly and who sit down with their workers in good faith to secure genuine agreements.
Australians want their government to set the example. They do not want their money fuelling a race to the bottom. So this bill lets us use our purchasing power to promote fairer wages and more-secure jobs through enterprise agreements where it makes sense to do so.
It doesn't compel the Commonwealth to do anything, but it gives us the option. How and when we use it is being worked through carefully through the secure Australian jobs code. As a responsible government, we are taking the time to get it right.
I sat through a few enterprise agreement negotiations myself in my years at the United Workers Union. Done properly, they work for everyone in the room, providing security and fair conditions for workers as well as flexibility and productivity for business. They work precisely because both sides have hammered them across the table in good faith.
That is what makes them one of the best tools we have. And it is worth saying plainly that an employer who signs an enterprise agreement is signing up to better pay and conditions for their people. That is the whole point.
Think about what this means in practice. When we build a road or a house, who do we want building it? When we pay for a hospital to be cleaned or for older Australians to be cared for, what kind of businesses do we want on the other end of that contract?
I want it to be the one that looks after their workers, not the one whose priority is to undercut their workers if they think being able to do that gets them a government contract because they are paying their workers less. When taxpayers are footing the bill they are entitled to expect quality delivered by people who are treated decently. Value for money and on-time delivery are our priorities.
But let's be clear. Businesses who do the right thing by their workers are the ones delivering value for money. This bill also stands up for a group of workers that the system has too often let slip through the cracks: our truckies.
Drive through the north-west of my electorate and you'll see trucks rolling out before dawn, the men and women behind the wheel keeping this country running. We saw it most clearly during the pandemic. When almost everything else stopped, they didn't.
The trouble is that owner-drivers and contractors carry enormous costs before they've even had the opportunity to earn a cent—the truck, the fuel, the insurance, the rego. The margins are wafer thin, and when a contract treats them unfairly, too many have had nowhere to go. We have already given drivers a quick and simple way to challenge an unfair contract at the Fair Work Commission.
But the high income threshold, the way it works now, was never built with a truckie in mind; it bears no relation to the way their costs and their earnings actually stack up. This bill fixes that, with a new threshold designed for the road transport industry—one that reflects what it really costs to keep a truck on the road. We will settle the right figure in consultation, but the aim is simple enough.
When a truckie has been done over, they get a fast, fair process to put it right. This is not where we started, though. Our fairer fuel reforms have already given drivers and operators a fast track to claw back a fairer share when their costs have spiked.
Our gig work laws, the first of their kind anywhere in the world, finally give employee-like workers a floor of minimum standards to stand on. This bill carries on that work for the people who keep the country fed, stocked and moving. The bill also turns to the Fair Work Commission.
When a workplace dispute needs settling, the commission is who settles it, and right now it needs a hand. Its case load has been climbing for years, and the pressures keep piling on. There are more paid agents in the system than ever before, and AI, as we've heard so many times before, is driving more disputes through the door and trickier ones at that.
On top of all of that, a recent decision of the full Federal Court now forces the commission to work through technical jurisdictional questions before it can even begin on the substance of a general protections claim. Anyone who has dealt with the commission knows how that goes. Time and money is burnt for everyone involved.
This bill does something practical about that without stripping away a single protection for workers. We want the commission free to get straight to the substance of a matter, rather than being bogged down by technicalities first. It can move quickly on claims that are frivolous or vexatious or have no reasonable prospect of success.
It can decide more matters on the papers, but only where both parties agree. It cuts the red tape so supported bargaining can start back up without a fresh round of paperwork, where an authorisation is already in place. Those opposite will predictably use this debate to have another go at the union movement and the workers who join it, but let's take the politics out of it.
These are sensible, practical changes that make the system fairer for everyone who uses it. A quick, certain outcome matters to a small-business owner every bit as much as it matters to a worker. Underneath all of it is something this side of the House has always believed in: that working people do best when they have a voice, when they can bargain for a fair deal directly through their union.
This is not new ground for us. The Labor Party was formed from the union movement, and we've never been shy about that. Nearly every protection a worker is afforded today was won the hard way by ordinary people who organised and stood together, and nearly every one of them was resisted at the time by the conservative side of this parliament.
The eight-hour day was won by the stonemasons in Melbourne in 1856, among the very first workers anywhere in the world to do so. The weekend, the minimum wage, paid leave, superannuation—none of this was a gift handed down from above. Every one of those was fought for, and in almost every case it was fought against by the same people who now come into this chamber to cry foul about workers' rights and the unions that stand up for them.
When we move to make our work more secure, we are not breaking new ground. We are doing what Labor governments have always done, and the reforms in this bill are a reflection of listening to workers, to employers and to the people who represent working people. No bill like this stands on its own.
To see why this work matters, we have to remember where we are coming from. Those opposite have form. Under their idol John Howard, we got Work Choices, a calculated attempt to strip away the protections and the bargaining power of ordinary working people.
When penalty rates were cut for some of our lowest paid workers, those opposite didn't lift a finger to reverse it. In fact, they have voted against every attempt we have made to protect take-home pay. When wages would not budge, one of their own senior ministers at the time told us why.
Low wage growth, he said, was a deliberate design feature of their economic plan. That is what working people are up against—a political party hell-bent on stripping the rights of workers and the unions that defend them. We reject that completely.
From our first months in office, we have set about turning it around through our secure jobs, better pay reforms and then our closing loopholes laws. Between them, they shut down the rorts that have been used to undercut workers' pay. Penalty rate protections went into law for the first time, and some of the lowest paid workers in this country got a pay rise out of it.
Every single time those measures came up to vote, those opposite voted against it. That is why we have been so determined to undo the damage of their decade in power, and it is why we bring forward this bill today. This bill is not complicated.
It backs secure work, gives workers who have been shut out a way back in and lets our commission get on with their job. Those opposite will predictably whinge about it. They always rail against every protection working people have ever won, but we do not accept that insecure work and flat wages are just how it should be.
We are proud to stand with working people, backing them in on higher wages and more secure work, giving them the tax cuts that they want and need and helping most of them get into their own home easier. Every day we are in this place, we focus on how we can advance the lives of working people, whereas those opposite—all three right-wing parties that we now have in this place—spend every day trying to make life harder for working people.
While those opposite stand against workers, we on this side of the House stand with them. That's why I commend the bill to the House.