In a move that the government has dismissed as a political stunt, the ACTU has told Employment Minister Eric Abetz he should suspend his IR legislative agenda for at least a year to enable the Heydon trade union inquiry and the Productivity Commission Fair Work Act review to run their course.
The Fair Work Commission will have to consider whether enterprise agreements contain productivity improvements before it approves them, while unions face additional hurdles to protected action, under the Coalition's latest IR bill.
Tasmania's Legislative Council has passed a Government bill designed to curtail rights to engage in workplace-disrupting pickets and protests, but only after removing mandatory jail terms for repeat offenders.
The Abbott Government will try its luck with a fourth major IR Bill before the end of the year, despite the first three having been blocked or held up in the Senate.
RMIT honorary professor and long-serving IR academic Breen Creighton says Australian labour law legislation has been characterised by knee-jerk responses to non-existent problems, a lack of willingness to allow existing laws to deal with issues, and "political opportunism", which explains why the major statute had been amended five times a year on average since 2009.
In the first real IR test of the post-July 1 Senate's precarious balance of power, Palmer United Party senators voted with their Coalition colleagues last night to preserve, by one vote, the rights of the WA government and third parties to ask the Fair Work Commission to terminate damaging industrial action.
Tasmania's Hodgman Government has introduced draft legislation for its proposal to impose a 12-month freeze on the wages and incremental increases of the state's 24,000 public servants and remove the State IRC's power to award future pay increases above a 2% Government-set cap.
The Abbott Government this morning introduced a Bill in the House of Representatives to cap redundancy payments under the Fair Entitlements Guarantee scheme at a maximum of 16 weeks, describing the current benefits for employees of insolvent companies as "overly generous" and as creating a "moral hazard".
Senior Victorian Government Minister Robert Clark has told the HR Nicholls Society that he has drawn on all three of his portfolios to combat bad behaviour in the building industry and has flagged changes to strengthen the guidelines for contractors seeking state government work.
