MR MORRIS (Mornington) (12:34): I am delighted to have the opportunity to make some comments on the Retail Leases Amendment Bill 2019, and I was interested to hear the member for Carrum’s comment about Choc Top in Mornington.

It is interesting that they could not get anyone in the government to pay them any attention until they got on 3AW and got Neil Mitchell on the case. Funnily enough after that, suddenly the government were interested, but before then nothing.

Now, it is the first week back as we emerge from the biggest shutdown in the history of this state, but unfortunately it is also the week that the state went into recession—two consecutive quarters of negative growth for the first time since 2008.

I think everyone in the room was a member of the Parliament at the time of that negative growth, but certainly those of us that were in here will remember that it was very much down and straight out again. Unfortunately I do not think that is going to be the case this time, because the fact is that the writing has been on the wall for quite some time.

We know retail sales went through the floor well before the bushfires and well before the coronavirus, and unfortunately they are down again. The April figures are out today—they came out about an hour ago—and they confirm that Victoria has had the biggest fall in retail sales in the nation by a country mile—South Australia down 14.6; Western Australia down 16.8; New South Wales and Tassie, 17.5; Queensland only 15.7; and Victoria, 21.1—the biggest fall by a very long shot.

The Parliament can come back but far too many businesses remain shuttered. Employees have been warned by the Premier not to go to work; in every other state in the commonwealth they are open for business. We are lagging behind without a sufficient explanation.

If one group has been hard hit, it is retailers; they have been particularly hard hit. Of course, they are allowed to open—we know that—but they need customers to survive.

You only need to look around the city—those of us who have walked around the city in the last couple of days—and you see the shops are open, the restaurants are open, the coffee shops are open.

They are ready to do business, but where are the customers? Many of them are working from home; many of them are being actively discouraged from going to work by the government—actively encouraged by the Premier.

The fact, though, is that the retail industry was in trouble long before the current crisis. It would have been in trouble anyway. That trouble is so much deeper because of the current crisis. Unless we take active steps to get those customers back and to get those businesses trading again, far too many of them are going to fall over.

This is a very important industry for Victoria. You only need to look at the second-reading speech to realise just how critical the retail sector is: 33 000 small businesses in the retail industry; 96 per cent of retail trade conducted by small business.

On the 2018 figures that is $80 billion worth of trade. Perhaps it is down a little bit now—hopefully not. But the fact is that unless the government acts to ease this pressure and unless they act to place Victorian businesses on the same level playing field as businesses in every other state in the nation, there is a very real risk that these businesses will go down the drain.

Now, I was interested to read in the second-reading speech the claim on page 2 that alleges this government came to office in 1999. They had to go back to 1999 to find achievements in this area. Even then, the best they could come up with were the Retail Leases Act 2003 and amendments to that act in 2005.

I hate to tell you, guys, the Bracks government came to office in 1999. I have not had a look at the photo, but I suspect that there are not too many left—there may be a few—from 1999. At best, you came to office in 2014.

Mr Fowles interjected.

Mr MORRIS: ‘Wynne’, the minister at the table says.

Mr Fowles interjected.

Mr MORRIS: And Mikakos. Yes, so not too many. The reforms undertaken by the Bracks government, though, are not in dispute, but please do not try to claim them for yourselves because the fact is that you do not have any runs on the board in this area at all.

You have done nothing. You are simply insulting the intelligence of the community when you try and claim actions of a former government as your own.

It was also interesting that considerable space in the second-reading speech was given over to the Small Business Regulation Review in 2016—four years ago. That apparently led to the Small Business Regulation Review retail action statement released in mid-2018. I just love the language here: ‘the retail action statement’—Dan the action man.

Well, that statement was released in mid-2018. It took 16 months to get this bill into the Parliament from the release of the statement to the bill being in the Parliament—16 months. It was first read on 29 October 2019 and second read the next day—standard practice. But it has sat on the notice paper every day since until yesterday. Seven full months since the bill was second read and we are finally debating it now. Well done, action man.

The substance of this bill is mainly tweaks. They are mainly tweaks, but they are very important to the businesses concerned, and they deserve to be dealt with in a timely manner and they have not been. In effect it has taken five and a half years to get to this point. That is legislating at a glacial speed.

Indeed, as the Leader of the Opposition noted in his remarks opening the debate for the opposition yesterday, this is the first small business bill in this Parliament—the first small business bill in this Parliament!—and I would say to the government: surely you can do better than that. While I am pleased it is being debated, it should have been done and dusted and through the Parliament before Christmas.

The fact is—and the figures I have quoted earlier bear this out—small business is facing an apocalypse. That is what we should be dealing with right now, not dealing with legislation that should have been done before Christmas.

We should be actively supporting small businesses. We should be taking action to help the thousands of businesses that face imminent collapse, and we should be taking action to try and keep those thousands—hundreds of thousands potentially—of jobs that are at genuine risk. But we are not. We are playing catch-up on the government’s legislation.

The contents of the bill are modest, but as I said earlier, they are important to the people that they directly affect. There are changes to the Building Act 1993 and changes to the Retail Leases Act 2003. The Building Act change essentially clarifies the obligations of tenants and landlords with regard to essential safety measures, and I understand that change is required because of a 2015—five years ago—VCAT opinion that created a level of uncertainty, the legislation before us will fix that.

There are changes to the Retail Leases Act in two principal areas—again, the essential safety measures and buttressing the changes to the Building Act—but the most significant changes are the changes in the area of leasing arrangements.

They cover a range of matters, from the timing of the provision of information about proposed leases to changes with regard to renewals, including the exercise of options by landlords and a range of other matters including a 14-day cooling-off period. Also there are arrangements with regard to rent review. The final matter that is covered is the return of safety deposits, which is currently ‘as soon as practicable’, and you can imagine how well that works, so that is changed to 30 days, which is general commercial practice.

So there is not a huge amount of meat in this bill, but it is very important to those who are directly affected. I do ask: why has it taken five and a half years to get to this point? Why has it taken seven months to debate the bill? I think it clearly demonstrates the attitude of this government towards small business that it has taken so long for a relatively straightforward piece of legislation to get in front of the house.

As I said earlier, the opposition believes that there are many more matters that are far more important to small business that we could be discussing. We should have done this earlier, but we will certainly support these changes.

MR MORRIS (Mornington) (12:02): I am pleased to have the opportunity to make some comments on this Wage Theft Bill 2020.

This is politics over policy. It is the government seeking to obtain a partisan advantage at the expense of the community. It is the government seeking to obtain a partisan advantage at the expense of the very workers that they purport to represent.

The fact is this bill will not solve what is a very significant issue. It is in fact a failed attempt to deliver electoral advantage while pretending to be a serious policy solution.

Do we have a problem with wage theft in this country? More importantly, do we have a problem with employees not receiving what they are due? Clearly we do.

Is it intentional? In some cases, unfortunately yes it is. There are always those who are going to try to obtain some advantage by deception. But in the majority of cases clearly it is not intentional.

If you have a look at the information that the library circulated a couple of weeks ago—and I thank them for producing it—it goes back to the 7-Eleven issue of 2015 where there was mass underpayment of the workforce. I am not going to identify blame here, but we would have to say that that was the issue that started it. But then there is a long list of companies:

• the Made Establishment, $7.83 million, 515 employees;
• the Rockpool Dining Group, Fair Work suggested underpayment by $10 million;
• Coles, 600 staff, $20 million;
• Wesfarmers, $30.1 million across the company, $9 million at Target itself;
• Qantas, 638 employees over eight years, $7.1 million;
• Commonwealth Bank, $53 million, 41 000 staff;
•  the Woolworths group, between $200 million and $300 million and by some estimates $400 million, 5700 staff.

But it is not just those major enterprises. The ABC have set aside $23 million to address the underpayment of 2500 casual staff. The Victorian Department of Justice and Regulation, the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services, the National Gallery of Victoria, the state’s public hospitals—they have all been questioned in relation to underpayment, and there are charitable organisations as well.

So what is clear to me from that list, and they are just the higher-profile cases, is that whatever the motive—and in my view the motive of most businesses, most organisations, is pure; they are endeavouring to meet their obligations—the system is simply not working the way it should.

Employees are not receiving the remuneration to which they are entitled. That is not in dispute and it should not be dispute. But the question we should be asking is: what is the most effective way to ensure that every employee receives every cent to which they are legally entitled—every cent?

Was that the question uppermost in the minds of ministers when they were considering the drafting instructions? Was that the question the cabinet asked when the bill was considered? Clearly not, because if that had been the question, we would not have the bill in front of us that we have today.

This bill is not a serious attempt to solve a significant problem. Frankly the motives of the government in introducing this bill, to take a word from the Premier, are dodgy. It is politics, pure and simple.

Clearly the government is asking: what political advantage can we extract from the situation, this short payment of working Victorians, which is unacceptable? But the government is behaving equally unacceptably and is seeking to obtain an advantage themselves. It is a cynical ploy.

What irritates me most is it is exploiting the people that this government claims to represent, because the legislation that is before us—if it passes, and I expect it will—is not going to fix the problem.

The government knows it is not going to fix the problem. The government knows that there is commonwealth legislation pending. They know, and the Attorney-General and the Treasurer in their letter to the commonwealth Attorney-General made it clear that in their view the way forward was, and it has been quoted before in this debate:

… to develop a nationally consistent approach to wage theft, reflective of the objectives contained in the Inter-Governmental Agreement for a National Workplace Relations System for the Private Sector.

Is the bill before the house the product of consultation and cooperation of a working group which, in the words, again, of those two ministers, includes all the states and territories? Clearly it is not.

It has been interesting in this debate, because the government, as always, is seeking to conceal their cynicism with soothing, measured words, and the language we heard yesterday from the Treasurer I thought was such a clear demonstration of this, cleverly cloaking the naked politics of this legislation—the politics of envy, the allusions that we have had in the debate from government members of class warfare, the implication that all employers are evil or, as the Premier said in his media release of May last year, dodgy.

The bill probably does serve its intended purpose, and that intended purpose is clearly to advance the political interests of the Australian Labor Party, not the interests of Australian workers—the interests of the ALP, not workers.

What this bill should be doing is dealing with the systemic failure of this element of the wages system: we have an unbelievably complex industrial relations system. It is a system that meets neither the needs of employees nor the needs of employers. Yet the solution of the Victorian government to this problem is to add more complexity, more red tape, more punitive measures, more public servants.

This is not a measure to confront the problems with the system. This will simply compound them.

As the house is aware, the government has had submissions—and I think eminently sensible submissions—from a range of bodies, including the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI), the Australian Industry Group and the Victorian Farmers Federation.

In each of those there were some very sensible comments made and some genuine potential solutions advanced, and they have been completely ignored. Indeed yesterday when the member for Ripon referred to those submissions the next speaker, the member for Essendon, dismissed them out of hand because they came from employer organisations.

Apparently employer organisations have no place in this debate. They have no right to be part of these important discussions. Frankly that is a view I do not share. It is a view I think is deplorable. The views of those organisations should not have been ignored.

Unfortunately I will not have the opportunity to explore the details that were contained in those submissions but others have, so I think that is fine. I just want to quote from the VCCI submission. They said:

When organisations such the Red Cross, the ABC and Maurice Blackburn and Woolworths have identified underpayments, there is clearly something bigger at issue than intentional ‘theft’ going on

That is the point. This is not just intentional theft. This is a system-wide problem.

This is a bill that does nothing to solve the real problem—the problem of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers being underpaid by tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. The interests of those workers have effectively been thrown overboard by this government in an attempt to obtain a blatant political advantage.

Is it any wonder the public are cynical?