Honouring one of its election commitments, the Victorian Labor Government will today introduce legislation to abolish the former Coalition Government's anti-picketing laws.
A SA Supreme Court full bench has ruled that an employer must pay long service leave to a casual dockhand who worked sporadically for more than 20 years at Port Lincoln Harbour but has also recommended that state parliament urgently fix legislation that reduced his entitlement to almost nothing.
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.
