On the last sitting day of parliament for the year, Prime Minister Scott Morrison gave further fuel to speculation that the controversial “better off overall test” (BOOT) may be dumped from the government’s omnibus Fair Work Act amendment bill. Morrison directed Labor’s questions about his government’s surprise proposal to undermine the BOOT to Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter. The measure was never raised during 150 hours of talks between employers and unions, and was introduced into the bill without consultation only in the past fortnight. Porter said this morning that the measure was not a “take it or leave it” proposition, and at a Mural Hall press conference this afternoon he said it was early days for the bill, which will go to a Senate inquiry. Opening a string of questions, Sky News political editor Andrew Clennell asked Porter whether he would be the “fall guy” if the legislation did not get up. Porter answered that he was responsible for the legislation and that “the focus has been on four paragraphs and one page so far”. With #WorkChoices2 trending on Twitter, Morrison clearly does not want to be associated with a pre-Christmas pay cut for frontline workers in the year of the pandemic, and he said not a word about industrial relations in his chummy end-of-year interview with 2GB’s Ray Hadley. 

Porter was pretty persuasive in his press conference, denying that the government was preparing to rip up the one page of the bill concerning the BOOT and arguing it was “absolutely absurd” to suggest that a business doing well because of COVID-19 could take advantage of the proposed new measure and somehow get the Fair Work Commission to approve an enterprise agreement that did not pass the BOOT. Porter said a JobKeeper-style turnover test would be “totally unworkable”, and there were only a “tiny handful of cases” when the measure would be used: “In these circumstances where all parties would have to agree, where the business would have to be impacted by COVID, obviously in a negative way, and where the Fair Work Commission would have to determine that, in those circumstances, it was not against the public interest to have a modification to an award provision,” he said.

Nonetheless, he flagged a willingness to debate and amend the legislation. “Like all of the other parts of the Act, dealing with all of the five problems that we’re seeking to solve, we’ll listen, we’ll talk to people, it’ll go through a committee process, but we’re not going to get into this sort of old 1997 politics [a reference to John Howard’s waterfront reforms]. This is going to be a calm, rational discussion which has to serve the best interests of people who need the government to assist in job growth.”

Porter took the same arguments in defence of the legislation into Question Time, accusing Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese and shadow industrial relations minister Tony Burke of jumping the shark. “Why are they both trying to come out with the most absurd, ridiculous, untruth in a question that they possibly can?” he asked. But Porter’s lawyerly arguments will not be enough to defend the omnibus bill against a frontal assault from Labor and the union movement, when the Morrison government has specifically and repeatedly declined to rule out that workers will not be left worse off.    

The Greens announced that they will oppose the omnibus bill outright. “The Greens have a clear position on the government’s IR bill,” said leader Adam Bandt. “We oppose this bill because it cuts pay and makes job insecurity worse. The Greens will block this bill in the Senate. The frontline workers who helped us through the pandemic deserve a medal, not a pay cut.”

It’s a simple line, and given the past form of the Coalition on industrial relations, it is going to bite.    

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