Job creation ‘number one game’

FEDERAL Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter has declined to outline exactly what the Government wants from proposed meetings with business and unions, other than the “number one game” of creating jobs.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced last week he wanted to draw on the collaboration with unions and business during the COVID-19 pandemic, setting up five working groups to improve outdated industrial relations laws.

“The point of these working groups is not for the Government to stroll into the room and tell everyone how it is and how it’s going to be,” Mr Porter (pictured), who will chair the groups, said yesterday.

“The point of them is to look at known problems inside the system that are inhibiting us in our challenge to grow back hundreds of thousands of jobs and hear from the parties most affected, with the skin in the game, as to how we may best solve those problems.”

But Mr Porter did have some views on some issues, including agreements surrounding greenfield sites, such as large construction projects in mining, oil and gas that generated tens of thousands of jobs.

“The agreements that cover them very often come up for renewal and renegotiation midway or part-way through the project,” he said.

“What the businesses that generate those jobs say is that is a very clunky system and it increases the cost of the construction and decreases the overall generation.”

He said making a life-of-project agreement did “make sense”.

Mr Porter said the better off overall, or BOOT, test in enterprise agreements needed to be looked at.

“The way it’s working now means less and less enterprise agreements,” he said.