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July 12th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
Dave Oliver: ‘If that means going after their personal assets then so be it.’ Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
THE country’s most senior union leader says the government should be able to go after the personal assets of company directors who do not keep aside enough money to pay employee entitlements when their businesses go bust.
Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Dave Oliver made the call yesterday following an Age report revealing that there had been a fourfold increase in the cost of the federal government safety net that pays entitlements to workers when companies fail.
But employer body Ai Group slammed Mr Oliver’s idea.
It said that existing penalties against directors for trading while insolvent were adequate and described as ”arrant nonsense” claims that employers had taken $1 billion of workers’ money.
The $1 billion figure represents the estimated payout over the 11-year history of the taxpayer-funded General Employee Entitlements and Redundancy Scheme.
”The problem with it [GEERS], of course, is that it is shifting the burden from employers to the taxpayers,” Mr Oliver said.
”So therefore laws should be toughened up to make it easier for the government regulator to recover those monies from company directors, and if that means going after their personal assets then so be it.”
Stephen Smith, Ai Group’s director of industrial relations, said there were already onerous penalties, including jail time, for trading while insolvent.
”There’s not one instance cited by the unions where this so-called abuse of the fund has occurred,” he said. ”What it is is that we have had the global financial crisis and we now have an economic environment in some industries where things are very difficult.
”You only have to have a look at the overall statistics about insolvencies and you can see more companies are becoming insolvent than five years ago.
”There’s no evidence companies are doing anything different.”
An Age analysis of insolvency data compiled by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission shows that the number of companies that fall over while owing their workers redundancy payments has climbed from 624 in 2008-09 to 827 in 2010-11, the most recent year for which figures are available.
Over the same period, the number that owed more than $500,000 in unpaid redundancies when they collapsed more than doubled, from 24 to 55.
Mr Smith also rejected union calls for the establishment of an emergency fund into which employers would pay.
”It would impose a massive cost on companies, it would have been controlled by the unions – this idea is an idea from the past that the unions are raising again.
”GEERS is the solution to the problem.”
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