Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is not unusual, but who can blame me if I cannot keep track of the ministerial changes under this government?

It is a very interesting situation we have here, I guess, when the government brings in this bill for protecting vulnerable workers. One can imagine, with its title, people listening to this broadcast think to themselves, 'That's good; it's got a good title.' What they do not know is the terrible, almost negligent—not almost, it is negligent—delay, when we know workers are being exploited and when we know workers are being mistreated, and those in government just kind of sits on its hands.

At the same time, it is cheering on cuts to penalty rates. At the same time we are getting reports about how we have to get stuck into the trade union movement either through the registered organisations bill or through the ABCC. There is this sort of idea that we should turn the screws every day on the only institutions in this country that really have their heart in protecting workers—the trade union movement. The trade union movement is not without its flaws, but overall it has been a patriotic, decent and very Australian institution which has added to the character of this country right from Federation onwards. We have one of the few constitutions in the world which has an arbitration power in it and protection for workers in it. Why is that in there? Because they had to get workers' votes and they had to get the support of trade unions to get Federation up, so the arbitration power was put in there, I think, after two or three referendums. The unions have added a great, important part of our culture: that idea of fairness.

The government received a report of Baiada Group with a date of publication of June 2015. That report said there has been:

Exploitation included significant underpayments, extremely long hours of work, high rents for overcrowded and unsafe worker accommodation, discrimination and misclassification of employees as contractors.

I know that this also affected Australian workers, so this report was no news to me. If you went down and asked the South Australian branch of the National Union of Workers they could have told you all of this. These reports were around well before. There were newspaper reports and other information in the public domain well before the report from the Fair Work Ombudsman. But this government got an official report from a government body, and what did it do? Nothing.

Then we fast forward. There are many newspaper articles, including some good work by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age about worker exploitation. Then the government got a report on 7-Eleven in April of 2016. Again, there are a whole range of issues. The executive summary states:

Investigations of stores included in the 20 store sample and of stores investigated as part of the wider Inquiry have led to a range of enforcement actions, including:

So what do the government do in response to that? Well, we know what they did: they did nothing. They just continued on their merry way—the ABCC, registered orgs and cuts to penalty rates—as if this is not going on.

I have some personal experience about these matters, and I will tell the House about them, because the other side of parliament is always telling us about how people in the Labor side went to university and never had a real job and blah, blah, blah. We hear that from those opposite all the time. But I have had some experience in this because I was a trolley collector for a while and I was a cleaner for a while. I worked for a company that did not pay its penalty rates, often did not pay its workers and had a boss who, while he was a nice enough fellow, you would have to chase sometimes for your wages and sometimes for other things. He would always try and slip one by you. You had to keep an eye on him. He was always going around in the trolley collection game and in the cleaning game undercutting his competitors. The way he did it was that he sliced and diced workers' wages. He did not pay penalty rates.

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