David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party, Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

The whole assumption here is that you are in favour of it and we are against it. Many people on this side have worked in industries where there are shifts, overtime and you work unsocial hours. I spent 30 years doing shiftwork. So the idea that only the opposition understands this is quite faulty. But that is quite different from a situation where someone just gets a job on a weekend because they are at uni or other things and there is an automatic assumption that they have already worked an eight-hour day or a 37-hour week. That sort of mentality means that in my part of the world, where we have a tourism industry that stops operating on Sundays and many Saturdays, it is counterproductive; it means that there are fewer jobs. So, even though the sentiment might be to protect income, it depends on which way you are looking at it. In my part of the world there are plenty of people who would love to run their tourism businesses on a Sunday but cannot because it is uneconomic. There needs to be two sides to the coin in any discussion about this because not everywhere is the same. Most of what was proposed before would mean people would be getting rates of pay that were uneconomic for businesses and businesses would not employ them. What we are trying to do is grow employment opportunities. For employment to happen anywhere, you need to have a business. If you price yourself out of existence, the business folds, and that is the commonsense approach that we are adopting in this whole space.

The issue that you are referring to is not the sole preserve of the opposition. We understand a lot of those arguments, but the arguments fall down. Employment is the driver behind any—

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