Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Attorney-General (Senator Brandis) to questions without notice asked by Senators Urquhart and Gallacher today relating to penalty rates.

This government comes in here and portrays itself as above board, really kosher, everything going well. But the reality is different. Senator Brandis talks about the Fair Work Commission and the independence thereof, but he does not tell the chamber that the bipartisan nature of appointments to the Fair Work Commission have been set aside since 2013. He does not say that we have continually appointed people from the right of industrial relations to the Fair Work Commission.

I do not cast any aspersions on those people's credentials to be Fair Work commissioners, but they are not impartial. There is no union and employer representation coming forward. He has simply skewed the Fair Work Commission's ability to rationally decide on issues like penalty rates by deliberately appointing people from his preferred side of politics. Senator Brandis comes in here and says, 'It's an independent umpire. Why are you being critical?', when since 2013 they have been slowly but surely setting out to skew the deliberations of that august tribunal to suit their own ends.

Let's get back to the central issue here. It is someone's daughter, brother, son, cousin or nephew who goes out to seek part-time or any employment in the workforce, is unable to get five days permanent work, ends up working some casual and part-time work—and heaven forbid they are lucky enough to enjoy a penalty on a Saturday or Sunday! What this miserable government wants to do is reduce that earning capacity. They have done no study on the net benefit to employment. They have done no study on the net benefit economically. It is simply that people are going to miss out on the opportunity to enjoy a reasonable level of living in casual and part-time employment.

More importantly, there is no creation of employment here. Senator Abetz goes closest to it when he says: 'You should all be happy to have any sort of job—any job at all. If you don't get penalties, bad luck. Just cop it. Get a job.' Well, the difference between the UK, the United States and Australia is: we have got higher minimum standards, and, in those higher minimum standards, we enjoy hard-won, hard-fought-for conditions like penalty rates. And we ought to fight to keep them, not appoint people to the Fair Work Commission whose whole ideology is to reduce those sorts of arrangements, to allegedly make the economy more competitive.

I have got to say: people who enjoy permanent part-time or part-time work or low-paid work in hospitality, enjoy as much as they can possibly get—and they spend it. I am not sure that they are off depositing their penalty rates incentive into a bank account! They spend it. A friend of mine ran a very fine establishment in the Victorian country, and paid the appropriate rates of pay—paid penalty rates—and a lot of those people actually spent some of that money in their leisure hours in the same establishment. And that is what would be happening around these sorts of arrangements.

People may be studying. They may be at home, studying, and getting some permanent part-time work, or getting some casual work. And heaven forbid they might actually earn a decent wage on Sunday!

This miserable government has gone right out of its way to take that off them, by deliberately setting in place a procedural path of politicisation of the Fair Work Commission. Can anybody from the government side name anybody from the employee representation side who has been appointed to the Fair Work Commission? And the resounding answer has got to be no. Senator Brandis says, 'It's all fair. It's independent. It's the independent umpire,' yet he, his government, his cabinet and his Prime Minister have deliberately set out to only appoint employer representatives as Fair Work Commissioners, in the last five years at least. So he has continued the ideological line of the Hon. Tony Abbott which has continued under the Hon. Malcolm Turnbull, and they stand up there and say, 'It's the independent umpire. Why are you complaining?'

Well, what we are complaining about is: you are ripping off hardworking, ordinary Australians who need a leg up, not a push down. We will continue to fight this issue all the way to the next election, and you will get your just deserts. Your return will be in the ballot box. (Time expired)