Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

At least they’ve got a job! You run that in your electorate. I dare you to run that in your electorate when you have a young person in a family who goes to work for a business for two weeks and is then told: ‘That’s work experience and it won’t be paid. Thanks very much but we’ve decided you’re not suitable; see you later, we’ll get somebody else in,’ to do two weeks work for no pay. And then you have the young person who genuinely thinks they have been signed up for a traineeship or an apprenticeship and then discovers that in fact there is no paperwork and after working the month over Christmas is told, ‘We no longer think you’ve got enough experience to be an apprentice, see you later.’ These are examples I have had in my electorate office. You talk to families whose kids are going through those experiences and you tell them, ‘Any job’s better than no job.’ I tell you what: you will get a pretty rude and abrupt response to that. The reality of Work Choices is that it works fine if you have power. If you do not, you will find yourself well and truly exploited.

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