Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I’d better go and stand over that side—put her through it! The fact of the matter is this: if you have an AWA, that trades off penalties for higher wages—and bear in mind that Greg Combet said that he regularly traded off penalty rates. So I ask the question: why is it okay for Greg Combet to negotiate a worker’s penalty rates away, but it is not okay for the worker to negotiate on their penalty rates?

That is where the Labor Party does not understand the aspirations of everyday Australian workers, those workers who want to be able to negotiate with an employer. Some of those workers will want to have job sharing and shift sharing. There is a whole raft of women in particular who want to go back to work but want to be able to work from home. They want to be in a position where they can have some flexibility in the workplace. The fact of the matter is that you can have a penalty provision but it might be the case that it is never accessed because an employer never lets an employee access the penalty rates. But there might be a bonus pool involved for the staff, at the end of the financial year. That bonus pool might have a value, and we do not know whether it is accessed or not. So the question is: how do you compare apples with apples? If the Labor Party thinks that the solution is to have a one-size-fits-all approach—which is the Labor Party’s approach—to workplace relations that goes in to bat for the union bosses, we reject it and the workers of Australia reject it.

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