Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Can I echo the words of the Prime Minister in answer to the earlier question from the member for Bendigo. Of course working families rely on decent minimum wages. They also rely on a decent safety net at work; that is, a safety net that cannot be stripped away from them. Today I am in a position to outline some further information about the way in which working Australian families had the safety net ripped away from them by the Liberal Party in government, the party of Work Choices.

I want to put these statistics in context. It is very difficult to get statistics about the impact of Australian workplace agreements on Australian working families, and that is because the former government—the Liberal government, the party of Work Choices—knew that Australian workplace agreements were hurting working families and they deliberately wanted to cover that information up. They therefore went through no systematic analysis of what was happening with Australian workplace agreements. They kept them in the black box. They did not want them looked at. They did not want them scrutinised. The amount of information that has been in the public domain has been limited. There was some at Senate estimates. There was some that leaked. There was the ABS data that the Prime Minister referred to in the House earlier today.

Of course, there were two systems that the former government operated in relation to Australian workplace agreements. The original Work Choices system meant an Australian workplace agreement was valid provided that it passed just five minimum conditions. Then last year, under acute political pressure, the then government in the lead-up to the election lurched for a so-called fairness test. Beyond that point, Australian workplace agreements were only valid if they were assessed against a set of protected award conditions. In order to understand the statistics that I am about to give to the House, people need to understand that transition point. This is an analysis of agreements that were filed in the two months from May last year.

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