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

They’ve all got jobs—the party of Work Choices speaks! Thank you very much. That is a big tick for Work Choices from the Liberal Party backbench. The party of Work Choices is once again revealed as the party of Work Choices, using exactly the same arguments it used in the lead-up to the last election. But looking at this sample of 670 Australian workplace agreements filed in this period, which were assessed against the protected award conditions and would have been examples of the kinds of agreements that used to be filed prior to the fairness test, what do we find? These statistics are truly startling. Approximately 45 per cent of these AWAs provided between $1 and $49 per week below the required rate of pay for the protected award conditions—that is, they ripped people off for between zero and 50 bucks a week. That was approximately 45 per cent of them. When we go further, we find that approximately 50 per cent provided from $50 to $199 per week below the required rate of pay—50 per cent provided less than people should have got by a margin of $50 to $199 dollars. Approximately five per cent provided $200 to $499 per week below the required rate of pay, ripping people off by that amount week after week. Approximately 0.5 per cent—half a per cent—provided more than $500 per week below the required rate of pay.

In the last few days, we have heard a lot in this House from the Liberal Party about so-called compassion. I would ask Liberal Party members in this House to look at these new statistics which would be indicative of the kind of Australian workplace agreements which were filed under the previous government.

See this speech in context