Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

A lot of workers in this country want to join unions but they are not allowed to. They are specifically told by their employers. That is what is happening today. I remember when this company eventually folded. By that time I was not working there but my friend Spike was. He had trouble getting his wages and all the rest of it. I said, 'That is pretty bad luck,' and he said, 'It is not as bad for me as it is for the other guys who went into subcontracting trolley collection contracts.' These guys were owed big money—$12,000, $10,000 and all that sort of stuff. There is a chain of contracts and, of course, when the top company went under everybody else lost their money. And it was real robbing Peter to pay Paul stuff, a real race to the bottom. Of course, the only real winners in all of this were Coles and Woollies. They were the ones who were getting the cheap trolley collection contracts. It is not like the workers were winning and it is not even like the small business were winning, because they went broke. They could not do it. They could not undercut themselves into business. We had this whirlpool of competition. You still see it going on today. The Fair Work Ombudsman still has to really focus on trolley collection and cleaning in particular, because they are areas where contracts go to the lowest common denominator. It was not uncommon when I was a union official to meet trolley collectors who were paid $5 an hour, and if you tried to get them to take action they often would not because they were afraid of losing their jobs. We absolutely know that that goes on today.

What is worse than that going on—it went on in my day—is that now it is becoming the norm. It is the norm. There is a vast army of exploited workers out there who operate in an area of a grey labour market where nobody enforces their rights and where they cannot enforce their rights and where they are terribly exploited, in terms of both their wages and conditions and safety and standards. That is against the Australian way. Even the National Party know it. I know that one of the members from Queensland has done quite a bit of work on this because he knows it is not fair to have this army of guest workers in this country exploited and abused and have them being competition for Australian workers.

All the while, this government, while it is hacking into penalty rates, ignores the abuses. It is now blackguarding the unemployed, saying there is this vast army of people out there who will not get a job—absolute nonsense. The reason they cannot get a job is because there is a vast army of exploited workers on 417 visas and other visas taking many of these positions where people might get their start.

The government rolled this bill in here this week very quickly. It is another patch-over on a prime ministership that is failing, on a government that is incoherent, on a government that has had multiple personnel changes and is completely lacking any philosophical underpinning other than being in office. This is why the member for Warringah is so outraged. Whatever you say about the member for Warringah, he stood for something.

If the government wants to convert on the road to Damascus, what it should do is pass Bill's bill. The Leader of the Opposition has introduced a bill into this House which closes down sham contracting, which licenses labour hire firms, and which shuts down phoenixing of firms to avoid the payment of wages, superannuation, conditions, annual leave, redundancy pay and the like. The taxpayer picks up the bill for all of that. Bill's bill criminalises coercion or threats that are used in the commission of breaching of FWA in regards to overseas workers—we know this is happening—and it improves unpaid wage recovery, which is absolutely critical. That is what the government should do. If it is going to do a backflip, if it is going to pretend that it is protecting vulnerable workers, why not go the whole way and just pass the Leader of the Opposition's bill? Pass the Labor bill because we are the only ones who can be relied on to support workers, to protect workers in this country. It has been ever thus; that is our mission.

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