Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

It's a serious question and it goes to the issue of the use of labour hire. The earlier formulation of the question was whether or not it was agreed that two workers doing the same job at the same place in the same workplace should get the same pay. That is not even the Labor policy. When you read their speech, they say that a labour hire firm who employs someone at the same job at the same pay should get no less. It's actually not even their policy, and they have had some difficulties in working out what their own policy is.

The difficulties, of course, arise with labour hire. For the benefit of the House, the ABS notes that labour hire as a proportion of all employees has been stable at about two per cent over the last decade. What is very important—and what the government absolutely ensures occurs—is that under labour hire agreements people should have exactly the same rights as other employees, including, of course, unfair dismissal rights; award entitlements; bargaining rights; general protections; and work, health and safety protections to name but a few. The Labor Party say that they have a policy for perfect equality between those two forms of employment, but when you actually read their policy they acknowledge that that is incredibly difficult. Indeed, in their policy, they say that someone at the labour hire with the same type of work at the same place should get at least as much but could get more—not exact parity, as they pretended in their earlier question. The reason why that is actually very, very difficult to achieve in practice is, for instance, an employee who is remunerated directly—

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