Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Last week we saw the humiliation of a tired eight-year old government in the Senate—a government that is in constant chaos, a government without an agenda, a government that's suffering from the way in which it came to office in 2013, eight long years ago, when it ran a campaign against the then Labor government defined by what it was against. It failed to define itself in favour of a reform agenda for the country. After three prime ministers, multiple deputy prime ministers, dozens of ministers, this is a government that really is out of time and out of ideas.

In the Senate last week, we saw the government introduce industrial relations legislation after an extensive consultation process between the trade union movement and employers that didn't reflect the basis of that negotiation. The government sought to entrench insecure work and make it harder for workers to get a pay rise. Instead, what they were left with was a single element which punishes casuals. Why have they done that?

In Queensland, Mr Skene, a miner in Central Queensland, won a case before the courts, which ruled that, indeed, he wasn't really a casual worker; he was a permanent worker because he was given shifts way in advance, 12 months in advance of when he was working. It was just a device to deny him the same conditions as the workers he worked beside. It's been the subject of a very clear principle from this side of the House of same job, same pay. If you're doing the same work, side by side, you should receive the same pay and the same conditions. What this legislation seeks to do is contravene that and entrench the capacity of employers to define as casual those people whose employers are getting all the benefit of permanent work but are not giving those workers the proper conditions like annual leave, sick leave, proper superannuation that come with it. That is what the government is seeking to do. So much for the Gold Coast accountants in the Senate who don the high-vis vest and pretend that they're workers, waiting for the big four accounting companies as they did before, like Senator Canavan.

The fact is that the government did something else that went to the heart of their own lack of morality. They ripped out the wage theft provisions that were supported by everyone in the Senate and in the House of Representatives in an immature, vindictive act of spite. Even after the Prime Minister stood before this House and spoke about wage theft and how important it was, instead of having a separate bill before the House to deal with it, what they did was rip that out. We know wage theft is an incredible scourge that causes a great deal of hardship. It could have been so different if they actually had been constructive.

The tragedy here is that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the trade union movement and individual workers put aside a whole lot of the hard-fought conditions in order to keep businesses going, in order to be constructive. The model was there. And what was the payback for those workers? This tardy piece of cheap legislation to undermine wages and conditions, at a time when the Reserve Bank is making it very clear that it is the undermining of wages that is holding back our national economy. This farce should be voted against, and Labor will be doing just that.

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