Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Cunningham, who's been a relentless defender of trying to get wages moving in this country and for the workers in her electorate. I'm glad the question specifically referred to the need to clarify the labour hire loophole. It's a very simple policy, which is: if a business has already agreed to rates of pay in an enterprise agreement, they shouldn't be able to use labour hire to undercut them. They'll still use labour hire for all the other reasons: of specialist workforce, of short-term replacement or for a surge. All of that's completely legitimate, but it shouldn't be used to undercut a rate of pay that the employer's previously agreed to.

It's important that this be clarified because back at the start of the month—it was on the front pages of the papers—there was going to be this enormous campaign, and I felt for the business organisations that were funding that campaign because they were claiming that there was a government policy that there just wasn't. They were claiming that there was a government policy that everyone would have to be paid the same, so I came out immediately to correct the record so that the business lobby didn't waste that money. Then yesterday I was reading a great article in the Sydney Morning Herald, about the Cooks River, and I looked on the page beside and realised they're still running the ad. And the ad is campaigning against a government policy that purports to do this:

It means that if you've chosen to work hard because you want more pay—by law—you can't be paid more than someone who doesn't want to work hard at all.

Now, that sounds like a terrible policy. It's absolutely appalling! And I realised what these ads were about. They're going to run a successful campaign, because you start with a policy that government has no intention of implementing, you campaign hard against it and at the end the government doesn't implement it. And it's a complete victory! I say to those who are funding these ads, and they're out there on social media as well. They're on the news.com.au website as well, and I say with this campaign: go hard—go hard! It will be incredibly successful because it is railing against a policy idea that they have come up with themselves, that I would never support, that this government would never implement—

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