Carina Garland (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

These laws have been a long time coming. Workers around the country have been fighting for the best part of a decade to ensure that a lot of these loopholes are closed, including labour hire workers. At this point, I really want to thank all the workers across Australia, the union delegates, the union members, the union leadership, the ACTU and all other trades and labour councils across the country for the hard work, vision and courage they've been possessed of to ensure that these changes are finally going to be made law. The pendulum has swung too far in one direction. Our government is about getting things back where they should be, to make sure that our country is a fair one for workers.

As a member of the Australian Labor Party, I am absolutely unapologetic of the fact that I stand with workers right across Australia. I urge those opposite to do the same. I've met too many people who have suffered the pain of insecure work. I spoke about my own experience of insecure work in my very first speech in this place. It devastates communities. It's not just about individual lives. When people don't have a secure job, they cannot make that commitment to the local sporting group. They cannot participate in the parents and friends associations. They can't make plans. They can't think of what a good life for them and their families might look like. It holds people back. Making sure that we're taking action here to ensure that labour hire workers are treated the same as the people they work next to every single day in the workplace will go a long way in giving certainty to those people. I'm really proud to stand with them today.

I've met too many workers, particularly young, migrant and women workers, who have experienced wage theft. We talk in this place of the cost-of-living crisis. We hear, frankly, ridiculous MPIs day after day in this place about the cost-of-living crisis. Now, given the opportunity for people to be paid their lawful wages and for consequences to follow when that doesn't happen, those opposite are voting no. We're talking about people who are paid $4 an hour, for goodness sake. We're talking about making that a crime.

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