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

I move:

That the amendments be agreed to.

This legislation is a critical part of the government's agenda to fight to get wages moving. While those opposite want people to work longer for less, we want people to earn more and keep more of what they earn. People have been waiting too long for these provisions, for rights for casuals, for minimum standards in the gig economy, for minimum standards in road transport and to be able to have some rights to your weekends and your time off.

These are basic rights that are contained in this bill, which is why it's no surprise that those opposite are fighting tooth and nail to prevent them. They fought tooth and nail against us when we said we would argue for an improvement in the minimum wage. They fought tooth and nail against the secure jobs and better pay bill. They did it with closing loopholes No. 1 and they are doing it again now with closing loopholes No.2. We are simply talking about basic rights—the concept that a casual, who is already working completely consistent hours, should have a right to say, 'I would like some job security.' Why on earth is that controversial? Try getting a mortgage or try getting a rental property if you've only got a casual job. It's about giving people some security in their lives. Our entire workplace relations system in Australia is based on the concept of having minimum standards. Yet, if you are a gig worker when you first get asked, 'Are you are an employee?' and the answer is, 'No,' all of those rights fall off a cliff. What we're doing today is turning that cliff into a ramp. The parliament is deciding today that Australia should not be a nation where you need to rely on tips to make ends meet.

The road transport industry has been fighting for 20 years for a workable system of minimum standards, like payment times to make sure that people aren't waiting endlessly for the money they are owed to be paid while all the bills for the money they owe are coming in one after another after another. This is thanks to the work of both industry and the Transport Workers Union, working together. They have come up with a project, a program, a plan to be able to do this through the Fair Work Commission that will deliver whether you are an employer, an employee, an owner-driver or just a motorist who wants to make sure that those driving heavy vehicles aren't under unreasonable pressure.

So today we should act. A further bill will be introduced on Thursday by me, because of what happened in the Senate last week, one of the most extraordinary things that I've ever seen. The right to disconnect is an important right. Where flexibility already exists in the workplace, where workers and employers already have cooperative arrangements, this legislation will make no difference to those arrangements at all. But there are some bad actors, some employers, who do take advantage and constantly reach into people's personal time and stop them from ever being able to get a weekend or reasonable time off. Those workers will finally have a right to ignore incessant unreasonable contact when it's being made.

It's not a ban on the employer reaching out, but it does mean that if you're on your weekend you don't have to constantly have your phone with you. If you want to have your phone off at night, that's not an unreasonable thing to do. If you've got a work email account, you can wait until your work hours before you check back in. Of course there'll be some people for whom regular checking in or keeping in contact is part of their award or agreement, where they're paid an allowance or paid a salary and that's part of the deal, and nothing changes in those circumstances. Effectively to argue against this is to argue that it should be okay for people to be working without being paid, because that's the alternative. And the position of those opposite, the one thing in this bill that they thought they would immediately declare they would repeal, was the thing that deals with people having to work for free. That was the bit they thought was outrageous. It just says how one-sided their view is to what the laws at the workplace should be.

Part of the way that the right to disconnect has been introduced is the same way that we deal with a series of other rights, including some anti-bullying provisions that are in the Fair Work Act. (Time expired)

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