Ged Kearney (Cooper, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to commend not just a piece of legislation but a promise—a promise that has been made to the Australian people, to our workers. It's a promise to introduce the Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Penalty and Overtime Rates) Bill 2025, a fight that many of us have been waging for years, including yourself, Madam Deputy Speaker Chesters.

I stood with this struggle wearing many hats—as assistant minister in the Albanese Labor government, as the President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, as the secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation and, most importantly, as a shift worker myself. As a nurse, as a retail worker and as a hospitality worker over my life, I know what it means to miss birthdays, barbecues, bedtime stories, bath time and precious moments with your kids and your family because your shift ends when everyone else's day begins. I know what it's like to work during those silent hours of night, where your only friends are the owls, the bats, or anyone coming home from Revolver! In the aftermath of all those odd hours resides a consistent state of jetlag too.

When I was a young mum with baby twins, my husband and I bought our first house. It was in 1987. He was an apprentice chef, earning, at the time, about $180 a week, which wasn't a great deal of money, even back then. So, with two young babies and with interest rates soaring around 18 per cent—if anyone can remember when that happened—we were in real dire financial straits. I decided to work permanent night shift, because I knew that the penalty rates would get us over the line. I worked seven nights on and seven nights off. For anyone who has had to do this type of night-time rotation, they will know it is gruelling. You come home in the morning. I would get the kids ready for daycare. I'd give them their breakfast and get them dressed. My husband would well and truly have been gone by the time that happened. I'd get them to child care. I'd fall into bed and always manage about four hours—if I was lucky, five hours—of sleep before I had to get up and pick them up again. This was really hard. It does terrible things to your circadian rhythms, not to mention your mental health.

But I did that for about four or five years. It got us through some really terrible times.

I can certainly tell you that no-one is sacrificing that much of their life for a luxury bag or watch. You see, despite what any unscrupulous employer may tell you, penalty rates are no luxury. For millions of Australians penalty rates are compensation for missing out on those cherished moments and milestones of life, and for many Australians penalty rates are a survival fund, determining whether someone has enough to eat, enough to be housed and enough to pay their bills. That is because often our penalty rate workers are some of the lowest paid in this country. They're our cleaners, our retail and hospitality workers and our care economy workers. They're in our hospitals, our aged-care centres, fast food restaurants, supermarkets, pubs, schools and emergency services. Often their employment is casual, insecure and unreliable. And we know all too well who is more likely to be in casual and insecure work: it's women, and those with caring responsibilities, and our young people.

I don't believe that anyone who is trying to balance caring for their babies or an ageing parent with work should lose fair compensation. And I don't believe that our young people, balancing TAFE or university with work, should lose fair compensation. When I was ACTU president I was asked by a journalist in a public forum how I could possibly justify nearly $100 an hour for a shift worker. I looked at that journalist, who was a very senior journalist, and I thought to myself: I wonder how much you actually earn a year. The worker who was getting nearly $100 an hour on possibly one single day of the year—I can't even remember; it might have been for working New Year's Day—would earn, over the year at that time, around $30,000 a year. These are not highly paid people. I said to the journalist, 'I bet you get paid nearly triple that much, and nobody asks you how we justify your salary.'

The Albanese Labor government believes in fairness and opportunity, and that's exactly what this bill is about. However, fighting to protect penalty rates is not a mere value statement of the Labor government; it's a very real and constant threat. Back in 2015, when I was president of the ACTU, and over that whole period that I was in the trade union movement we saw employer after employer front the Fair Work Commission begging for cuts. They argued that they needed flexibility and efficiency, but really that was another word for cheaper labour. I used to joke with my members that flexibility was really the f-word.

I remember that the restaurant and catering association argued to abolish loadings, and their CEO famously said, 'Well, unions can't mount this argument around going to church'—implying that nobody actually went to church anymore, and that weekends were meaningless—as though time with your kids, your friends and the rest of your community is irrelevant. In fact, a longstanding trope was that weekends no longer exist, that everybody works 24/7 now, that weekends are not a thing anymore and workers don't need to be compensated for it. But, as I said then, and I will say it now: the day they play the Rugby League grand final on a Tuesday morning is the day you can tell me there's no such thing as a weekend. The world still runs on a weekly rhythm, and an absolute majority of workers still work Monday to Friday. Yet the cuts keep coming.

I read in the Australian a few months ago that the Australian Industry Group is pushing to cut the Clerks—Private Sector Award and, if they get their way, workers in admin, banking and finance, many of them young women, could lose up to $16,000 a year. That's a lot of money when you're on a low wage to start with—no penalty rates, no overtime and no breaks, just more profits for the top and less dignity for the people who make those profits possible.

So gutting penalty rates is not a hypothetical. It is happening, and the bill is a line in the sand. More specifically, this bill enshrines protections for penalty rates and overtime entitlements in the Fair Work Act, making it harder for big business and employer groups to strip them away through award reviews.

We are ensuring that penalty rates and overtime pay are considered minimum standards. If employers want to negotiate higher pay for their workers in exchange for a higher base rate, for example, they are still free to do that through the Fair Work Commission and through bargaining, alongside their workers and with the unions, and they must do that and still meet a better-off-overall test. There are no tricks and no loopholes now, and, most importantly, there will be less division of power. You don't have to be a lifelong unionist to know that divided we beg, united we bargain. Before those opposite try to call me a radical again, I want to emphasise that this bill still allows freedom of negotiation between employers and employees. It just balances the power when it happens.

The bill is sensible and fair. And where is the coalition on this bill? They voted against restoring penalty rates in the last parliament. They backed the business lobbyists without compromise or question. The truth is that the Liberal Party has never believed in fair compensation for working people. In recent years, they opposed paid family and domestic violence leave, multi-employer bargaining and the right to disconnect. They also attempted infamously during the election to remove the ability to work from home. They talk about aspiration but for whom—whose aspiration? It's certainly not working people.

This bill is part of a broader vision for our country, a vision that the Labor government is proud to fight for every single day. This builds on work we've already done, including increasing the minimum wage, stronger laws to close the gender pay gap and increased pay for care economy workers—historic investment in secure Australian jobs. Ours is a vision based on a fairer Australia for all. We understand the difference a few dollars can make each week. I certainly know the difference a few extra dollars made for me when I was a nurse raising my kids.

This bill is for our nurses pulling late shifts and night shifts and for young baristas studying during the week, relying on weekend rates just to get by. It's for aged care workers who go above and beyond to ensure the best possible care at all times. This bill is for every worker who has ever missed a Christmas, a birthday, eight hours of sleep and every precious moment with a loved one. When we protect penalty rates, we protect people and we ensure dignity. I commend this bill to the House.

See this speech in context