Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for McPherson for a very interesting contribution. She has certainly got me feeling quite nervous and anxious to go back and check my own circumstances. Indeed, as a divorced mother—and, therefore, a single woman—looking forward to my pensionable age, I think it is a very good point to have made. I appreciate the contribution that she has made—in particular, the fact that she made it to, with all due respect, Mr Deputy Speaker Adams, a largely female presence in the House as well, both elected and not elected.

I would like to take the opportunity in this grievance debate today to cover three areas that have caused me significant frustration over the last 12 months, or just over 12 months, in this House. On a significant number of occasions, important bills have been presented to the House and I have been denied the opportunity to put on the record the concerns of my electorate, and to give them the respect of putting on the public record my own views on those pieces of legislation, because the full debate has been gagged by the government in the House. So I take this opportunity, having felt fairly annoyed at the time that that had happened, to at least put on the record, in a much briefer format, my views on those matters and why I still think it is important to have the discussions that flow on from the passage of those pieces of legislation—although, in one case, it looks like it will not be passed.

The first occasion on which I was gagged from presenting my views, as an elected representative of one of the 150 electorates in this country, was on the passage of the Work Choices bill. This particular piece of legislation has now been in place for a time—although not a great deal of time—and, as a member of the Labor Party’s IR task force, and having travelled to 22 electorates around Australia, I think that it is clear that the implications of it are starting to be felt.

Certainly, in my electorate I have had representations, by and large by young people—although through their parents, rather than directly by the young people—about circumstances that have caused them a great deal of angst. Sadly, on each and every occasion, whilst the parents are willing to speak up and, indeed, to do so publicly, the young people are not. Being a parent of a 22-year-old and a 17-year-old, I am more than conscious of how vulnerable young people can feel in their early years in the workforce.

On one occasion in my electorate, a particular fast food outlet had changed franchise owners. The new franchisee had come in and told all the staff not to bother coming back until he had made an assessment of what he wanted to do, and that he would ring them. Not surprisingly, none of them had heard from him again, and they had approached me about what exactly their rights were and what they could do.

Of course, under the current legislation they have no rights; they have no capacity to redress that situation. There were certainly less than 100 employees there. They were young people who, by and large, were doing casual work—many of them while they were studying at university—and they felt particularly bitter about the experience. Like so many young people in that age group—and I know people on both sides of this House have had children in that age group—they are trying to study and to do it by being, to some extent, selfsufficient and not relying on their parents, and they are fairly optimistic about their opportunities and the skills that they bring. So to have that sort of experience is very bitter for them; and it is very frustrating for me, as their elected representative, to have to tell them that there is no fairness in the system and no capacity for them to seek some redress about that.

The Work Choices bill, in particular, in my electorate, has raised some significant concerns. Indeed, in fairness, I acknowledge that the member for Lindsay has also made public her concerns about this in regard to people from non-English-speaking backgrounds. Generally speaking they are of an older generation. Some of them in my area came out and worked in the steel works in the forties and fifties, and developed quite significant manufacturing based skills. Many of them of course were laid off during the great downturn—or the restructuring of the steel industry, as they called it at the time. They went out and established themselves with small businesses, got employment with contract cleaning companies and did that sort of work. A lot of them also have had to rely on their wives working as a result of that significant decrease in their pay. And they are particularly vulnerable. To have any sort of belief that people in that circumstance have any sort of choice when confronted with an AWA is simply to defy logical assessment of the situation.

If what you are saying is that those people should work on a below-poverty-line wage in order to create more job opportunities, then at least be honest enough with them to say that that is the sacrifice you are expecting them to make to achieve that outcome. But many that I have spoken with—and, indeed, many who attended various rallies and functions I was at on this particular bill—were very concerned that they would not have the capacity to get fairness out of the system under this legislation.

The second time that I was gagged in this place, and denied the opportunity to put on the record the concerns of my electorate and my own position and views, was on the Telstra privatisation bill. And what a success that has been so far! Indeed, my greatest concern with the proposal to sell the remaining 51 per cent of Telstra was that I had always found Telstra local management to be relatively keen to assist me, as the local federal representative, to get resolution of issues when I had concerns about their service delivery. I was a little bit cynical that you could get very quick resolution of the issues if you saw your federal member but, if you tried to go through the established procedures that they had in place, you got very frustrated. But, by and large, at least if people had the nous to get onto their federal member they could actually get their problems solved.

Since that bill passed, I have noticed a significant change in the attitude of Telstra management, locally and nationally, towards those sorts of problems. Nothing exemplifies that more than the experience of a group of students at my local TAFE who were told by the TAFE management that the payphone at the building that they attended was to be removed because it was a commercial payphone and the income it took in did not cover the maintenance costs. This particular phone is on the welfare and childcare studies building. By and large, about 90 per cent of the students attending classes in that building are women and are often in part-time or night courses.

In a nearby area—the university and TAFE are side by side—a few years ago sadly a rape occurred and many of the women attending those classes indicated to me that their partners and family were very concerned that they had safe transport. Most of them had set-ups whereby when the class was finished they would use the payphone to ring home to get whoever it was who was to pick them up to come out and do so. Quite often they did that on a reverse charges call. Having a 17-year-old, as some of you would appreciate, I know that, if you are on a low income, or no income using reversing charges is a fairly standard method of making phone calls to family. They obviously had real concerns about this particular phone being removed.

There were two phones being removed from the TAFE campus. We did not have any problems with the other one. There were no particular access and safety issues about that, so there was no complaint. But students then subsequently found out that in order to register complaints they were put on a circuit of being sent from one person to another—in fact, recorded messages rather than actual people. Subsequently, it turned out when a memo from Telstra management was leaked that that system was purposely set up to make it virtually impossible to register a complaint about the proposed removal of the payphone. I acknowledge that the minister has since required them to put a more open and transparent complaints procedure in place, but that is absolutely an example of why the privatisation is going to cause us so much more grief in our local electorates.

Finally, in the last minute or so that I have I want to acknowledge that I would have liked—as I understand my colleague at the table, Ms King, would have—to have contributed to the debate on the proposed changes to the way we handle refugees in this country. I can only say that I am glad that the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 seems to have badly stalled and perhaps will not rear its head. In my area we are currently running very good community campaigns to integrate people from the sub-African continent into our communities and, when you hear the extraordinary tales of what they have survived and been through and you see the wonderful commitment to making them a part of our community, you can only commend it and oppose that bill. (Time expired)