Julia Irwin (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As we all know there are three great lies. The first of those is: ‘I’ll still respect you in the morning.’ The second great lie is: ‘The cheque is in the mail.’ Of course, the third and biggest lie is: ‘I’m from the government. I’m here to help you.’ And that is the great lie that the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations is using to try to rescue this sad and sorry government from the annihilation that awaits it at the next election. But the Australian people stopped believing that lie a long time ago. No matter how many millions of dollars this desperate government spends to try to reassure the voters that they will have fairness in the workplace, the voters know that the scales of workplace fairness have been tipped too far in the employer’s favour and no amount of window-dressing will ensure the rights of workers in their workplaces.

Here we have a government promising to go over the AWAs since the 7 May with a fine-tooth comb and decide once and for all whether the agreement is fair. At the moment we are seeing 10,000 AWAs signed each week. Of course we could take the simple view and assume that many of these agreements are template agreements, as we saw in the hospitality industry—that is, they follow a pattern, they are all the same and only the name on each one is different. But then that would not be an individual agreement. I am left to ask how this battalion of public servants is going to test every single AWA for fairness.

I will give the House an example of an agreement gone wrong, and the consequences for the worker involved. Take the case of a part-time worker in retail who is employed three days a week at $20 an hour for $420 a week or around $21,000 a year. It is not uncommon to be required to work every second Sunday where the award requires double time payment for Sunday work—that is, 24 Sundays at double time. That would add $3,300 a year to that worker’s income, taking the total to $24,300 a year, and that works out at $24 an hour. So it would take a $4 increase in hourly pay to make up for the loss of penalty rates on Sundays. Again, I would have to ask how many AWAs would include an increase in hourly rate of pay like that. But if an AWA is to pass a real fairness test it would have to give that increase.

The loss to workers currently covered by awards that provide penalty rates for weekend work is often a significant proportion of their annual wage, and we do not know what the fairness test is. We will not find out whether the assessor takes into account the loss of overall income as a result of the loss of penalty rates and, of course, there will be no review of the decision taken. It does not matter how you set up the Office of the Workplace Ombudsman or how many inspectors the ombudsman has, when you do not have a fair bargaining process in the first place you cannot get a fair outcome. With a public servant to just rubber-stamp agreements, you do not have a safety net; you have a pit of vipers.

There is a lot of expensive advertising and lots of soothing words come from the minister, but the government just cannot get its message through. The fact is that Australian working families do not trust the government anymore, but we have the daily spectacle of the minister for workplace relations—‘Joe the Fruiterer’, I am calling him; he has everything except the leather apron—trying to sell us that basket of rotten apples we see in the commercials. But Australian working families are not buying it, and who could blame them? They can smell a shonky deal a mile off, and smiling Joe the Fruiterer will be left with that basket of rotten apples, Work Choices. The Prime Minister’s dream has become the workers’ nightmare. Bring on the election, I say. The people of Fowler want the election as soon as possible, and Australia definitely needs a Rudd Labor government.