Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On this government's watch, many of our coalmining companies have dramatically increased their use of labour hire companies. I support our coalmining companies. They pay lots of tax, which we, of course, use to build schools, hospitals and roads and, most importantly, they create hundreds of thousands of jobs, including many thousands of jobs in my own electorate. But I don't support the use of labour hire for the sole purpose of lowering the cost of doing business, at the expense of our mineworkers.

We have far too many mineworkers working alongside their mates on less pay and without all the leave and other entitlements enjoyed by their mates. At BHP's Mt Arthur mine, for example, a mineworker working for the company under the enterprise agreement secured by the union earns $159,000 a year, while his or her mate working alongside him or her earns only $106,000 working for the labour hire company—and, in this case, a labour hire company wholly owned by the mining company, BHP. In other words, it was established for one purpose only. So same job, different pay; same roster, different pay; and same hours, different pay—year in, year out.

Labor went to the 2019 election promising to fix this by inserting into the Fair Work Act an objective definition of what is a casual employee. At the time, members of the government, including Senator Matt Canavan, ran around the electorate saying, 'We already got this covered; we have a bill in the House to fix this.' Mysteriously, that bill just disappeared after the election. But, worse, that bill would have made the situation worse for our coalminers, because what that bill is about and what this government is really about is overtaking the so-called WorkPac case, where the Federal Court said, 'If it walks like a duck and squawks like a duck, it's probably a duck,' and found that these mineworkers year in, year out, on the same roster, working the same days are entitled to the same rate of pay as their mates working for the mining company. This government is now joining with the companies in the court to appeal the WorkPac decision—in other words, to do over our mineworkers.

One Nation says that it supports our mineworkers; yet down here, day in, day out, One Nation senators support this anti-worker government. If One Nation is serious about backing our coalminers, they should join with Labor and do something about this overcasualisation.