Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, $80 million, Senator Polley. And that $80 million could have been used in so many other ways. It could have been used to support the child abuse royal commission or to improve Tasmanian schools or Tasmanian health services, for example.

Labor formed the Fair Work Taskforce so we could give people, particularly workers, an opportunity to talk about how the Abbott government's attacks on jobs, wages and conditions will affect them. It has also been an opportunity for a conversation about what the government could be doing to create the high skilled jobs of the future by investing in skills and training, infrastructure, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Over the two days of hearings in Tasmania, the Fair Work Taskforce heard from: workers in aged and disability care, retail and manufacturing and about the importance of penalty rates to them and their families; university academics about the impact of casualisation on their job security; a worker in the community services industry about how the way grants are administered is driving down wages and threating job security; workers in the Australian Public Service about how a freeze on recruitment in their agency has put extraordinary pressure on them to deliver outcomes; and workers in the maritime industry about the threat of foreign flagged and crewed vessels to their job security, and Australia's marine safety and environment.

The conversations we had were very insightful, and I will outline some of these in detail. On the subject of penalty rates, we heard from workers across a variety of industries. For most of these workers, the penalty rates component comprised about 25 per cent of their pay, but they relied on that extra pay to get by. The retail workers spoke to us about how their penalty rates gave them enough pay to afford luxuries for their families. The luxuries they referred to were not a holiday, a house extension or a better car. They were actually talking about weekend sport for the kids or going to the cinema. To them, that is a luxury. One worker actually said that going to McDonald's for dinner from time to time was a luxury for her family—Mr Acting Deputy President, I would ask you if you could ask those on the other side to keep their voices down. This is a very important issue, and people out there in radio land are actually listening.