Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to put a different angle on this debate as I rise to contribute to taking note of questions to ministers. I just want make it very clear to those poor devils stuck in here listening to some of the nonsense here: I actually am a former small businessman. I come from a trucking background, with three generations of truckies. I had the privilege of being a rank-and-file employee, where I learnt my skills as a furniture removalist, going into long distance trucking to buy my own. I had to actually put the family house on the line. My wife and I had no idea how we were going to pay off our debt of $100,000 or so back in 1980 when the truck was about $30,000.

I want to talk from the heart—and I know what it means—when we start talking about union collective agreements. Senator Duniam, who is on his way out of the chamber, had a crack at union agreements. These collective agreements under the enterprise bargaining structure are where the employer speaks to the employees and they may come to an arrangement where there is an increase in base pay for the normal 38 hours. It will mean an increase in their superannuation. It will be an increase that affects their holiday pay, their sick leave and all sorts of stuff. If they have traded off a higher penalty rate for the weekend then it is because it has been picked up in the ordinary hours. That is how that happens. But those opposite forget to say that.

But I want to talk about penalty rates. When I was cutting my teeth in furniture removals with an old company called Ansett, which is no longer with us, unfortunately, the cream on the cake at the end of the week was our penalty rates. After moving furniture back then for eight hours a day—it was not 7.6 hours and RDOs—we had the opportunity, because the boss came out and said, 'We need you to keep working because we have to start loading the truck for Darwin and the truck the Sydney. Will you stay back?' You jumped at the opportunity and you did so purely for the reason that not only were you going to get more pay but you got an extra rate. That was the cream on the cake—the icing on the cake. And then if you had the opportunity on the weekend to do bush runs as an offsider or as an offsider on office removals, guess what? The first two hours were time and a half and then double time. For that I had to give up my footy career. I was a state schoolboy footballer. I did not have to, but I wanted to, because I wanted to carve out a living. I wanted to take that step forward to buy that block of land so my girlfriend, who I am still married to 35 years later, and I could afford to build a house on it. I have no fear with people making a good dollar. But I understand that it can get tough for employers. Because of penalty rates they have to make the decision, if they are paying the penalty rates, to not open the doors. I get that. But when we start talking about penalty rate cuts we are not talking about phasing it in over the next 10 years in a grandfathering clause. We are talking about the true possibility or probability that 700,000 Australians will cop a pay cut from 1 July.

Who are those 700,000? I have no idea. But what I do know, and I think I am pretty close on this, is that the majority of them will be youngsters. The majority will be either kids at school who have a part-time job on the weekend at Red Rooster, Hungry Jacks, Woolworths, Coles, at the local delicatessen, or wherever it may be. I also know that they will probably be paying their way through university. There are probably university students who study like heck all week and, then, while the rest of us are enjoying the football or going out to family functions, they are working in a pub, or a restaurant, or a nightclub or whatever it may be. So please tell me this: if we are going to have a balanced argument, how is it fair when you consider what all of us in here had previously. And I don't think I am the only one who had to rely on penalty rates so I could live my Australian dream and buy my block of land. And how proud was I to get my first EJ station wagon, having wondered where the hell am was going to get 280 bucks for a car, but we managed to do it. Then I progressed to my Monaro, and that made me even happier. But I still for the life of me cannot see how it is fair for us sitting in this chamber and in the other chamber to say—to coin a phrase—now we are okay. We have our homes and probably most of us own our homes and have put our kids through university—or, in my fortunate position, my son followed in my footsteps as a truckie. But is it all right for us to get there now and pull the trapdoor up behind us, and say, 'It is all right for us, but you, the next generation, are not getting it'?

I really struggle with this argument. For the life of me I cannot understand the ridiculous argument where greed is okay if it is us. But all of a sudden we have gone to, 'We have it, so why should the next generation? Those employers really need a lift up.' If you want to give the employers a lift up, why don't you get fair dinkum? You tax the living bejesus out of them at every opportunity. From the time they wake up to the time they close their eyes at night they are battling red tape. They are battling taxes. This is just fairy floss. You can put as many hundreds and thousands on that sandwich, but it is still a you-know-what sandwich. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.