Corinne Mulholland (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This debate, on the Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Penalty and Overtime Rates) Bill 2025, goes to the very heart of what it means to be an Australian and to live in Australia. We live in a country built not on privilege or inherited wealth but on the simple, powerful idea that, if you work hard, you deserve a fair go. Let me make something absolutely clear to those opposite: penalty rates are not a luxury. Overtime is not a perk. They are the building blocks of fairness for millions of Australians. That's why the Albanese government is moving to strengthen the Fair Work Act—to protect penalty rates and overtime and to ensure the Fair Work Commission cannot be used as a backdoor mechanism to strip away the wages of people who are already earning the least.

Penalty rates recognise something fundamental—that working on a Sunday, on a public holiday or through the night comes at a cost. It comes at the cost of family time, rest, community and sometimes even health. Overtime protections recognise that employers cannot treat workers as mechanisms to be run endlessly until they break. They ensure that, if a worker gives up more of their life, more of their health and more of their energy, they are properly compensated. Let's be very clear. For so many Australians, penalty rates are not pocket money. It is their survival money. Penalty rates are the difference between paying rent and falling into arrears. They are the difference between food on the table and going without.

I want to make it very clear that this fight is personal for me, which is why I am so passionate about penalty rates. I don't come from privilege. I didn't grow up in wealth. I grew up raised by a single mum with two kids, where money was short and every dollar mattered. From the age of 17, I worked every shift and every weekend that I could to pay my rent, to cover my bills and to put myself through my studies.

Sadly, like too many workers, I have been a victim of wage theft at a time in life when I was dependent on penalty rates. My first job was at a big cafe chain, where my employer was deliberately not paying his staff properly. Some weeks he'd blame the bank; other weeks he'd blame an administrative issue. Sometimes he just tried plain old underpaying us. Other weeks, he just wouldn't pay us at all. Let me be clear: that was no accident. It was no mistake. It was his business practice to exploit teenage and vulnerable workers and rely on them to quit and just go somewhere else, because he saw churning through underpaid workers as a way to boost his personal profit margins.

My story is not unique. Millions of Australians rely on the fair pay to make ends meet that workers and unions have fought for under the award system. For families across this country, penalty rates are the line between survival and poverty. So to vote against protecting their basic rights is to turn your back on Australia's promise of a fair go.

We will hear from those opposite the tired, worn-out arguments that reducing penalty rates somehow boosts productivity and that, only if we stripped workers' pay, businesses would thrive and the benefits would magically trickle down to everybody else. This is a dangerous myth. Trickle-down economics has been tested for 40 years across the developed world, and it has failed. It does not raise national productivity. It does not create stronger economies; it creates inequality. You don't build prosperity from the top down. You build it out from the middle and up from the bottom.

Here is the economic truth. When you cut the pay of workers, you are not creating efficiency. You are draining demand from the economy. You are reducing the capacity of households to spend. You are reducing the capacity of families to invest in their children's education and to contribute to their communities.

Workers are not costs on the balance sheet; workers are the economy. They are the very people who shop in small businesses, who pay their mortgages, who buy groceries and who keep local communities alive. When wages stagnate, when rights are eroded, national productivity falls because demand falls. The fantasy of trickle-down economics is this—if you just make the richest people richer, somehow the wealth will flow down. But what happens in reality? The wealth pools at the top. It gets locked into property speculation, offshore tax havens and luxury consumption but does nothing for productivity. Meanwhile the workers, the people who actually keep the lights on, who staff our hospitals, who clean the offices, who pull the pints and who stack the shelves at our supermarkets are told to accept less. That is not an economy. That is exploitation dressed up as economics, and that is exactly what those opposite want. They want to trade away workers' rights like penalty rates and overtime, so their take-home pay goes backwards. They don't even try to hide it. Who could forget that, when they were in government, they described low wage growth as a deliberate design feature of their economic architecture.

This Labor government is here for workers. We're here to grow their wages, strengthen their rights and, in doing so, strengthen our national economy. To even contemplate allowing workers' penalty rates and overtime protections to be stripped away would be unconscionable. It would be an assault on the lowest-paid workers, those who need protection the most.

When those opposite come to cast their votes on this measure, I wanted them to remember something: this is Australia. This is the land of hard yakka and a fair go. This is not North America, where good, honest workers are demonised by billionaires buying their fifth yacht to attend a wedding in Venice or taking a joy flight in space. This is Australia, and we are better than that.

That's why the Albanese government believes in a fair wage for a fair day's work. We believe that productivity comes from empowering workers, not impoverishing them. We believe that protecting penalty rates and overtime is not only good economics; it is the very essence of Australian fairness. And I say to those opposite: if you believe in a fair go, if you believe in hard work being rewarded, if you believe in our national story, vote for this bill. In fact, I don't think anyone can in good conscience vote against this bill. On behalf of every worker who clocks in on a Sunday or on a public holiday, on behalf of those staying back late at night, and on behalf of everyone working overtime to support their family, I will be voting to support this bill to support their rights and their wages.