Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

At the heart of the Albanese Labor government is a simple and unwavering belief—that if you put in a fair day's work you deserve a fair day's pay. That's the promise of this Labor government. It's a value that we hold close. Penalty rates are not a privilege or a bonus. They are recognition of the sacrifice made by workers who give up their weekends, give up their nights and give up their time with family in order to serve our communities and in order to keep the wheels of the economy running.

The pay and conditions of award reliant workers are directly set by the Fair Work Commission. In other words, these workers—and there are a huge number; one in five of all 15 million taxpayers are these workers, 2.6 million Australians—feel the direct impact of the decisions made by the Fair Work Commission. The modern awards, together with the National Employment Standards and the national minimum wages provide a critical safety net for workers. They set a floor, not a ceiling, for fair, relevant and enforceable minimum terms and conditions of employment. We spend our time basically at home and at work. The Fair Work Commission sets these minimum standards up. They are a floor—the minimum required to protect workers.

These standards encompass your working conditions, flexible work, casual employment, maximum hours, leave entitlements and so on. Penalty rates put food on the table. They help a young student pay rent. They help cleaners and transport workers function and maintain a quality of life. These are the people who keep Australia ticking over at times when most of us are with our loved ones.

I just want to recall an anecdote. I've never forgotten this. During the 2022 campaign, I called into a town in Tasmania and I spoke to a single mother about her penalty rates. I asked her what they meant to her. She was a hospitality worker. She was so dependent on these rates that she said to me, 'Michelle, I actually can't speak to you about this; I've got to go into another room.' Why did she have to go into another room? Because she didn't want to have this conversation in front of her children. That's how important penalty rates were to her. I've never forgotten that story. It's with that single mother in mind that I speak.

Not only are these people award-reliant workers; they are also some of the most vulnerable. Sixty per cent of them are women. The average age of these workers is 34, and about 40 per cent are under the age of 25—in other words, they are overwhelmingly young people. Seventy per cent work part time. Notably, nearly 60 per cent of all low-paid workers are award reliant, meaning they are on this minimum award. To cut these rates is not just an attack on pay packets; it's an attack on fairness itself. What kind of country do we want going to the future? We have to ask ourselves this. We want a fair country. We do not have want to have a working underclass, a working poor, as happens in other countries.

This bill will ensure that penalty and overtime rates are protected and remain an during part of the modern awards safety net. The protection is crucial for workers who rely on these rates for financial security. The bill ensures that specified penalty and overtime rates in modern awards cannot be reduced, and the bill addresses loopholes that allowed employers to roll up penalty and overtime rates into a single pay rate, undermining workers' actual compensation.

We do also know what happened when the coalition were in government. In 2017, they actually cut penalty rates to a whole swathe of workers—workers in retail, hospitality, pharmacies and fast food. The Labor Party stood with those workers and opposed that change, and so did other members of the parliament. Unfortunately, we didn't win the 2019 election, so it was difficult to change course. But with the help of the unions and the voices of those workers, we are now back and we are determined to protect the working rights and the pay of these ordinary Australians who do the work at times when the rest of us are with our families.

Let's be clear, protecting penalty rates is not just a matter of justice; it is a matter of economic good sense. Every dollar earned in penalty rates is a dollar spent in local communities. It circulates through small businesses, it supports regional communities and it strengthens the very fabric of our nation. This is what Labor stands for—dignity at work, fair reward for effort, and a recognition that our economy must serve the people, not the other way around. Protecting penalty rates is about protecting the Australian way of life, a way of life built on fairness, opportunity and respect for those who keep our nation running, often at the hardest hours. As a Labor government, we will always stand shoulder to shoulder with working Australians. We will protect their penalty rates because we understand what it means, and we don't want to go back to the bad old days where arbitrary judgements were made and penalty rates were cut, putting these vulnerable Australians at risk.

The Albanese government has done a power of work to secure the wages of working Australians. This bill today feeds into and complements the other work we have done in respect of banning wage secrecy, banning labour hire and backing in consecutive increases to the minimum wage, which has seen real wages rise for seven consecutive quarters, despite us also navigating this country through a nasty inflationary and cost-of-living crisis. We are here for working Australians. We are here to protect our most vulnerable workers and our most essential workers from future erosion of their pay. I commend this bill to the Senate.