Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I utterly reject that. It's no secret that there are issues on which the government and the BCA disagree. I did note the BCA statement yesterday welcoming my announcement that we will be accelerating EPBC reforms, so thank you to the BCA for that, but there are other issues we disagree on, including workplace relations. There is no reason to expect that this will add any further compliance costs to small businesses, because it is about simply maintaining current arrangements for award based workers rather than allowing their penalty rates to be cut in future. If employers employ people on the award rate now, they can continue to do so into the future; it's just that in the future the penalty rates can't be cut.