Marielle Smith (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This week unions around the world, including the mighty SDA and Transport Workers' Union here in Australia, are standing up together in unity as part of the Make Amazon Pay campaign. I've spoken on this issue multiple times in this chamber, as have my colleagues and as have parliamentarians all around the world, yet Amazon continues to put profits over people—to exploit, to evade and to rip people off. The Make Amazon Pay campaign is not just a slogan; it is a call to action. No international cooperation, no matter how powerful it may be, sits above our laws in Australia.

In my home state of South Australia, workers recently joined a nationwide strike, organised by the TWU, the SDA and the MEAA, outside Amazon's local facility, and their message was clear: South Australian workers deserve more, and our state deserves more. Since I was elected to parliament, I've been proud to advocate for changes to the law to protect gig workers and to defend the principles which underpin our workplace rights and laws—the principles that my grandfather, as a unionist, stood for and that my mother, as a unionist, marched for—and we have delivered those changes. Our closing loopholes laws, which are reforming gig work, labour hire and the treatment of casuals, represent hugely important first steps to address the exploitation of Australian workers, especially within the gig economy—laws which those opposite in this chamber opposed. Along with my colleagues from the SDA and the Transport Workers' Union, I will always stand with the workers in my state and, indeed, across Australia and the globe as they fight to make Amazon pay.