Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution about workplace relations, particularly with regard to Black Friday. This Friday marks the start of the Black Friday weekend, and, according to recent reports from the ABC, around six million Australians are expected to take part in a weekend of major markdowns and bulk purchasing incentives. Many will turn to online shopping to avoid the chaos at shopping centres. The online shopping realm presents as a desirable retail experience for many Australian consumers, who will manage to check off Christmas lists and even grocery shop from the comfort of their home this festive season. I do encourage them to think, though, about their local small businesses and to see what they can do to support business in their own area.

The online retailer that has perhaps been most successful in promoting the convenience and cheap prices that consumers covet is Amazon. As a goliath of the e-retail space, Amazon owns a substantial share of the online retail market in Australia. This isn't, in my view, something to celebrate. Instead, as we head into this festive season, we must pause and recognise the workers whose labour underpins every click, every parcel and every promise of convenience. Those workers are the ones who make this retail frenzy possible.

While Black Friday is certainly an exciting event for many Australians, it's far less festive for Amazon distribution workers, who will face immense pressure in an already stressful, antiworker environment. The environment of Amazon rids employees of their human and workers rights. Amazon has intrusive surveillance practices. Amazon forces employees to work and live like the very machines that surround them.

This week, the Transport Workers' Union and the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association are campaigning to protect Australian jobs and businesses that fall victim to the exploitative and deplorable actions of Amazon. Today I am proud to stand in this chamber and support the SDA and the TWU and their push, as part of a global movement, to Make Amazon Pay.

I note that, in 2025, Amazon is continuing its globally disgraceful record of union busting, denying collective bargaining and pursuing corporate arrogance. In Quebec, Amazon made its stance clear. Rather than negotiate a fair union arrangement for fair wages and fair working conditions for ordinary Canadians, it instead chose to close seven warehouses, punishing more than 3,500 workers simply for standing together in solidarity. That will not wash in Australia.

In Australia, though, Amazon has employed similar tactics. They've routinely attempted to silence workers who raise concerns about their health and safety, they've disregarded issues raised by union members and, very, very significantly, they have refused to engage with workers seeking representation. In doing so, in enacting these responses to workers' requests and conditions, Amazon is systematically denying its workers a voice.

Equally alarming is Amazon's willingness to overstep legal and ethical boundaries in pursuit of intrusive and excessive surveillance practices—behaviour that governments are now taking notice of. In France, the national data regulator fined Amazon $57.4 million for an excessively intrusive monitoring system that tracked employees' scanner inactivity and productivity rates.

So how can we trust Amazon? How can we even believe that they'll uphold obligations that they've agreed to when they continuously mistreat their workers and overstep legal boundaries? We cannot allow Amazon's track record of exploitation to go unchecked, particularly when it benefits from lucrative public contracts. That's why the Albanese Labor government's recent move to require agencies to assess the ethical conduct of bidding firms is a crucial step in the right direction. This reform sends a clear message: if you want to access public money, you have to meet the public's expectations—a fair day's work for a fair day's pay.

People are not machines. They cannot be mechanised, and they should not be intrusively observed and turned into machines. That is a dehumanising practice. Amazon needs to review its practices and fix its disgraceful record. This parliament will no longer be witness to the deplorable flaunting of legal obligations and imaginary ethical standards. The days of profits first and accountability later are over. I congratulate the SDA and the TWU on their campaign. (Time expired)