Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister representing the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Senator Wong. Can the minister inform the Senate what impact Australian workplace agreements have had on hardworking Australians?

Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Those opposite may not understand this, but Australians very clearly understand the impact that Australian workplace agreements had on working families. What we know is that in this place today the opposition sought an inquiry into the government’s transition to forward with fairness bill. The opposition sought to examine, amongst other things, the economic and social impacts from the abolition of individual statutory agreements. How ironic. Those on the other side had 11 years to obtain and analyse data on the effects of AWAs on Australian working families. But did they do so? No. What they did was stand in this place and trumpet how good AWAs were for working families, for women, for young people and for Australia.

In how many question times and in how many debates in this place did we on this side sit listening to you lecture us and the Australian people about how good Australian workplace agreements were for them? The Australian people gave their view on that opinion very clearly at the last election. We saw opposition senators, when in government, standing in this place saying that working families had never been better off, whilst at times voting for laws that stripped the safety net out from underneath them. Perhaps to add insult to injury, today we have seen the opposition still clinging on to Work Choices. They cannot bear to let it go. They want to keep in place these Australian workplace agreements that we know have stripped wages and conditions from vulnerable Australian workers. They cannot bear to let them go. Despite the fact that this was a clear difference between the parties in the election and despite the fact that, overwhelmingly, the Australian people did not support your extreme laws, you still want to defer the abolition of AWAs because you cannot bear to let Work Choices go.

What do we know about AWAs? We know that, when the opposition was in government in May 2006, the Office of the Employment Advocate revealed that it had been reviewing AWAs to determine how many were stripping away what the former government deceptively and contemptuously called ‘protected award conditions’—conditions that, when in government, the opposition spent millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on advertising to say were protected by law. That data showed that employees were losing their key conditions under AWAs at an astonishing rate. Of the agreements, 64 per cent cut annual leave loading, 63 per cent cut penalty rates, 52 per cent cut shiftwork loadings, 51 per cent cut overtime, 48 per cent cut monetary allowances and 46 per cent cut public holiday pay. In answer to the first part of your question, Senator Marshall, that is what we know. This opposition, when in government, knew about their extreme—(Time expired)