Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Age is important. All of these things that you have just raised in your interjections are important. However, my concern is that your tendency is to overregulate on every occasion. You think you have the answers to everything, but I can tell you that neither I nor you have the answers to everything.

We can reasonably put processes in place that are acceptable to the Australian community, keeping in mind where we want to go and the sorts of protections we want for people. But we must not overregulate to the point where the controls on the industry, the management or the staff are completely overwhelmed by governments who think they can just come in, tread all over the whole situation and ignore the processes.

In the lead-up to the 2001 federal election, the Howard government promised to develop legislation that would prohibit age discrimination, the aim being to eliminate age based discrimination in key areas of public life. The Age Discrimination Act 2004 implemented this commitment to the Australian people and is working well. People from all walks of life, regardless of their age, should not have to tolerate negative stereotypes. I say this about younger and older workers but today particularly about older workers.

Throughout the whole of my retail career, I was in praise of older women. I was in praise of older women because they were very effective in all our business activities. We were flexible in our arrangements—as the new IR laws are to be flexible in their arrangements. People were able to work the hours that suited them, after they dropped their children at school and before they picked them up again. They were able to come in at night, if they decided to do that, and work when their children were being cared for by a spouse, partner or grandparent. They were able to perform tasks that they were specialists in, and they were excellent in the delivery of their service to the customers and clients that we had.

Throughout my life I have been concerned about men—particularly men—and many women who found themselves, for one reason or another, without work. This occurred after a life of domestic activity, in many cases, with regard to women, and with men who had been in a particular stable job for a long time, say working for GMH in those days or working for International Harvester or Nestle. At 45 years of age, no-one wanted them. We have to have laws like this where we give a guide to people as to where we want our older people to be employed.

For a long time now we have been looking at proposals where people retire at around 50 years of age. With regard to planners and all sorts of other people, that is not the time for them to be retiring; that is the time for them to be taking off. They can actually look at the mistakes they have made. In my case, I am glad that there is not a retirement age of 60 for politicians. I would have five years to go, and I have a lot more work to do in this job than five years can possibly allow. There is a great opportunity for us as a nation to be different, to say to older people, ‘We really value your contribution.’ Whether it is in the area of planning, community activity or aged care, there is a whole generation of people out there whom we need to find new ways to employ.

This act is a guide to protection for older people, but more importantly we as a community have to take a view that older people are valuable in the workplace. They can make a contribution. They can make a mentoring contribution in any company where they may offer their services. We need to get a trend whereby, if a curriculum vitae comes in from someone who is older than 45 or 50, it is not immediately moved to one side and the value of that person not taken into account.

For me, this bill is particularly about the Australian view of older people and how we might put that into law. It has been put into law, but the two-year review of the act has refined the provisions. I commend the bill to the Main Committee. I thank the chamber for the opportunity to speak on the bill and look forward to the Labor Party contributing to the rest of the discussion.

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