Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Corangamite for his question and his interest in this subject. I can inform him and the House that there are significant protections available for workers in Australia under the Work Choices legislation—in particular, the significant increase in funding to the Office of Workplace Services in this regard.

It is interesting in this light that the ACTU have been using workers in their advertising that they claim to be victims of Work Choices. The reality is that the Office of Workplace Services has power to enforce compliance with the Workplace Relations Act. It has staff trained, and additional staff who have been brought on board, to do that and who have been appointed as workplace inspectors. They have power to go into workplaces, to require the production of documents and the giving of evidence about a range of matters and to take action on behalf of employees against employers where they find that there is a need to do so.

Despite the ads that have been run, the very interesting thing to note is that the unions have not referred a single one of the people featured in these advertisements to the Office of Workplace Services. Not only that, the ACTU on its website does not refer workers who have a complaint to the Office of Workplace Services, despite the fact that significant resources are there for workers to make a complaint if they believe they have been hard done by.

The Labor Party and the unions claim that they have the interest of workers at heart. If that were true, they would stop playing politics with these people and refer these cases to the Office of Workplace Services. There is no clearer indication that this is simply a matter of the unions and the Labor Party playing politics. If they did have the interests of these workers at heart, they would refer them to the Office of Workplace Services, where a proper investigation could be carried out.

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