Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for his question. There appears to be some confusion amongst some members of the House about the impact of Australian workplace agreements and Work Choices on hardworking Australians. The member for North Sydney last night said that former cabinet ministers of the Howard government did not know about the impact of AWAs on hardworking families. I note the shadow minister for foreign affairs disagreed with this view on radio this morning, where he said:

I heard what Joe said. I don’t know whether … how true that was. But, you know, certainly I led the task force there for six months and certainly I understood that the removal of the no disadvantage test did expose us, and the community were on to it very quickly.

So there is confusion amongst the opposition about the impact of Australian workplace agreements. Can I help the opposition with that confusion, because the opposition, when in government, deliberately decided not to collect information on what Australian workplace agreements were doing to hardworking families. They knew that those results would be bad, so they preferred not to ask any questions that they did not want the answers to.

We did have some samples in May 2006; they came out in Senate estimates. Then the clamper went on—no more information was to come out. The government did sample AWAs between March 2006 and May 2007. To the extent that that analysis got into the public domain, it was there because it leaked. In particular, a sample of over 1,000 AWAs was leaked to the Sydney Morning Herald. Today I can confirm what the results were for that complete sample of 1,700 Australian workplace agreements. These are actual results. I note that the former government denied the figures in the Sydney Morning Herald leak. They will not be able to deny these figures, because these are the actual results. Of the 1,700 Australian workplace agreements that were sampled, 89 per cent removed at least one protected award condition, 83 per cent excluded two or more protected award conditions, 52 per cent excluded six or more—that is more than half—and of course the list goes on.

When we are talking about protected award conditions, we are talking about the things that the very expensive propaganda told people were protected by law but could still be taken away without compensation. In these agreements, we know that they were stripped away. What was excluded? What were the sorts of things that got stripped away? We know that the things that are basic to the take-home pay of Australians got stripped away. Shift loadings were excluded in 70 per cent of agreements, annual leave loading was excluded in 68 per cent of agreements and penalty rates were excluded in 63 per cent of agreements. This is the truth that the Howard government covered up in the run-up to the election.

See this speech in context