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

I see that they are interjecting about salary. Listen to these statistics about salary. On the question of the dimension of the rip-off of Australian working families engaged in by the Liberal Party, by the members who sit opposite, I referred in the parliament last week to a sample of Australian workplace agreements that showed approximately 45 per cent of the AWAs provided between $1 and $49 per week below the required rate of pay for protected award conditions, 50 per cent provided from $50 to $199 per week less, approximately five per cent provided $200 to $499 per week less and approximately half of one per cent provided for more than $500 per week less than the required rate of pay—statistics that members opposite might need to really understand. Maybe when they come into this place pretending that they care about the future of Australian working families they should start by actually explaining how it is that in government they supported extreme laws like Work Choices and they continue to do so.

Today I can reveal new problems that are confronting the Australian community because of Work Choices. These are problems particularly confronting Australian businesses. I can reveal that there are new statistics from the Workplace Authority about the backlog of Australian workplace agreement processing. There was, of course, an initial backlog of 54,000 agreements that was created because of the shambolic way in which the former government introduced the so-called fairness test into law. It announced a test it had not formulated, it legislated retrospectively for the test and there were weeks when agreements were backlogging up and no-one knew how to process them. The initial backlog was 54,000 agreements. I can indicate that, to the end of February 2008, approximately 298,524 agreements have been lodged for assessment. Approximately 160,154 of them have been finalised, which means there are approximately 138,000 backlogged agreements waiting to be finalised. At the average rate of processing countenanced by the Howard government, processing this backlog would take 8½ months—8½ months when employers and working Australians would have no idea whether or not the agreement that they were working under was lawful.

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