Jodie Campbell (Bass, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On 24 November 2007 we as a nation breathed a collective sigh of relief. It was the day on which across the country workers and their families could look forward with confidence to the return of fairness in the workplace. That is why I rise today to add my voice to that of those in support of the Rudd government’s Fair Work Bill 2008. In the aftermath of the 2004 election, rights and conditions which had been hard fought for were stripped away in the blink of an eye. Those opposite took advantage of the trust that the Australian people had shown in them, and the result was Work Choices.

As a government, we are keeping the deal that we struck with the Australian people. We said that we would do away with Work Choices and return fairness and balance to the workplace. Earlier this year, the Deputy Prime Minister introduced the Workplace Relations Amendment (Transition to Forward with Fairness) Bill 2008. That effectively brought an end to the Australian workplace agreements and allowed the process of award modernisation to begin. The bill to which I speak today builds upon this and paves the way for a new workplace relations system. This bill will take effect from 1 July 2009. This legislation allows us the luxury of looking forward with optimism to a system in which the most basic principles of fairness will be at work.

This will be a system built upon some basic yet fundamental principles: notions like a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. That seems somewhat basic, and yet it was this premise which was casually and callously tossed aside by the previous government. Work Choices stripped away rights and allowed the worst employers to adopt a divide and conquer approach when it came to negotiating with workers.

That is not to say that this was the case in all workplaces, because it was not. There are in my electorate of Bass some wonderful, fair and generous employers. But—and this needs to be said—that is not always the case. At its worse, Work Choices took advantage of the most vulnerable in the workplace: young people going for their first job, single mothers, long-term casuals and the low paid. Essentially, it allowed employers to make demands, however unreasonable, and force the hands of those most vulnerable to acquiesce.

The following statement has been well documented in this House. However, it is still something that has the power to shock me. It is the admission from the former workplace relations minister, Joe Hockey, when he told the ABC’s Four Corners program:

I don’t think many ministers in cabinet were aware that you could be worse off under WorkChoices, and that you could actually have certain conditions taken away.

Once I started to raise those issues with colleagues and they became more informed of the impact of WorkChoices, we introduced the fairness test.

It must be noted that the so-called fairness test did little to redress the gross imbalance in workplaces the country over. I was and still am shocked by that admission. It says so much about the cavalier attitude of those opposite to workers and their families.

As I campaigned last year, I travelled the length and breadth of Bass and there were many recurring issues which troubled people in northern Tasmania. One thing which came through loud and clear was that people had not voted for Work Choices. They did not know that the first thing that a power-drunk coalition would do was strip away their security.

Grandparents were concerned for the future of their children and grandchildren. Young people feared for the conditions under which they would be introduced to working life, and they were justified in being concerned. One company in Tasmania negotiated an AWA which stripped away penalty rates, overtime and annual leave loading, and in return workers received an additional 2c an hour. Another company forced an agreement on workers which specifically excluded rest breaks, incentive based payments and bonuses, annual leave loadings, observance of public holidays, overtime payments, shift work allowances and penalty rates.

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