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

I thank the member for Capricornia for her question. I know that she is deeply concerned with fairness in Australian workplaces, particularly for Australian women. She has asked me about how workplace relations systems can support fairness for working women. Of course you can support fairness for working women if you have a decent safety net that cannot be stripped away, if you have a proper pay equity principle that allows equal pay cases to be taken and appropriately prosecuted, if you have a low-paid bargaining stream which enables predominantly female dominated industries to enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining, and if you have an independent umpire and a regular minimum wages case which means that minimum wages are fairly adjusted, as we have recently seen from Fair Work Australia. You can support working women if you allow appropriate flexibilities at work, underpinned by the safety net; you can support working women if you protect good working women, women who have proved to be hard workers, from unfair dismissal. Of course the Fair Work system does all of that.

Australians remember very vividly Work Choices—a system of workplace relations supported by those opposite that did not give any of these protections to working women, that enabled the pay of working Australians to be cut back with no compensation. Let us quickly go through the statistics. Under the Australian workplace agreements that the Liberal Party used to rejoice in, we recall the statistics that 63 per cent saw their penalty rates cut, 52 per cent saw shift work cut, 51 per cent saw overtime loadings cut, 46 per cent saw public holiday pay cut and 22 per cent were provided with no pay rise over the life of the agreement, some for up to five years. This was bad for working people but it was particularly bad for working women. Let us look at the statistics in female dominated industries. Research in 2007 found in retail, obviously female dominated, that casual and part-time sales assistants working a 12-hour week lost on average 12 per cent of their earnings if they were on an Australian workplace agreement—a truly amazing statistic. Permanent part-time retail workers on the same hours lost 18 per cent of their earnings on Australian workplace agreements. In hospitality, once again a female dominated industry, it was the same story. Workers on Australian workplace agreements suffered losses of between six and 12 per cent of their income—rip-off after rip-off, particularly for working women.

Research on Victorian workers under Work Choices found that if you were a median worker on an Australian Workplace Agreement you earned 16.3 per cent less compared to the median worker on a collective agreement. If you were a woman, you earned 18.7 per cent less than a woman on a collective agreement. For the most disadvantaged groups, female labourers and related workers, AWA workers were paid a whopping 26 per cent less than similar women on collective agreements. These are stunning statistics about the rip-off that Work Choices was for working women. What that rip-off means is that women went to work and could not complain because of the threat of unfair dismissal; they had absolutely no right to take an unfair dismissal claim in almost all Australian businesses—you just had to cop it, even though that pay reduction might mean that you could no longer pay your mortgage, even though that pay reduction might mean that meeting the ordinary household bills to put food on the table was really putting stress and strain on you.

Many Australians might believe that these are the horror stories of the Work Choices past but we need to remind ourselves these could be the contemporary stories of the future if the Leader of the Opposition has his way. He is lock, stock and barrel committed to Work Choices. He is turning his head because he does not want Australians to know the truth. He is on the record, time after time, as a devotee of Work Choices. Even in his budget reply speech he endorsed the central elements that made Work Choices the rip-off that it was. The message for working women is very clear. When they look at the Leader of the Opposition they see a man with a track record of statements that would concern women, including working women, and they see a man committed to industrial relations extremism and committed to the return of Work Choices.

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