Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last week I attended a breakfast meeting in this place. It was organised by the LHMU to kick off their Clean Start campaign in Australia’s shopping centres. The Deputy Prime Minister attended, along with my electorate office manager, herself a previous LHMU organiser but also, importantly, prior to becoming an organiser a cleaner in our schools. The key guests at this breakfast were the cleaners who keep clean our shopping centres all over Australia. We MPs all met small groups and listened to their work related stories. That is why they were there.

All are proud of what they do. They just simply want time to do it, to do it with dignity, to do it properly and to not be expected to be in two or more places at once. Some said they could be cleaning up one crisis and get called to another. They found it difficult to manage that with the demands of being in big shopping centres, in particular, being in different places and all needed at the same time.

They all want to be treated with dignity and, to be fair, many are. But dignity has a number of defining characteristics. It is about giving workers enough time to do their work well, and cleaning is important because it also has a big public health function. The campaign goes back to 2006, when the LHMU launched the Clean Start campaign. It was to highlight the crisis in the cleaning industry and to improve jobs for cleaners. You may remember, Mr Deputy Speaker, that they stood together, in front of CBD office towers, and they talked to tenants and they told their stories. Cleaners in every capital city were out and about, helping to build consensus for the reform that was needed in the industry.

LHMU cleaners, alongside government and commercial property owners, responsible contractors, made great strides to improve both the quality and reliability of CBD office-cleaning services. This is the message from the LHMU’s Clean Start campaign in Australia’s shopping centres: ‘Now it’s time to deliver the same improvements to the cleaners, owners, managers, tenants and customers of Australian shopping centres.’ When the LHMU had the Clean Start campaign the Deputy Prime Minister, on behalf of the federal government, wrote to all state governments asking them to support Clean Start. That is what we have been asked to do. They will follow up with members of parliament and ask us to do particular things. I pledge my support to cleaners campaigning for a clean start in shopping centres and I commit to helping them have their voices heard over the coming months.

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