Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

He is a great union leader, and he was a night filler himself so he knows what he is talking about—not like many in the Liberal Party. My friend the member for Grey at least worked on a farm and did some real work, but there are an awful lot of people in the Liberal Party who have never had a real job in their lives and have never met a real person in their lives. They are too busy lounging around with their business mates and their pokie mates and rolling into the House of Assembly down there in South Australia and getting stuck into Peter Malinauskas. It is a great shame that it has happened in this forum as well. The member for Mayo, in the past, has had much to say about Peter Malinauskas—much that is wrong. Again, I think that is a great shame. This is a unique proposition, the idea that Christmas Eve and New Years Eve are community times and should be public holidays so people have the right to work or the right to not work. That is, to make it voluntary and to pay an additional penalty rate to that vast army of workers—shop assistants, hospitality workers, and ambulance and police officers—who make us have a happy and safe New Years Eve. If this proposition is adopted by the South Australian parliament then I am sure it will spread over time to other states in Australia because it is only fair to provide workers who work at these times with public holiday rights. It is a fair thing to do, it is an appropriate thing to do, it is an affordable thing to do, and we should do it because it is the right thing to do.

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