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

This is the thing. You have to wait for the Australian people to make a judgment before you jump the aisle, as it were. But we know what we would get from them in government. We will have all these cases: 'Five people want to work for just an hour. What harm would it do?' Of course, it is all designed to erode the minimum standards. That is what it is all about.

We used to get the same thing about penalty rates when I was a union official. 'If only the penalty rate wasn't there, we could afford to have a few more workers on a Sunday or at 12 o'clock at night.' I used to hear those arguments a lot as well. We used to hear the same arguments about overtime. 'If only overtime payments weren't there, they could work extra hours, couldn't they?' 'If only I wasn't limited to 38 hours a week, I could work more, get more hours.' That is the argument that the opposition, retail associations and other employer groups use to undermine things like minimums.

If you look at what the Federal Court actually did, it said that schoolkids should continue to be able to work a minimum of 1.5 hours after school, between 3 pm and 6.30 pm, and that their parents or guardians had to agree to it, which I think is a pretty good set of circumstances. Parents or guardians should agree to these things for people under 18. The court also said this applies where employment for a longer period was not possible—that is, the shop is closing. That is a fair set of circumstances, but we would not want a situation where you have fast food outlets employing young people, 16- or 17-year-olds, for 1.5 hours simply to get out of the three-hour engagement.

The reason why the three-hour engagement is there is that people have to drive to work. They have to buy uniforms. There are costs associated with work. So for casual workers, if you only get an hour's work, if your minimum engagement is just an hour or 1.5 hours, you might find yourself in a situation where it is costing you as much to get to work as you are getting paid. That is why the minimum engagement is important. It is a fairness thing, which is why it has been upheld in the Federal Court's decision.

We have this particular circumstance which was taken into account by Fair Work Australia and by the courts, not through political direction or through petitions but through a rational way of looking at these things. This is not done through sentiment but evidence. We have a three-hour minimum established because that is what is fair. We are not going to run our workplace relations system on emotion or on one person's individual circumstances. We are going to run the Fair Work system on what is fair overall. We are going to have hearings and we are going to have people arguing their case. We are not going to run it on sentiment or politics.

But we know what the opposition would do, as they do in so many things. They have worked out that Work Choices is like a loaded dog; it is a dog with a bit of dynamite in its mouth and they are all running from it as best they can. That is why, every time we mention it, you can see the nerves and you can see the smiles. Then they say, 'It is dead and buried.' Sometimes there is laughing and scoffing: 'As if we would do that!' But we know now what they are going to do. They are going to cut the onion slice by slice. They are going to come up with various circumstances and situations and they are going to try to push for erosions to the safety net. That is the member's intention here—slowly but surely to cut out things like the three-hour minimum.

The three-hour minimum is a very important fairness mechanism for casual workers. We know that some 20 per cent to 30 per cent of workers are now casual. That is a lot of people who are on insecure incomes and a lot of people who are dependent on the hours they get. In the retail industry, my union has worked very hard to make sure that those workers do get some notice and do have some security. Often there are casuals who have been working regular hours at a place for years and years. One day they rock up to work, thinking they have a level of permanence, and find they have a new manager, or that someone has had a change of heart, and their hours have been reduced. I have seen workers who have had their hours reduced from 37 to three in the space of a week, sometimes with even less notice than that. We know that people have issues with insecure work and I would not like to see their situations made even more insecure.

We support the motion and we support common-sense decisions by the courts. We support young people having a work ethic and we support that in the member's electorate—I think those young people should be commended for their work ethic. But we do not want to see a situation where retail industry associations and others seek to deliberately, as a strategy, undermine the safety net bit by bit and cut away—cutting the onion, slice by slice—at people's entitlements and security.

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