Mike Symon (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I speak in support of this motion moved by the member for La Trobe. For a working person bringing home a wage, finances can often be tough especially if that person does not have the benefit of an enterprise agreement to lift their wage above award levels. Allowances, loadings and penalty rates really do make a difference to the pay packet at the end of each week.

As a wage earner for over 20 years before coming to this place, I can certainly speak from experience. Working overtime on a Saturday or a Sunday meant that rather than just paying the household bills and living week to week, some money could be saved, maybe to put on the mortgage, maybe to take the family out to dinner, or maybe even to put some away for a family holiday. Working night or afternoon shifts or abnormal hours on weekdays also brought financial rewards but, as others have already noted, at a cost to quality time with one's family.

On 16 August this year, Senator Nick Xenophon introduced a private member's bill into the Senate titled Fair Work Amendments (Small Business-Penalty Rates Exemption) Bill 2012. That bill and the explanatory memorandum started with the completely false argument that the Monday-to-Friday week is now outdated. With that, the senator went on in the explanatory memorandum to claim that many part-time or casual employees consider weekends to be part of their regular hours. To me, weekends have never been part of regular hours when it comes to work; they have always been on top of regular hours. With the stated intent of ripping off workers of their overtime penalty rates, the Xenophon bill is just as bad in this area as the widely-hated Work Choices that was consigned to the rubbish bin by this Labor government. It is a bill that is nothing but a blatant and disgusting attempt to rob wage earners of their hard-won entitlements and money in their pockets.

It was not the workers in the hospitality or retail sectors that saw extended shop trading hours. We all know it was the bosses who over many years fought a long and, I must say, largely successful campaign to remove state based restrictions on trading hours. Now they have what they wanted in just about every state and territory. But of course it is not enough. They have decided that their employees get paid too much to work the hours that most people spend at leisure or sleeping. The Xenophon bill would steal these conditions from workers, conditions that have been fought for and earned over decades.

Indeed, as far back as 1909, Justice Higgins in the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission awarded the penalty payment of time and a half for the seventh day in any week or an official holiday and for time of work done in excess of the ordinary shift. By 1960, all awards had provisions for extra pay for overtime including the payment of double time in certain circumstances. By 1981, the federal Department of Industrial Relations had outlined a community standard that had time and a half paid for the first three hours of overtime and double time after that beyond the eight ordinary hours, time and a half for Saturday work, and double time for Sunday and public holiday work.

Some of these provisions have been built upon since that time, but others have been cut in some awards, such as the Hotels, Resorts and Hospitality Industry Award of 1992.

The attacks on working people's wages and conditions from conservatives, from the Liberal Party, from the employers and their associations have never stopped and, I am sure, they never will.

Indeed, it was the Kennett government in Victoria that prohibited the inclusion of penalty rates in awards in 1992 and continued this for the 356,000 unfortunate employees who were transferred from the state to the federal industrial system in 1996 under the notorious schedule 1A of the Workplace Relations Act. The Howard Liberal government introduced Work Choices in 2005—a system that was designed specifically to rip off conditions from workers not covered by enterprise agreements.

I note that in the 2008 book entitled Fair Work: the new workplace laws and the Work Choices legacy, Professor Andrew Stewart and Anthony Forsyth provided an excellent example of this. They said:

Thus under WorkChoices it became possible to employ workers under statutory agreements which did not give entitlements to overtime payments, night shift penalties, weekend penalties or public holiday penalties. In the retail industry, for instance, the number of workers on Australian workplace agreements who were entitled to overtime penalty rates fell from 54% to 35%.

The Xenophon bill is just another in a long line of attacks on the working people of Australia that seeks to restore an essential component of Work Choices by destroying penalty rates. I commend the member for La Trobe for bringing this important private member's motion before the House, because an issue that should have been settled many years ago is still on the agenda and working people deserve to get a payment for working the times that other people do not.

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