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

I listened very carefully to the member for Farrer's contribution to the House on the Fair Entitlements Guarantee Bill 2012. This bill is a legislative example of Labor's commitment to Australian values. One of those key Australian values is a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. Implicit in that old saying is the idea that you will get paid. We know that for decades when companies became insolvent it was workers who were often the last people in line to get not just their wages but their annual leave, their leave loading, their long service leave, their payments in lieu of notice and their superannuation, which is one thing that needs to be thought about in all of this as well. You frequently find in this situation that employers are not paying their superannuation payments either.

This went on for decades and decades. As an official of the shop assistants union in South Australia I saw it myself not just in big and medium companies but even in small companies. Sometimes it was not the fault of the company and its directors, sometimes it was just economic circumstance, but there were frequent occasions when it was their fault, was due to the phoenixing of companies or was due to neglect by directors and the like. I have seen many examples in my time of where workers have been treated appallingly in redundancy situations and left in very difficult situations. I worked for a company many years ago as a trolley collector.

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