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

This is a bill of broken commitments. After the budget, which was a budget of broken commitments, it is not surprising that this bill should come into the parliament. We all remember the Prime Minister saying on Melbourne radio that WorkChoices was 'dead, buried and cremated'. It was a full stop and another one of his great rhetorical commitments given to the Australian people in the last election. It is hard to keep track of them all—there were so many of them. He promised that WorkChoices was dead, but here is this bill in the parliament and it is a continuation of the Liberals' long war that the member for Eden-Monaro talked about, going way back to 1890. They have always been trying to get back to that point; it is their ideological starting point, when they had freedom of contract and they could push workers around. There was a series of strikes in the 1890s; workers lost all of them, but we won the moral battle.

That is why an arbitration power was inserted in our Constitution during the federation debates. People might have lost the war on the ground and they might have been pushed around by their employers, but they wanted our federation to have some fairness in it. Fairness begins at work and that is a principle that has always been present in our country.

There were also great ideological debates in the 1930s, when they tried to cut all wages and pensions by 10 per cent, in the 1960s and in 1992—I vividly remember that one of the reasons I joined the Labor Party was the prospect of $3 youth wages. The ALP's IR policy of the time said: 'We are going to basically have a brave new world. We are going to scrap every award across the country and workers will start again to negotiate for conditions that they had in the past.' All of that would have been swept away in the 1993 election if Hewson and Howard had had their way; workers would have had to start from year zero.

That is the point that this government wants to get us back to. What they intend to doing is not to bring the big bang; they are just going to cut it like you cut an onion—one slice at a time. That is their strategy. Nobody should be under any misapprehension about what this government intends to do. They intend to run austerity in the budget, even though they promised something otherwise; they intend to lift the GST, even though they say otherwise; and they intend to destroy the industrial relations fabric of this country. Once they have destroyed the sensible social fabric in this country and the Australian way—Medicare and the like—they will set out on a long ideological war to do the same thing in the workplace. Everything that makes Australia fair will be ripped away.

The people who will suffer most in this system—I have seen it, because I have been there—are people like cleaners, retail workers, trolley collectors, hospitality workers and the like. I remember in about 1994—when I was working as a trolley collector—there was the cleaners and caretakers award, which I was employed under. I did not get my penalty rate, which was one of the reasons I joined the SDA, but I at least got the award rate. Within a few years, those workers had slipped out of the award safety net through a legal technicality and their wages tumbled from $11 or $12 an hour to about $5 or $6 dollars an hour. It was still possible in South Australia a few years ago to find trolley collectors employed on $6 an hour. There were young people employed on miserable wages through a series of subcontractors in the retail sector.

That gives you some idea of what will happen if the award system goes and if those opposite get their way—that is freedom of contract. That is what happens. Even now, if you look at the Fair Work Ombudsman's website, you will find from time to time cases they have taken on to recover the wages of unpaid trolley collectors. It is people like that who suffer the most when we remove protections. Retail workers, hospitality workers, cleaners and people in the service sector are the ones who are the most vulnerable to wage reductions.

People in the building industry, who can and do organise to protect their wages can often withstand these periods of adversity during Liberal governments. But it is the people with the least protection—those who are the most unorganised and the most vulnerable—who suffer under the coalition. They have the most to fear from a return to WorkChoices, from a return to 1992 or a return to the 1890s. They do not have much protection, but they do have their votes. They have always expressed their displeasure at the ballot box about the type unfairness that those opposite are promoting.

The provisions of this act are presented an evolution, small steps and a little cut the onion—one slice at a time—and so they target things like right of entry in the workplace, but the whole of this act aims to stop unions from entering into workplaces, to stop workers from talking to unions and to stop workers from having the choice of joining a union.

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