Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I wanted to finish on this matter with respect to the cuts to the Fair Entitlements Guarantee. I want to make clear that I too have my own perception of the history of entitlements. Indeed, Labor has a very clear understanding of how the entitlement scheme commenced under the Howard government. It may have commenced formally after the Ansett collapse. But of course, the first decision by the Howard government to provide entitlements to retrenched workers was when the Prime Minister intervened and provided some entitlements to National Textiles, a company of which the Prime Minister's brother, Stan Howard, was a director. We used to call it the 'Stan Alone' policy because only one company seemed to receive it.

Mr Pyne interjecting—

It seems to me the minister likes to talk about conflict of interest and the motivations of members of the opposition. I am just making it very clear that we do recall the prime minister at the time, Prime Minister Howard, making a decision that impacted and benefited only one company, a company of which his brother was director.

Leaving that aside, what I am asking the minister to do with respect to this cut is to provide the parliament with information about the extent to which this cut will impact on workers who are to be retrenched over the next number of years. Has the minister been advised by the Department of Employment of the extent to which this will impact? How many people will lose income as a result of reducing their retrenchment benefits—how many will be impacted? How much, on average, would each retrenched worker lose as a result of the cuts to this measure? And what explanation will the government provide the companies and the workers? Other than just attacking the opposition, I have not really had an answer to those questions. What is it that these workers have done wrong to lose the support of the government in their time of need?

It is clear that the government has chosen to goad companies like Holden to leave our shores. I think that was a very, very dangerous and stupid thing to do. Now we are left with workers who are going to be unemployed for a period of time. Let us hope they find work quickly. But in the meantime, they had an expectation that, pursuant to the current arrangements, there would have been some support. That has been torn away. Yet we have not heard how the people will miss out, how much money has been taken per capita, and what it will mean for those workers.

The minister has not answered those questions. He wants to play politics with this. This is about the workforce, not the Labor Party and not the government; it is about the workforce that will be retrenched and the fact that they will lose this entitlement because of the decision by the government to cut this measure in the budget.

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