Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

This bill will enable employers to undercut basic award entitlements—a move that even former Prime Minister John Howard admitted was a key mistake of Work Choices. And of course former Prime Minister John Howard subsequently reinstated the no-disadvantage test in 2007.

Let us not be in any way confused by the multiple speeches filled with talking points that we have heard from those on the government back bench in the course of the debate on this bill, the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014. This is part of a war that the Liberal Party is waging on weekend and night pay, and it is just the first step to an open slather on cutting the pay and allowances of Australian workers.

The bill goes much further than the coalition's pre-election policy which was published in May 2013. It goes much further than the fair work review panel's recommendations. Of course, this kind of legislation, now being introduced to the parliament, is what we have come to expect from this government—a government which said one thing to the Australian people before the election and has done another, in so many areas, after the election. Before the election we had a vague policy on industrial relations from the Liberal Party, designed to reassure Australians that they were not proposing to attack Australians' wages and conditions, and very much vague in order to ensure that their true intentions—a hard-right agenda that we see now being implemented by this government in so many areas—their real intentions, were to go much further than anything they had said before the election. It can only be said that what this Liberal Party said before the election was intended to deliberately mislead Australian voters.

Night and weekend pay is a core part of the budgets of millions of Australians. Some 4.5 million Australians work in sectors where night and weekend pay rates apply, and it has, for a very long time, been an expectation of Australians—a very large majority of Australians—that people who work nights and weekends should be paid more. That is something that has been confirmed by recent polling by Essential Research, who found that some 80 per cent of Australians believe that people who work at night and on weekends should be paid more.

What this bill does is to set up circumstances designed to cut Australians' pay. It is worth looking a little bit at the history of the industrial background to this by noting that—contrary to what has been said in multiple speeches by those opposite—under the Labor government, individual flexibility arrangements or IFAs were used to give employees genuine flexibility, not to cut wages.

The key safeguard that Labor introduced was, of course, the BOOT—the better off overall test. IFAs had to ensure that employees were better off overall. What this bill does is to make changes that will remove that key protection. It will allow night and weekend rates to be traded off for an unlimited variety of so-called non-monetary benefits. For non-monetary benefits to be taken into account under Labor's BOOT safeguards, they had to be relatively insignificant and genuinely agreed to. Under this bill, these safeguards will be removed. Labor's safeguards to limit the use of the non-monetary trade-offs are replaced by a short note providing for, apparently, any 'benefits other than an entitlement to the payment of money' to be used. The requirement that these be relatively insignificant and genuinely proportionate has gone, and it will open the door to weekend and night pay being traded away for all sorts of non-monetary items—perhaps even pizza.

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