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

I move:

That this House acknowledges that penalty rates are relied upon by Australian workers and their families to cover everyday costs of living, no matter if they are full time, part time or casual, including workers such as:

(1) nurses;

(2) police, firefighters and ambulance officers;

(3) retail and hospitality workers;

(4) manufacturing industry employees;

(5) services sector employees; and

(6) tourism and transport industry employees.

Penalty rates form a critical part of the incomes of nurses, police, retail and hospitality workers, manufacturing workers, people who work in services and people who work in tourism and transport. All of these workers rely on their penalty rates as part of their take-home income. Frequently, these people work the night shift and unsocial hours on the weekend to be able to provide the money to keep their household budgets afloat—to keep their kids clothed and going to school, to keep the mortgage paid and to keep food on the table. So it is incredibly disturbing that in South Australia and across the nation there is a trifecta of parties who want to pretend that penalty rates are not important and to begin to destroy them in one form or another. Some of these parties opt for an outright attack on penalty rates. But many others, in a more political fashion, want to cut penalty rates as you would cut an onion—slice by slice by slice. We see in this parliament and across the nation over time these attempts to cut up penalty rates. That fallacy—that we live in a seven-day society and weekends do not matter anymore—has been frequently proved wrong whenever someone has turned up to a marginal seat MP's office on the weekend or has rung one of these employer groups on the weekend and found that the answering service is on. For many, the weekend is alive and well.

Look at the various parties. Look at the article dated 7 October 2015 headed 'Briggs steps up Turnbull attack on penalty rates'. It is all about how the member for Mayo, who is a colleague of mine from South Australia, wanted to get rid of penalty rates for small business. I do not think I am paraphrasing him there. That is what he intended to do. More recently, we have had Michaelia Cash talking in similar terms about getting rid of penalty rates. Oddly enough, the Prime Minister has gone cold on this, just like he has gone cold on the GST. They are all matters, presumably, he would come back to if and when he is granted a second term.

In my state, there are other parties as well who want to get rid of penalty rates. For instance, Family First want to get rid of penalty rates. People who are voting for Family First in the Senate would do well to look at Senator Day's proposals. He does not want to just get rid of penalty rates, which he proposed to do in his Fair Work Amendment (Penalty Rates Exemption for Small Businesses) Bill 2015—it was one of the bills he put up—he also wants to get rid of the minimum wage for young people. It is extraordinary, for someone who stands for a party that says they want to put families first, to put forward a policy in parliament that would actually diminish families' incomes.

We know that the new Nick Xenophon Team also has a hostility to penalty rates. Senator Xenophon also presented a Fair Work amendment bill with the same effect—that is, getting rid of penalty rates but just for retail workers and hospitality workers—in an attempt, as I said before, to cut the onion. We know that Stirling Griff, a would-be senator for the Nick Xenophon Team, has some form in this regard. He called penalty rates 'a noose around the neck of small business'.

You can see that there is a trifecta of parties—the Liberal Party, the Family First party, the Nick Xenophon Team—all with a hostility to penalty rates and all vowing to cut them by introducing Senate bills. We know that there was a bidding war about who could be toughest on penalty rates. Now that we are coming into a election year we want to put these three parties, this trifecta of parties that are against penalty rates, to the test and find out whether they have electoral support for their policies. I think we will find that they do not have any support at all out there in the public.

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