Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise today to support the motion moved by the member for Wakefield regarding penalty rates and to stress the importance of penalty rates to families in my electorate of Lalor to make ends meet, week to week. Jobs, of course, are critical. Employment is obviously one of the most important issues as we prepare ourselves to go to a possible rush election. Thousands of people within the community of Lalor rely on penalty rates to put food on their table and petrol in their cars and pay for those excursions for their children. Penalty rates are not a luxury. In a discussion on penalty rates, lessening the importance of penalty rates to the hospitality sector is disingenuous. It is as plain as the nose on the Prime Minister's face that this would be the thin edge of the wedge and, before we knew it, 25 per cent of lots of workers' income would be gone. Once we accept that penalty rates are not important for one sector of our workforce, that will roll through to all other sectors of our workforce.

In the hospitality sector, it is extraordinary to think that we would say to these people, who work unsociable hours and give up time with their families to earn those extra dollars to see them through the week, that they should be targeted in this debate at all.

It is stunning, absolutely stunning, that members of the National Party are silent on this, because McKell Institute research shows clearly the impact it will have in regional Australia. It is extraordinary. Retail and hospitality workers in rural Australia would lose between $370 million and $1.55 billion each year, depending on the extent of the cut to penalty rates and the level of local ownership of retail stores. This means that the disposable income for spending in regional areas would be reduced by $174.6 million or $748.3 million a year. It defies logic that anyone would purport that taking money out of workers' pockets will not have an impact on the economy and will not have an impact on our micro-economies, like in my electorate of Lalor and in regional Australia.

It is astounding that today we have this private members' business here and the speakers from those opposite are so limited. On our side of the chamber, we are prepared to get up and speak on this every week because we are passionate about people's ability to earn a living. People should be fairly compensated for giving up time with their families, for working the hours that other people do not want to work. We note our Prime Minister's obsession with the notion that it is a 24/7 world these days. Well, lots of people are not showing up here today to talk about penalty rates, so it is clearly not a 24/7 world at all.

I want to mention too the increase in casualisation and insecure work, particularly in the electorate of Lalor, particularly in my community, where more and more young people are only finding casual work. They are sitting up until 12 and one in the morning to see if they are going to get the text to say they have work tomorrow. Removing penalty rates at this point in time, with increased casualisation, with insecure work, seems just to be an attack on low-income workers and an attack on young people that is completely and utterly unfair.

I know that I have spent a lot of time across the last 12 months with people in the electorate, particularly people in their 50s, who are finding themselves unemployed, and they are shocked to find that the only work that they seem to be able to find is casual work. I think it is fair to say there is a new empathy in the electorate of Lalor for young people. There are people aged 50-plus who are now in queues at Centrelink, who are going to MatchWorks or other JSAs, who are coming to tell me about the length of time and number of jobs they are applying for, and they have a new understanding of what is confronting our young people. I would suggest that those people will come out to defend penalty rates, and they will stand with the Labor Party to defend penalty rates because this is an attack on workers' rights and conditions and families' incomes.

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