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.

We all know that the decision by the Fair Work Commission relating to penalty rates has been delayed, reportedly so employers can provide additional submissions to their case. That would, to my mind, only prove that their case has not been made. We know that a whole range of workers, from police to nurses, retail and hospitality workers, and everybody in between—really the bulk of the Australian working and middle class—rely on these penalty rates, if not for themselves then for their partners' or their children's income earnings.

We know that during the election there was a lot of crab crawling away from some parties' positions on penalty rates. We know the Liberal Party has, in the past, been wildly enthusiastic about cutting penalty rates. We know that from the experience under Work Choices. We know that they first ran a mile and then crab crawled away from it. We know that the Nick Xenophon Team had a similar position. We know that these parties, which are essentially conservative parties and have been enthusiasts for cutting penalty rates, have been trying to obscure their positions by some sort of latter-day conversion to a commitment to the Fair Work Commission and its role as umpire in this situation.

For my own mind, it is easy to quantify what penalty rates mean to an individual worker and it is easy to quantify what they mean to an individual business. I often chat to cafe owners and they express a desire to cut their penalty rates. They say, 'If I could cut my penalty rates, I could put an extra person on on Sunday,' and I say, 'That might work for you as a sole business if you operated in a vacuum where no other business was doing the same thing, but if Coles and Woolies and all the big employers and the state governments are all cutting their penalty rates who do you think's going to be shopping at your store? Who's going to be buying the cups of coffee?' This is often something that is lost on them. They often do not think about that broader situation.

Interestingly, the McKell Institute, in an analysis in 2015, observed that if penalty rates were cut—and 18 per cent of rural workers work in retail and hospitality—then rural Australia would lose between $370 million and $1.55 billion each year, depending on the rate of cuts to penalty rates and the level of local ownership in retail stores. It also estimated that it would reduce disposable income in regional areas by between $174.6 million and $748.3 million. So you can see that cuts in penalty rates do not just affect individual workers; they affect whole communities and whole communities' economies.

In South Australia, where we have quite a big independent retail arm in the case of Foodland and, in my own community, the Barossa Co-op, the effects would be somewhat moot. But, even so, we have a number of the big chains—Woolies, Coles and Bunnings—who receive regular pay rises and receive penalty rates. Of course, if they were able to cut them, then we know regional economies like South Australia would be affected.

What we have here is the opportunity for this parliament—and I extend the opportunity for the Liberal Party and for the Nick Xenophon Team to do what Labor is doing—to express to the Fair Work Commission the importance of penalty rates and, in a formal opposition to cuts to penalty rates, to express to them just how important a part of the income of workers these are, and how important it is for regional and rural economies and for Australia's social fabric that these penalty rates remain in the national awards and in our social and economic ethos to make sure that there is fairness and wage growth in the economy. Previous speakers have talked about the lack of wage growth in our economy being a problem not just for those individual workers but for the economy as a whole. Fairness is essential for growth and growth is essential for fairness, and we know that the two things increasingly go arm in arm. That is why we should resist any proposition to reduce penalty rates across the economy.

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