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

I wish I could say it was a pleasure to follow the member for Corangamite in rising to speak on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Youth Jobs Path: Prepare, Trial, Hire) Bill 2016. Such are the delusions of this government, where they think if they get up and say the word 'strong' and 'we are backing Australian workers first' enough times that it will somehow echo and ricochet from this parliament out there into the community. But the community, of course, know exactly what this government is up to in a whole range of areas because they see in this parliament every single day that we either have no positive agenda at all or we have these rampant reactionary measures. The member opposite wandered from this bill, which is all about internships, and into industrial relations—all sort of weaved into the ABCC. What I would like to let the House know is that the Australian Building and Construction Commission does not deal with criminal behaviour at all.

There was a fellow in my electorate named Ark Tribe. He lived out in Middle Beach and he worked on the Flinders hospital site. He was worried about the safety of himself and the workers at that site, so they held a safety meeting because they were worried about working in an unsafe environment. And do you know what happened? He got hauled before the courts by Gestapo style tactics for months and months and months of his life. He was not a corrupt union official; he was just a construction worker who wanted to work in a safe environment. Those opposite want to criminalise that sort of behaviour and want to pretend that it is wrong. The fact is, people like Ark Tribe are the real Australians who are really representing the Australian tradition—that of a fair go, of a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, of working in a safe environment and of being able to come home to your family. Instead, we have this nonsense where those opposite talk about fraud. There is a place to deal with fraud whether it is in unions, the local footy club, a company or anywhere else in the community and it is called the courts. And guess what: they are doing it every single day. There is nothing particularly special about it. That is the way we have set up our community for the administration of justice. That is the way we should pursue it because that is the best way to pursue it. We should leave industrial relations separate from criminal law.

I guess we should talk about this bill. The other thing those opposite like to do is talk about real-life experience. I was a union official and, on occasion, I had stop-work meetings. These days, those opposite might have put me in jail for it. I might be in chains, like my forebear: my great-grandfather, Peter Roberts. He was on the docks at Geelong. He died in an unsafe work environment. He was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. Those opposite would have banged him up because that is what they are about. They are about criminalising trade unions and trade union activity.

Mr Falinski interjecting—

That is what was said. Let me tell you about what happened when I was a union official. Every so often I used to have to go out to some small retail establishment. I would be there and they would have somebody in to do 'work experience' or as an 'intern'. This would go on for weeks, sometimes months, and these people would be used to displace existing workers. Sometimes it was not such small institutions. We had one major retailer do it once. And I would have to patiently explain to those institutions, those commercial organisations that what they were doing was in fact illegal and that they should be paying these people.

From time to time some manager, or sometimes it was an owner of a company, would get into his head that maybe, if he had people come in as interns or for work experience, that would be a great boon to his business and that somehow the individual committing this free work would also get a benefit. Now, from this article in TheSydney Morning Herald by Clara Jordan-Baird, who is the national policy director of Interns Australia, I have got some figures: 'Only 20 per cent of unpaid interns are offered employment with the same organisation.' What happens to the other 80 per cent? I can tell you from my real-life experience: they get exploited. Let us think about that.

We roughly know what will happen under this bill and it will all come out in the Senate inquiry. The government is attempting to institute a program where we know the majority of people in the scheme are going to be exploited in some way.

Government members interjecting—

I suppose I will be generous with those opposite after the interjections. I heard the member for Corangamite talk. I remember being on the backbench of a government that was in a death spiral. You know those dive-bombers? I had a constituent who was in a dive-bomber. He was a guy who had to sit in the rear seat and he was the gunner. That is who you guys opposite are: you are in the rear seat of a plane and you are assuming there is a pilot in the front, but they have bailed out and you are just sitting in the back and shooting away and you are taking out the rudder and the wings and you are hurtling towards the ground. And as you are hurtling towards the ground you are issuing orders to the rest of us. You are giving us your bon mots of wisdom as you hurtle towards the ground.

I have been there, so I am not telling you how to suck eggs. But from these situations—and I have certainly seen enough of them in my time in parliament—we should know the sorts of rorts that go on and the sorts of people, the bottom feeders, who are attracted to programs just like this. To be fair to those opposite, we have seen it in all sorts of programs across administrations. The LPG subsidy was my favourite. It was started by Howard. There was $3,000 to subsidise LPG conversions. Australian taxpayers spent $750-odd million subsidising commercial activity that would have gone on anyway. All it did was drag demand forward. It doubled the price of LPG conversions. No-one was keeping an eye on that.

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