Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a sad day in Australian governance when a first-term opposition MP has to school a minister of the Crown on a piece of government legislation. The ACTU is absolutely right—it is $4 an hour on top of the Centrelink payment that they would normally already get. To say otherwise is simply a blatant falsehood. The minister and I share a history. I too am the former editor of a local newspaper—though not one quite so salubrious as The Daily Advertiser in Wagga! Our newspaper also had interns. They were university interns, usually students in their third year, or graduates. The big difference between them and what is being proposed now is that they were what most people would understand interns to be, which is young people learning on-the-job training for the profession of their choice—invaluable work experience. It was a win for the employer—we got a warm body to give some extra work to—but they got training, they got mentorship and they got a body of work that they could then use when they went out to get a real job.

The minister is quite right—if a good intern came along you would give them a job if a job was available. That is the key—if a job was available. The problem with this scheme is that it promotes, it incentivises, churn. You are going to give $1,000 to an employer every 12 weeks. If you are a small business employer and you are on the bones of your bum a little bit and the opportunity is there to turf a worker every 12 weeks and get a thousand bucks every 12 weeks, you are going to take it up. The minister will assure us in a moment that that will never happen—'Trust us, we would make sure that would not happen.' But I will tell you what, Minister—people game the system all the time. They find the loopholes, they find the gaps. Unless this is tied down and ironclad, that is what is going to happen. People will be ripped off, kids will be churned through this system every 12 weeks and dodgy employers will pocket that $1,000. One of my key concerns with this proposal is that it seeks to depress wages. It essentially creates a pool of free labour, and that then depresses wages for everybody else in the community. It treats young people as disposable—it tells them they are worth not quite as much as the rest of us. That, to me, is just not right.

I have a number of questions which hopefully the minister can answer in some detail. First, what happens if an intern sustains an injury at work?

Are interns covered by workers' compensation? The government simply has not addressed this important question. Will the base $200 a fortnight include the possibility of being made to work on public holidays and weekends? Does a penalty rates regime apply for these times? I suspect it does not. What is going to happen? For a worker who gets penalty rates with these times, the employer will say, 'There is a worker I have got to pay penalty rates to, and there is a free bit of labour.' Guess who will get those hours? It is absolutely outrageous. I would like some clarification on that. What qualification will an intern earn after four to 12 weeks in a workplace working 15 to 25 hours a week? Will they get a certificate? Will they get a trade qualification? Will they get anything to send to another employer, or will it just be, 'Thanks very much, on your way,' while somebody else comes in through the front door?

The minister assures us there will be safeguards. When you are dealing with legislation of this magnitude and when you are dealing with the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people, we need better in legislation than 'Just trust us.' We need to see the detail before it is put to the parliament. That is why Labor is going to seek to refer this to a Senate review. The minister said he can assure the member for Mayo that it is a good policy. She had some very good questions. I, too, represent a rural seat and I, too, know young people who find it very difficult to get to work. They do not all have cars and public transport is absolutely woeful. It is very expensive to get around. These are questions that need to be answered as well.

The minister said this will deal with the real-world challenges. A real-world challenge for young people is getting fair pay in the workplace. Australians have worked for generations to get fair pay and fair conditions for Australians in workplaces. We are simply not prepared to give it up on what is looking more and more like a dodgy free employment scheme.

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