John McVeigh (Groom, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In speaking about this motion, it is very important to make two key points at the outset. Small business creates jobs in Australia, especially in regional Australia, where I am from. It is clear that small business, from what we can see, has welcomed the independent decision of the Fair Work Commission. The coalition understand these points very clearly. We know governments, unions and others do not create jobs—employers do, especially small business employers. We will always stand up for the small businesses who want to expand, create jobs and keep those jobs in place, or stand up for the unemployed who want to have an opportunity and the underemployed who simply seek more work hours. We have heard from many small shops and retailers who have traditionally found it too expensive to open on a Sunday. This decision to modify Sunday penalty rates will help them now to open their doors, compete on a level playing field with big business and, most importantly, create more jobs than ever before. That is essentially what the Fair Work Commission concluded in making its decision on minimum penalty rates, which also takes into account modern retail shopping trends where many more customers want to shop and where more people want to work on Sundays, especially young Australians.

This has been an independent decision on employment awards and conditions made by the Fair Work Commission free of any suggestions of political interference so as to ensure such decisions are evidence based, not political. The commission has spent years, we know, studying the evidence, receiving submissions and interviewing witnesses. It has carefully considered the views of unions and employer organisations alike.

Let's just remind ourselves of the history of the commission and its reviews: set up by the Gillard Labor government in 2009; tasked by Labor to review awards by the same Labor government in 2013; and specifically required to consider penalty rates as part of that process by the Labor workplace relations minister, now opposition leader, Bill Shorten, in 2013. Of course it was Labor who appointed all members of the commission who made this penalty rates decision. I note the former Speaker said they must have had rocks in their head and yet they appointed them.

For the opposition leader and his Labor team now to not accept the result is absolute hypocrisy and political opportunism in its worst form. Those opposite should drop their blatant political games and recognise the position of small business throughout this country who themselves recognise the opportunities that the Fair Work Commission decision opens up for them, their communities and, most importantly, their employees, who will have more access to more work, should they wish or, in the case of others, new jobs where they have not existed previously.

In my regional electorate of Groom, this is exactly what small businesses, especially retailers, who create and sustain jobs, have said to me. They are saying they recognise this as an independent decision. For some, it will mean no change to the penalty rates they pay; for others, it will mean they can open when they could not beforehand therefore providing new jobs that do not currently exist.

The Toowoomba Chamber of Commerce has provided me with feedback at their own instigation about local businesses who are experiencing that planning going forward whereby they can now take up opportunities for themselves, their employees and new employees that have not existed before in retail, as we are discussing here in the chamber today, but also in hospitality and other services.

They recognise their small businesses as the engine room of our regional economy, and the decision of the Fair Work Commission, as originally established by the Labor Party, now means that they can provide more jobs, more opportunities and provide the benefits to our community that the Labor established and appointed Fair Work Commission itself recognised would flow. Thank you.

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