Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to continue the contribution I was making on the Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Vulnerable Workers) Bill 2017, repeating that the Labor Party will be supporting this legislation but have serious concerns about its efficacy.

The Turnbull government has been brought kicking and screaming to this legislation and finally have put it into the chamber, but it is nowhere near the standard of protections that Labor took to the last election. Labor's policy addressed the multitude of instances where workers' rights are crushed. Sadly, it is a practice that has become commonplace since the coalition has been in office. They are now approaching the beginning of their fifth year in office but are still acting like they are in opposition and that somehow everything that is wrong with the world is the Labor Party's fault.

There has been a series of high-profile cases where workers have been treated appallingly by some very well-known companies—not fringe companies but well-known companies like Myer, where cleaners were paid well below award wages, were denied penalty rates and superannuation, and were working in circumstances where they had no occupational health and safety protections. The 7-Eleven stores investigated by Four Corners were shown to be systematically exploiting vulnerable foreign workers. There was horrific evidence of gross underpayment of wages, the doctoring of pay records, threats of deportation and physical intimidation. Pizza Hut delivery drivers were paid as little as $6 an hour. As I said, these are not fringe-dwelling companies; these are major companies, major Australian employers.

We have heard of some poultry-processing plants where temporary overseas workers were being forced to work dangerously long hours for very little pay, far less than the minimum wage, and were being housed in overcrowded, substandard accommodation. We have heard of agricultural workers being exploited. I have gone out with the Taiwanese community to see the Taiwanese backpackers that were being exploited both in Bundaberg and in Gatton to make sure that people were informed what their rights are under Australian law—laws that the Australian government should be upholding and speaking strongly about.

Sadly, we saw the Turnbull government do nothing to stand up for these workers who were being severely exploited. The silence coming out of Point Piper on this issue was deafening. But today we can say, finally, they have done something. It is not nearly as much as Labor would do—as a sensible, fair-minded government would do—but at least it is something. This bill is not perfect—far from it. Obviously Labor will always, like a good opposition, closely scrutinise bills put forward by the government. We do have some concerns that, due to some of the drafting, there may be some unintended consequences.

This bill has been to the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee for inquiry and there were several issues raised by that inquiry process. Labor is concerned that there is an apparent gap in the legislation. The provision that will prohibit employers demanding unreasonable payments from employees may not capture the situation where an employer demands that prospective employees pay for sponsorship of working visas before they arrive in Australia so that the extortion takes place before the person gets on a plane.

There is a provision that would give the Fair Work Ombudsman power to compel people to answer questions, thereby removing their right to silence. As a lawyer or anyone concerned with human rights would know, that is a very difficult thing to sign away. Sadly, this bill does not contain protections which you might expect for a situation where somebody is being compelled to answer questions.

Provisions that will make franchisors and holding companies responsible for underpayments by their franchisees or subsidiaries to employees have failed to reverse the onus of proof, so the workers that have been short-changed will still have the evidential onus of proving that they have not been fully paid. We saw in the Four Corners investigation and since that people were given a pay packet with the right amount of pay in it but then, around the back of the shop, they basically had to hand back the cash that they had paid tax on. This evidential onus of proof, I think, is a particular problem where the employer has not kept proper records. This sort of employment often has that situation. How can a low-paid worker be expected to prove that an employer has not paid them when there are no employment records available?

As you would know, Deputy Speaker Mitchell, unions do great work in this area of tracking down pay records. Sadly in some of these areas, there is a deliberate attempt to exclude unions from the workforce, to make union membership almost impossible. We know that, where people are not unionised, they will be exploited. That is a basic law of industrial relations for the last 100 or 200 years. Those sectors of the community that do not have high membership get exploited, and that is where a sensible, fair government would step up and do the right thing by employees where there is low union membership. This is especially so if you have government that has those right-wing nut jobs who are obsessed with unions. That is all that they do, those right-wing nut jobs: they are obsessed with taking down unions, forgetting all the great work that unions do in the workplace. We know that is unfair.

If the Turnbull government really understood fairness they would implement the measures that Labor took to the election and they would stop the cuts to penalty rates. If they understood fairness they would stand up for the vulnerable, low-paid workers. Fairness, sadly, is not something that the Turnbull government has any understanding of. I look forward to the day when those opposite give me a list of all the times that employers have spontaneously given benefits to workers. I am waiting for that list to be put forward, because it has never happened. If the labour movement does not speak up, it does not happen!

We see it time and time again, that this Turnbull government has not been fair. We see it in their policies in this horrific budget, giving millionaires a $16,400 tax cut while everyone else actually gets a tax increase. That is just one sign of unfairness. They fundamentally do not understand or care about fairness in the workplace. They fundamentally are not committed to protecting workers rights. We know that; we see that by the voices opposite railing against penalty rates before the Fair Work Commission handed down that decision.

So many of those opposite are from the laissez-faire school of workplace conditions: let the market rip and let the devil take the hindmost! Fairness, I point out to those opposite, is more than a word. Fairness is not an attribute that can be feigned: either you get it or you do not. You can live and breathe it, but you cannot get it from a Crosby Textor focus-group-tested, clinically constructed line. I tell you that. And it is abundantly clear that the Turnbull government does not get fairness. The Turnbull government does not get fairness. The Tories never will—after all, that is why they are Tories.

We see this desperate manoeuvre of a budget, where the Prime Minister goes out there and frames it with his log cabin narrative that he came from humble roots. The only problem is that the logs in the log cabin were made out of gold! He talks about being this humble battler millionaire, whose chauffeur was picked on by the other chauffeurs when he was at school, and how he had these humble origins. He tries to frame himself by that so that he can at least try to convince some Australians that he cares about the lower-paid and disadvantaged people. The reality is that his government—and particularly those people who have hold of him on the Right—do not care about workplace relations, do not care about the lowest-paid and do not care about those people who know that $77 a week taken from them for working on Sunday, those penalty rate cuts, will mean the world of difference. That is a problem.

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