Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I hear a Labor member interjecting about Coles. The member for Wakefield is sticking up for the dodgy deals that were done at Coles that mean that if you are working on weekends—and this is what I have heard from a lot of people in the industry—some people might be better off under the Fair Work Commission's decision because they never saw the penalty rates in the first place. Before Labor members interject, they ought to consider the facts, and the fact that worker after worker after worker is fronting up saying, 'I have been underpaid.'

If the government was actually concerned about addressing matters to deal with bargaining and technical errors, they might look at the fact that this act severely limits the internationally recognised right to take industrial action and the right to strike. Talk about procedural errors! There are people who have tried to bargain to get better wages and conditions. Under this act, they have to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop—their notice of intention to have a bargaining period and then to take industrial action and then to go through the ballot process—only to have the whole thing pulled up on the basis of a technicality. It is very, very clear that the workers are saying, 'We want the ability to negotiate to have better wages and conditions,' and instead it gets pulled up on a technicality. Yet, there is the ILO, the International Labour Organization, and Australia is a member of the ILO—and that has not changed. So when it comes to that, what happens? The government does not say, 'We are clearly out of whack with our international obligations, so we better tidy up the act.' No, they turn a blind eye to that.

The only technical errors that they are prepared to fix up are the ones that do not seem to benefit employees in any meaningful way. There is a suite of amendments that could be made to the Fair Work Act to actually improve job security, minimum wages and conditions and the right to organise and to bargain for the people of this country, and the government is turning a blind eye to that. During question time today, we heard the Prime Minister again saying, 'The answer is to give big companies a tax cut. Of course, we are concerned about people's low wages. The answer is to give big companies a tax cut.'

Does anyone really think that when the big four banks, who make $30-odd billion profit between them a year, are given a tax cut and when that tax cut is a $7 billion hit to the budget that they are going to employ $7 billion worth of extra people? Come on! It is going to go straight into their pockets. Australians get this. They know that if you give the big companies in this country a tax cut, it is just going to help line the pockets of shareholders and profiteers, who are not the people who work in there. People know it intuitively. Over the last decade, the share of profits is growing and the share of wages is declining, of our national pie, and people are feeling it. They know that something is wrong, that something is rotten. There are things we could do to fix it up and the Fair Work Act does need amending.

The Greens were very, very pleased to go to the last election as the only ones pointing out the hole in the Fair Work Act, saying, 'Your penalty rates could be cut under this.' We went to the election pointing it out and said, 'It needs to be fixed.' The government, of course, said 'Well, there's no way we're going to do that. We'll leave it up to the independent umpire.' But my jaw dropped when Labor in opposition said, 'We'll do the same thing.' Labor and the Liberals went to the election on a unity ticket on penalty rates, saying, 'We'll abide by the commission's decision.' Had Labor won the election, which probably would have been a better outcome than what we got, they would be cutting penalty rates right now. That was the position they took.

When we wanted to legislate to protect penalty rates, the Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, said, 'It might never happen. Aliens are more likely to land from space.' Well, we knew there was a problem in the Fair Work Act and we pointed to it and said, 'Fix it.' We pointed to the problem in the Fair Work Act and said, 'Fix it.' Labor decided to hide behind making a submission and instead of having the guts to change the law, they said, 'We'll go to the Fair Work Commission and make a submission.' That had no effect. But what members of parliament can do that no-one else can do is change the law.

I am very, very pleased that Labor has now come in behind the Greens' position, and I will be very pleased to support the amendment that they are putting up, because, when we released our draft bill, there were 24 or 48 hours of silence before Labor decided that that would be a good idea and came up with their own. So I am pleased that Labor is doing that.

But the test is really whether the government and members of its backbench are prepared to stand up and support it, because we have the opportunity to stop the penalty rate cuts coming into effect. We have got a couple of days left to do it. I urge the government—in particular, the members of the government backbench who say they are concerned about this—to do something about it, because we could actually fix it before this place rises and, if we did that, I think that the Australian people would thank us for it.

See this speech in context