Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Members opposite don't like it when we talk about this. As the inquiry exposed, for many years unions have signed enterprise agreements with large enterprises that include cuts to Sunday penalty rates, and small businesses have been on an uneven playing field relative to large businesses. I reflect on a terrific column written by Grace Collier in The Australian, 'Make ALP pay for union collusion'. She is a former union worker who saw the light. She reflects on this report and cites some of the terrible examples where ordinary Australians have been ripped off by these EBAs brokered by large employers and the union movement, where workers have, in many cases, been left completely blind as to what is going on:

So pity those who work in a bed and breakfast. They get dudded by these deals. Another example was given:

That is as a result of special deals, EBAs, between KFC, McDonald's, Pizza Hut and the union movement. One of the biggest unions responsible, of course, is the shoppies union. Yet another example was given:

As Grace Collier points out, Labor's main defences of these deals—that any losses are offset by a higher base rate of pay and that they meet the better-off-overall test—have been totally demolished. They have also been demolished by the Fair Work Commission in some agreements. It found that evidence from a number of people who work for large retailers suggested they were worse off. Worse than that, they were not informed by either the company or the union that their agreement included penalty rates that were lower than those provided for in the award.

So we have seen absolute hypocrisy from the Labor Party in terms of this so-called battle against keeping penalty rates. They are not prepared to stand up for the many hundreds of thousands of workers who have lost out with these sleazy deals, which we are trying to combat through our corrupting benefits legislation. If the Labor Party and members opposite were interested in putting all workers on a level playing field and standing up for all workers, they would back our corrupting benefits bill. But they are not doing that. There is no greater deal-maker than the Leader of the Opposition. When he ran the AWU, his deal with Cleanevent denied Cleanevent workers penalty rates to the value of $4 million, which is absolutely notorious. What we have seen from the opposition is that the Leader of the Opposition is fine with lower penalty rates when his union mates do it—when they do those big sleazy deals with big business, including the likes of Woolworths, Coles, KFC, McDonald's and Pizza Hut—and he only opposes penalty rate modifications when the independent umpire, the Fair Work Commission, makes adjustments. Shame on Labor for its utter hypocrisy.

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