Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Here we are, the first day back after the winter recess, we're not even an hour into the new parliamentary sessions and yet we have this blinding hypocrisy from the Labor Party. The member for Batman gave the game away when she brought up bringing back the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal in this debate. The tribunal was simply about putting sanctions and mandates upon small business operators in the road transport sector but not putting the same sanctions or mandates against the large companies with their unionised employees. This is exactly what we are seeing in this argument over penalty rates.

It would be nice if the Labor Party came in and said that the bill that they were introducing applied to all the cuts that have been made by their friends at the SDA over recent years, but, no, it's not. This is the whole problem, it was those cuts to penalty rates that were made and authorised by the union officials that forced the hand of the commission. Let's just have a look at some of them. At Bunnings the 'shoppies' union, the SDA, and the Leader of the Opposition's former union, the AWU, cut penalty rates for workers at Bunnings from zero on Saturday and down from 100 per cent to 50 per cent on Sunday. Where were all the members of the Labor Party standing up and saying how terrible these cuts to penalty rates were then? We didn't hear a whisper or a murmur from them. All that did was make small business in the hardware sector have to pay more wages than their competitors—their large, big-end-of-town competitors, backed by their union mates—so they were at a competitive disadvantage.

It was the same thing at David Jones. The SDA, with the backing of the Labor Party and all the Labor members that sit over there, cut penalty rates at David Jones. They cut them to zero on a Saturday and down to 50 per cent on a Sunday. That put David Jones, with a unionised workforce, at a competitive advantage against small business that were forced to pay higher wages on a weekend. Where were the complaints from the Labor Party when that happened? Absolutely none.

Another example: the SDA cut the penalty rates for workers at Pizza Hut in Queensland, making them over $13,700 worse off—they actually cut the penalty rates to zero on a Saturday and Sunday! And where was the outrage of the Labor members of parliament over this? When did they come into this place and complain about penalty rates being cut for Pizza Hut workers in Queensland? A deathly silence. But that cut, again, placed a large corporation with a unionised workforce at a competitive advantage over their small-business competitors. And that is what we see this debate is all about.

This debate has nothing to do with penalty rates. It is about more union control, more union dominance, across the workforce. The Labor Party don't care about those workers who had their penalty rates cut, otherwise they would have come in and spoken up about them before. They just wanted to see those small businesses with a non-unionised workforce placed at a competitive disadvantage, and to have those workers have to go over to their big-end-of-town competitors—and, of course, cough up their union fees. That is all this debate is about.

I've heard a few other comments from other members. The member for Bass raised power bills—well, if the member for Bass is so concerned about the cost of electricity in this nation, I hope he will get behind the recommendations made by the ACCC, and reduce the subsidies that are currently flowing and being added onto everyone's electricity bills. If the member for Bass is fair dinkum, he will get behind those recommendations, and he will stand up and say, 'I support every single one of the ACCC's recommendations.' But, Deputy Speaker, five will get you ten that there's not a chance of that.

Then we had the hypocrisy on the corporate rate of tax. We live in an internationally competitive environment. Our companies have to compete around the world for capital and for workers. We currently have a situation where the US have lowered their corporate rate of tax down to 21 per cent. We have France planning to lower their corporate rate of tax from 34 per cent to 25 per cent. We have the UK, 20 to 17 per cent—(Time expired)

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