Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, am very pleased to rise in this place today to speak on this motion. In particular, I want to highlight point 5 of the member for Canning's motion, which:

… calls on Alcoa and the Australian Workers' Union to reach an agreement that protects the job security of their workers—

except that it's virtually impossible for Alcoa and the AWU to reach an agreement that protects the job security of workers when Alcoa is, today, in the Fair Work Commission, seeking to have the enterprise agreement cancelled and workers' conditions revert to the award. That's not bargaining. It's theft—theft of the working conditions of a long-serving and loyal workforce across Western Australia.

I'm really happy, today—and I've heard before in the media—that the member for Canning is supporting the workers. I call on him to move amendments to the Fair Work Act to protect the job security of the Alcoa workers in his electorate, and in mine, and in the member for Burt's, and in all the electorates around Western Australia where Alcoa workers reside. We can work together on this. I'm very happy to talk with the member for Canning to suggest amendments to the Fair Work Act. We can legislate, for instance, to protect collective bargaining. Everyone knows Labor's policy is to ensure that collective bargaining is not undermined by corporate gaming of industrial relations laws, including preventing the use of sham enterprise agreements—and what we have seen here—by preventing the likes of Alcoa from seeking to terminate enterprise bargaining agreements so that they can save a bit of cash and turf out a whole workforce.

There are other things we might work together on—if you are in support of the workers, as you say you are, Member for Canning. We can look at the same job, same pay policy, where we will protect workers and ensure they get a fair deal by tackling unfair labour hire and making sure that people who work alongside each other get paid the same amount of money for exactly the same work. Those are just a couple of ideas. There are a few more. As to fair work, we could redefine the definition of 'casual' so that it's used for the purpose for which it was originally intended, not how it is used now. We would seek to prevent employers from forcing their workers into sham contracting. So there are a few ways in which we can work together, Member for Canning, to actually do something about protecting the workers of Alcoa. This is how you can work to protect their job security. Unless you move amendments to the Fair Work Act, this is just another bit of hot air. It's all talk and no action.

But I know you've been busy. There's a lot to do in the Liberal Party at the moment. There were reports in the paper from a couple of Thursdays ago that the member for Canning sent a staffer down to Officeworks to buy an overhead projector and HDMI cable to set up in the room to do the numbers.

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