Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

When I was speaking previously, I cited a couple of examples where the employees, workers in my electorate, had been done out of their entitlements. I spoke about the Fair Entitlements Guarantee and welcomed the increases in penalties for those companies that deliberately try and do their employees out of their entitlements.

At the moment, the penalties are minor, it must be said, in comparison to the monetary amount many of these individuals and body corporates are squirrelling away into complicated mechanisms. The current penalty is 10 years imprisonment or 1,000 penalty units, which equates to about $210,000. As I said, I welcome the new penalties, which for an individual are imprisonment for 10 years or a fine of the greater of the following: 4,500 penalty units, which equates to about $945,000, or three times the total value of the benefits obtained by committing that offence, or both. For a body corporate, a fine of the greatest of the following: 45,000 penalty units or about $9.45 million; three times the total value of the benefits obtained by committing of that offence; or 10 per cent of the body corporate's annual turnover during the 12 months before the body corporate committed, or began committing, that offence. So we agree, as I alluded to previously, that these substantial increases in penalties will, hopefully, reinforce the serious nature of these crimes and will also act as a substantial deterrent for persons who may otherwise seek to engage in these types of evasive behaviours. It's also the case that the civil penalty provision will make it easier to hold those directors and companies liable for avoiding liability for the entitlements that are owed to those employees.

No-one should ever forget that when it comes to the Fair Entitlements Guarantee that this government's primary motivation is to reduce the fiscal cost to the Commonwealth, rather than any true commitment to protecting worker entitlements. As the guardians of workers' rights in this nation Labor will do whatever it takes to protect the Fair Entitlements Guarantee, as it is essential to providing a safety net for Australians.

We've seen with penalty rate cuts, and other initiatives from those opposite, that cuts to the rights of workers in this country, unfortunately, are in this government's DNA. We saw it with WorkChoices back in the times of former Prime Minister John Howard. We see it in this divided party and that is, unfortunately, one of the very few things that unite the conservative forces in this country and that's attacking workers' rights.

Under this government wages are stagnant, and even the business community is starting to be worried about that. Underemployment is stubbornly high, worker exploitation is rife and work in our nation is increasingly insecure. That's not good for Australian families and that's not good for the Australian economy. While these reforms that I have spoken about today, and other speakers have spoken to, will strengthen the legal regime to punish and deter those dodgy employers and companies they are only a start. We need to do more.

In the end, we support the premise and intent of this bill, as we see it. It will benefit employees, and as an extension of that the taxpayers who will have their valuable funds returned to them. There is a growing concern amongst workers in our nation that the federal government has not got their back. That they have been too keen to make sure that the top end of town is looked after, rather than those workers out in our nation who provide for their families and are what makes our country tick. It is the workers of our nation who really need to be supported. It is, obviously, the small- and medium-sized businesses as well that generate employment in our country. We recognise that, but we also recognise that strengthening the penalties for when people—people in positions of power and people in positions of great wealth and influence—take the opportunity to screw their workers out of the entitlements that they're owed it's not good. That is why the Fair Entitlements Guarantee was formed, to ensure that those workers aren't left behind, but we need to strengthen these penalties and, as I have outlined, hopefully, these penalties will send a strong message to those who would seek to subvert what those workers are entitled to. I welcome the bill.

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