Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Through the course of the pandemic, we've often heard the expression, 'We're all in this together.' So our message to the minister is: 'When you say it, mean it,' because a lot of Australia Post workers—and these are average Australians who are driven very much not by the pay packet, and certainly not by the pay packets earned by the executives in Australia Post—do their work from a sense of service, and, importantly, they do it at times and in a way that most average Australians would recognise is pretty hard going.

Every single person on this side of the House is familiar with Australia Post workers and knows what their day looks like, and I will give you a sense of what it's like. Every single one of us on this side of the House is prepared to stand with average Australians who work at Australia Post, and we know what they do—like the van drivers who start their day at the end of our day clearing the mail; like the mail centre workers whose working day is always the night; like the line-haul drivers who cross state lines at midnight, delivering mail; like the posties who are up before dawn getting ready to do their day delivery; like the people you see in the post offices who greet you and help every single person in the community and know your name; even down to the video coders who make sure that your bad handwriting is not going to stop the mail being delivered. It's all those average Australians who we stand up for and are proud to stand up for in this place. They, through the course of this, had to live with the kind of job anxiety and insecurity and this whole crisis that had been cultivated by Australia Post managers, backed in by the government, who, we're told, will bring in a whole series of temporary changes that will last until June next year—not very temporary for them! They're the ones who saw their overtime cut, the ones who saw the amount of hours that they work cut, the ones who knew that their jobs were likely to be cut. At a time when they knew how much post was going through, the postal execs a few months earlier were saying, 'Post volumes are dropping.' Even this minister was saying that the numbers were dropping. What we discovered, through the parliament that this government didn't want to sit and the parliament from which this government didn't want the answers to come out, was that mail volumes were actually going up in the middle of the pandemic—going up!

So we've had a crisis generated by Post managers a few months earlier, and then, a few months later, we've had the managing director of Australia Post saying: 'At Australia Post, it's Christmas every day'—bragging about how much is going through Australia Post. These are the same executives who, after creating that level of crisis and that level of anxiety, then managed to reward themselves on a job well done by giving themselves big bonuses! The same people doing this are being supported by this government. Only this government can stand by. Only a Liberal MP could stand by and endorse the notion that you get a million-dollar bonus, or millions of dollars of bonuses, for scaring your workforce and lying to the public. Only the Liberals could back that in and only the Nationals could let them get away with it. Only the Nationals could—the people who are supposed to stand up for people in the bush, either for the Australia Post workers that are in regional communities or for the communities that those workers are helping. The Nats don't say a single thing about it. It is wrong on so many levels.

As the Leader of the Opposition rightly pointed out, after all that revenue is up. They're doing okay. They can see what's happening on parcels. They've had all this stuff happen. They award themselves a bonus in that way. Then after all that they say to Australia Post workers, 'Now, could you help us clear the mail with your own cars?' This is the genius of Australia Post management that they do that—'If you could just help us out in that way?'—after making them so nervous about what's happening.

The other thing is the minister is wrongly accusing our side of lies. When Australia Post workers were briefed in their workplace—

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