Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

I'm really proud that the member for Paterson has brought this motion before the chamber, because this is a member who understands the needs of the mining workers in the Hunter. Those opposite: don't pretend you support mineworkers when at the same time you try to cut their pay. What we've got, in the member for Paterson, is someone who backs the industry and backs workers getting fair payment.

What we just heard from the member for Goldstein, where he referred to 'empowerment', is extraordinary. I'm yet to meet the worker who wants to be empowered to get a pay cut. I'm yet to meet the worker who says, 'If only I had the authority to be able to be paid less.' The workers who would be protected by what's being proposed by the member for Paterson, the workers who would be protected by 'same job, same pay', want to be empowered with a better take-home pay. I've met with these workers at Moranbah; I've met with these workers throughout Central Queensland. And it's not just the mining industry where this happens. People are employed by a company, and the workforce is usually represented by a union, because union workplaces do get better rates of pay. We don't resile from that for one minute. But, once an enterprise agreement is in place, some of these employers go off to a labour hire company. And, because those workers are technically employed by someone else, they come in and undercut the enterprise agreement rate. So you get two people working side by side on the exact same roster, where one receives a radically lower rate of pay.

What's the answer? What's the policy solution that the previous speaker, the member for Goldstein, just referred to? He said, 'You can deal with this through casual conversion.' What does his model mean? Well, if you're already employed by labour hire, the casual conversion legislation they put through doesn't let you change employer; you only get to convert within the labour hire firm. So he's offering the person who is already being paid less than the person they work side by side with to go from casual to permanent, still for the labour hire company, and be paid even less per hour still. The proposal that the member for Goldstein has just put forward as a way of dealing with the issue of two people working side by side, doing the exact same job, and one of them is being paid much less per hour than the other is: 'Let's just make the gap even wider.'

Australians have a good sense of what's reasonable and what's not, and it is reasonable that, if you're doing the same job on the same shift at the same workplace, then you get the same rate of pay. The member for Paterson will have had many conversations with mining workers throughout the Hunter, where they will tell you upfront their frustration at this not happening. Don't forget, in an industry like mining, when you've got these concerns, it's not simply a difference in pay; it's also a difference in security. What does that mean in the mining industry, an industry where safety concerns are not about whether or not you have a minor injury; safety concerns are about whether or not you are at risk of dying at work? People told me in Central Queensland—and mining workers everywhere will tell you, and the mining union will tell you, but those opposite might not know this—that people in less secure work are less likely to speak up about safety issues. How do the workers know this? Because they've got examples of labour hire people who did speak up about safety issues and they never saw them for another shift.

Job security is a safety issue. Job security is about us being a country where, if people have security of their job, they have security in their take-home pay and they have security in knowing that they'll be able to pay their rent, pay their mortgage, pay their bills. It's a security that this side of the House will defend for the workers of Australia and it's a security that those opposite are deliberately designing to remove from the Australian workforce. Everybody who sees the injustice of different rates of pay for the exact same job should know there's only one way to fix this, and it's a change of government at the next election and following what's been put forward by the member for Paterson.

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