Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Makin for the question and for the commitment that he shares with every member of this government, that we want people to earn more and to keep more of what they earn. I just want to focus on one particular example, because we've often gone to the big statistics in terms of what's happening with real wages now returning in terms of growth, or what's been happening with the gender pay gap getting to its lowest level ever. I want to just focus on one employer and one set of laws, and what changed on laws that this side supported and those opposite opposed. That is the change that went through with secure jobs, better pay, which was to abolish the zombie agreements.

This article came out when parliament wasn't sitting, but I think we should refer to it. It was by David Marin-Guzman in the AustralianFinancial Review at the end of last year. The article referred to a labour hire company called AWX, which is a subsidiary of PeopleIN. That labour hire company had an old zombie agreement that dated back to 2004. When we've talked about zombie agreements before, we've talked about them in the context that they mean a particular company has an unfair advantage against their competitors. But when a labour hire company has a zombie agreement it means they can go to every single workplace and offer rates of pay that are not only below an enterprise agreement but below what the award rate had become.

For this particular subsidiary, the Sunday penalty rate—they covered people on the Restaurant Industry Award—that they were able to offer was $12 an hour less than the award rate of pay. It was $12 an hour less on a Sunday than the minimum rate of pay for the award. Now, you can imagine what that meant. They could go from business to business. Even if you didn't have an enterprise agreement, if an employer was paying the lowest amount that was meant to be the legal minimum, this labour hire company could come in and say, 'We can undercut that.' We had argued that that principle needed to be fixed in opposition. Those opposite voted against it when they were in government. They voted against it now that they're in opposition. It meant that people were able to be paid $160 a week less than if they were directly employed.

When those opposite say, as the Leader of the Opposition has said, that they will have a targeted package of reforms on industrial relations, we know exactly who it's targeted against. It's targeted against casuals, targeted against job security, targeted against closing the gender pay gap—targeted against ordinary Australian workers.

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