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

I want to thank the member for the question. She's a tireless worker in south-western Sydney and a defender of making sure that people earn more and keep more of what they earn.

There was a debate in the first year of this term on the secure jobs, better pay bill, about multi-employer bargaining, and different predictions were made. We said that it would improve wages, that it would improve conditions, that it would improve job security and that it would improve productivity. But those opposite made predictions as well, about multi-employer bargaining. They said, modestly, it would close down Australia, it would 'burn down' Australia, it would result in coast-to-coast strikes and it would smash productivity.

Well, we now have the first of the multi-employer bargains—being reported by Ewin Hannan in the Australian today—in the air-conditioning manufacturing industry. And what we find there is the following: six per cent pay rises each year for four years for those workers; job security and casual conversion; productivity improvements, including skills development and span of working hours; and better apprentice pay rates. The full-time pay rate will go from $102,000 to $133,000 over the course of four years, and those same workers will get a tax cut of more than $2,200 now and more than $3,500 by the final year of the agreement. It's worth having a listen and comparing what those opposite said multi-employer bargaining would result in with what the employer organisation has said about this agreement, which is only possible because we changed the law. From HVAC's president, Mimmo Scavera:

… some wins, some losses on both sides, and we came up with a happy medium we're all satisfied with.

A better skilled workforce and an organised workforce is always a better productive workforce … For us, it's a move to improve our industry, to make it a safer, more skilled industry.

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