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

I thank the member for Cunningham for the question. She is somebody who is representing 72,000 people, all of whom are about to get a tax cut—every taxpayer gets a tax cut because they elected the member for Cunningham—and also representing a whole lot of those 2.6 million workers who, as of the decision this week, are going to get a pay rise.

I'm asked quite specifically about pathways the government won't go down and policies we've rejected. Often you'll get resolutions from conferences, and you sort of think, 'Oh, that's just an outlandish conference resolution', and you don't need to take it seriously. But rarely do you find that the shadow minister, Senator Cash, has written in response to the resolutions from their New South Wales conference, describing them as 'good ideas that align strongly with the coalition's approach to industrial relations'. While we were told a while ago that they had a targeted approach, now we're getting to find out exactly what's in it. We've just been told it was an approach of repeals of what had been done during this term. Remember a while ago we heard those words from Tony Abbott that Work Choices was 'dead, buried and cremated'? What's being proposed in these resolutions that the shadow minister has described as 'good ideas' are issues that haven't been law in Australia since Work Choices. What was dead, buried and cremated—so the hands are reaching up through the dirt and it is finding its way back. Zombie agreements that were previously abolished are finding their way to be enlivened.

Here's what they're going to do: (1) make it easier to sack people; (2) what do they want to do with the better off overall test? Abolish the better off overall test. A lot of people might remember this from the Work Choices era—where you can have an individual contract but it's not negotiated; it's a condition of employment. Unless you agree to worse wages and conditions than you'd otherwise get, you don't get the job. That's one of the things that's been referred to by the shadow minister as one of the good ideas that's in line with their policy—and then removing award protections for anyone who is above average wages. Have a think of some of the occupations where you've got classifications where people are earning above-average weekly earnings but are within the awards system—people like teachers, people like police officers, people like coalminers. What does it mean for those workers? It means no award entitlements to rostering rules, nothing for meal breaks, no overtime rates, no shift work, no public holiday penalty rates. It means a pay cut, which is what they want. (Time expired)

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