Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This week marks the six-month anniversary of the Prime Minister's infamous statement:

Good government starts today.

At the time, the Australian people laughed. They laughed that it took this Prime Minister that long to decide that he wanted to lead a good government. Here we are six months later, and Australians are still asking themselves, 'When will this good government begin?' because it has not started yet.

Let us just take the recent attack on people who are earning penalty rates: the government, through the Productivity Commission, are not going after the highest paid workers in our community; they are going after the lowest paid workers. They have singled out retail workers and hospitality workers in our community—people who earn as little as a wage of $441 a week—as being the ones who should take a penalty rate cut. This is what 'good government' means to the government. They are going after the lowest paid workers and attacking them when it comes to their penalty rates.

This is also the government whose Minister for Employment says that he has no problem with workers being sacked via text message and email with less than 24 hours notice: 'Check your email. You've been sacked', 'Check your email. You've been made redundant.' What kind of IR minister does not stand beside workers when a company behaves that way? That is bad government. That is not good government. Australians want to know when good government is going to start. (Time expired)