Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There has been no greater asset to Australia than the Australian trade union movement, both in protecting wages and conditions and in service to the country. We saw this best through the accord years, where the trade union movement balanced a sectional interest, the interests of workers, with the interests of the country. I was a union official.

Government Members:

Government members interjecting—

Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I hear those opposite baying. They should just listen and they might learn something.

Government members interjecting—

I did not interrupt you. You think this is a joke, but protecting people's penalty rates is actually pretty important, so you can carry on like pork chops across the aisle, pretending this is a joke, but protecting workers' wages is actually very serious. That is why it is so important that this parliament and, indeed, the nation's media and the national discussion deal with facts rather than with misinformation.

It is one of the great problems, I think, of the current debate about enterprise, that my union, the SDA, is being assailed by misinformation put about by both the Trotskyist left, a very strange sort of beast, and the extreme right. It is a strange meeting of minds, but they hate moderate trade unionism, so it should be unsurprising that they are seeking to put out misinformation into the public domain. I am drawn to an appearance by COSBOA's Peter Strong on Sky News the other day, where he said:

They know that the great majority of Sunday workers are already on low rates. They know, as the largest union in Australia, the SDA, negotiated the agreements in the first place

I thought to myself that Mr Strong has talked about Coles and Woolworths agreements numerous times without dealing with the facts. While there is a lower rate on Sunday, there are higher rates during the week. If you want to know about this agreement, look at South Australia, where the same agreement was offered to small businesses by Business SA and the SDA—a template agreement any small business could take up. It had a 15 per cent increase in pay in exchange for broadly the same penalty rate settings. Do you know how many small businesses in South Australia took up this deal that Mr Strong says is not available to small business? Zero. The reason they did not is that labour costs are higher under these agreements—not lower, higher. So let's not have this misinformation put about in the public domain by Peter Strong and others—the Trotsky left; and I am not joking about that—that somehow the SDA has traded away Sunday penalty rates for nothing. They have traded away Sunday penalty rates for higher base pay. (Time expired)