Melissa Price (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the falsehoods being peddled by those men and women opposite regarding penalty rates in this country. It must be good to go through life as carefree and unaccountable as those members opposite. The simple fact is that on this issue of penalty rates, Labor needs to be held to account and their unscrupulous warping of the facts deserves criticism.

The hypocrisy of their own leader on this issue, who cut penalty rates for the workers he represented so that he could bolster his own electoral fortunes, is, quite frankly, breathtaking. The EBAs that Labor and the SDA help to cut are already doing more damage to young, vulnerable Australian workers' weekends rates than anything the Fair Work Commission has ever done. The facts are that any worker that is working solely weekends at Coles, Woolworths, McDonald's or Domino's is already worse off under their current EBA—this is what the unions have agreed to—than if they had been stuck with their current award. In some cases, we have heard that they are nearly $1,700 a year worse off.

Those members opposite talk about fairness as if they owned the concept, but I am not sure how they can even get those words past their lips, such is the hypocrisy on this issue of penalty rates. The member for Wakefield, whom I heard speaking earlier today in the other place, has said that it was nonsense to suggest that the workers were sold out or that there were sweetheart deals struck between unions and big business. But I suggest to those opposite—and there are not many of us here—that there are the real facts and not the fake facts that they continue to peddle. In the Fair Work Commission just only a few days ago, Coles's lawyer Stuart Wood QC indicated that much of the Coles workforce—up to some 60 per cent—would be better off if they were paid minimum award rates, rather than what they are being paid from deals struck with the SDA. This admission comes as Coles tries to fight off a huge back pay claim for tens of thousands of its workers from Brisbane night fill worker Penny Vickers. In deals struck with SDA, workers at some of Australia's biggest employers, including Woolworths, Coles, McDonald's, Hungry Jack's and KFC are collectively being underpaid more than $300 million dollars a year. This equates to about 250,000 workers being underpaid through dozens of union enterprise agreements. The agreements show a clear pattern of hourly rates paid from a few cents to a few dollars an hour above the award, whilst their penalty rates are slashed or non-existent. This leaves workers worse off. Some workers at Coles were earning the princely sum of $15,000 a year. These are people who do not earn very much and these are the people that those opposite should be standing up for, and they are not. Those members opposite have absolutely no leg to stand on with this issue. It is absurd to suggest otherwise while they continue to support the SDA and take their members' money to fund attack acts.

This is what those members opposite do not understand: when a union negotiates these deals with large employers like Coles or Woolworths, what they are doing is cutting the legs out from under the small-scale operators competing with them. A union-negotiated deal that allows a place like KFC to stay open on a Sunday without paying penalty rates means that they have a competitive advantage over the mum-and-dad stores across the road who are paying their staff the double time or whatever the relevant penalty rate may be at the time. This hypocrisy has, quite frankly, gone on long enough.

The simple fact is that the union movement is gradually limping towards irrelevance. We see example after example of unions taking corrupting benefits—something this government has recently taken steps to curb. Research agency Roy Morgan released a report at the start of this year that estimates only 15 to 17 per cent of the Australian workforce is now a member of a union, which is a record low. A full 50 per cent of the Labor Party's candidates are chosen by the unions, and this, I believe, defies belief. How can you run in an election with 50 per cent of your candidates having ties to a movement that only represents 15 per cent of the population? The maths of that equation does not stand up to scrutiny.

The Australian people do not enjoy being lectured to by hypocrites, and that is exactly what the modern union movement and its political arm, called the Labor Party, seek to do. Unions have eroded the trust that workers have placed in them because of secret payments, militant behaviour, and a perception that they no longer care about the average Australian worker. This does stand up to scrutiny. Unions do not represent the lowest paid workers in the country—not anymore. They have illustrated that regarding this penalty rate debate. In fact, they are barely representative of the construction sector. They no longer enjoy the support of public opinion, and they are overly represented by bureaucrats in the public sector.

The largest percentage of union membership is made up of workers earning between $80,000 and $100,000—earnings well above the national average. These are hardly the struggling battlers the unions fraudulently claim to represent. What about the kids in Coles? Why don't they represent their interests more? This is the great falsehood of the union movement and of the Labor Party by extension. They claim to be representing the lowest paid workers in the country. They claim to be fighting for a fairer deal. But they are routinely selling out their own members for some other benefit. We hear loud criticism and condemnation from those opposite regarding the Fair Work Commission decision to cut penalty rates, but no criticism of their own unions' decision to sell out those 15-year-old Coles workers.

The simple fact is that the current penalty rates system simply does not work. This is why Labor set up the Fair Work Commission and asked them to investigate this very issue. The problem is they did not like the umpire's decision, so now we have got a lot of criticism of our side and also of the Fair Work Commission by extension. This is notwithstanding that the Labor Party stacked the Fair Work Commission with their mates. But they did not get the right result, so that is why they are unhappy.

But I understand, and those opposite also understand—we all understand in this place—that penalty rates are an integral part of our economy and they do allow young people, single parents, working holiday-makers, and many others to work jobs outside of normal hours and be paid extra for doing so. By rewarding people for working these abnormal hours, we are incentivising these industries, and we are ensuring that industries like the hospitality sector and the tourism sector have a bright and vibrant future. But we also need to balance that objective with the ability of these businesses to stay open and to remain competitive. I know this is perhaps hard for those opposite to grasp because they do not seem to stick up for regional towns and cities in Australia, but there is not always a lot of choice in regional towns and cities in Australia as to where you shop, and so, therefore, having a high penalty rate structure does impact those businesses, and that is who I care about. If those opposite thought more deeply about what regional Australia requires, then they may consider that we do actually have some valid arguments with respect to the penalty rates.

I am going to wrap up to give my learned friend on the other side an opportunity to speak today. But what I would like to say is that I do want the other side to be held accountable on this issue, and I do not want them to continuously play these cynical political games with people's lives without being held to account, as we have seen them do time and time again.