Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Hansard source

In the interests of correcting ‘unwittingly or deliberately misleading’, which I think was the phrase that the minister used, I want to make this point: I think it was filing fees that the minister talked about—how much it costs to file an application in either the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission or the Federal Magistrates Court. Let us be clear: he is not including legal fees in that analysis. The Industrial Relations Commission of New South Wales is a lay jurisdiction and a reasonably accessible jurisdiction. The government is proposing in this legislation a process of determination before either the Federal Court or the Federal Magistrates Court, so frankly it is completely misleading for the minister to make a comparison only on the basis of filing fees and not to address the issue that Senator Marshall was raising, which is the lack of access for an ordinary worker to a fully litigated and defended action to determine that they are an employee in the Federal Magistrates Court or the Federal Court.

The figures the minister is talking about do not include any legal representation, so Senator Marshall’s point is a very good one. How is a cleaner working for a school who thinks that she or he should be entitled to annual leave and the rest of the entitlements that employees would ordinarily get supposed to pay a lawyer to run a case in the Federal Magistrates Court or the Federal Court? It is simply justice beyond the reach of most ordinary working Australians.

This is the lie at the heart of the government’s approach in this area. They say: ‘Look, we have these sham contract arrangements. You can go off to these courts and you can get these remedies.’ The reality is that people will not and people cannot, because the sorts of employees who we are seeking to represent on this side of the chamber—the sorts of Australian workers who we are concerned about in our position here—are not people who have tens of thousands of dollars to go to a lawyer to take an action through the Federal Court or the Federal Magistrates Court.