John Hogg (Queensland, Deputy-President) Share this | Hansard source

You do not understand what precarious employment is about. Senator Parry, I will come back to you outside the chamber and tell you how precarious your employment is. But that is for another time. It is not because of me; it is because of you. The driving force in the Bjelke-Petersen era and in the era of this government is supposedly in the name of lifting productivity and profits. But, of course, the people who have been asked to sacrifice the wherewithal to generate that so-called productivity lift have been those who are in vulnerable employment.

Of course, the award over a long period of time was a safety net. It was always available to employers to go beyond the safety net—to pay in excess of the safety net and to give conditions of employment they were far superior to and far better than those that may have prevailed in the award. That was the case back in the eighties when VEAs were around.