George Campbell (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

What you are saying, Minister, is essentially that if an agreement is found to be unfair the onus will be on the employer to remedy it. We are talking about an 18-year-old. Everybody in this country knows that when young people front up to work for the first time they are given a document and told: ‘Sign on the bottom line and you’ve got a job. If you don’t sign, you haven’t got a job.’ There is no negotiation. Senator Webber in her contribution on the second reading debate went through, chapter and verse, a workplace agreement which was being offered in the mining industry in Western Australia to experienced workers—not to people 18 years of age who have just come out of school to go into the workforce—and they were told: ‘Sign it.’ You cannot even take a copy of it away. You have to sign it on the job: ‘Here it is. During your lunchbreak read it over. Give the copy back and sign it or you haven’t got a job.’ And those people do not have a job.