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

In fact, Senator Webber’s contribution has forced the Office of Workplace Services to write to her seeking information so they can go and inquire into the circumstances of that agreement. Minister, don’t you sit there and tell us what ACCI told us at the inquiry: that there is not one instance of these things occurring, that it is all a figment of our imagination, that it is all being generated because the ACTU is running a scare campaign. There are a multitude of these circumstances out there that we all know about where people are being forced into adopting or accepting agreements which they do not want to have a bar of, but they have no choice because it is the only way they can get a job.

I have asked you a simple question which you have not, in the past 25 minutes, even come close to attempting to answer. That is: how does an employee in those circumstances—an 18-year-old coming into the workforce for the first time—actually seek to remedy a deficient agreement in such a way as to get the conditions they are seeking and not the conditions that are being imposed upon them by an employer? I have not heard the answer. If you are not prepared to answer it, just tell me and I can go and do something else.