Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

Here we go; we have Senator Macdonald interjecting, again justifying the Howard government’s condition- and wage-stripping AWAs. It simply reminds us that those opposite are all at sea when it comes to industrial relations. What we know is that data released in May 2006 showed that employees were losing their core conditions at astonishing rates: 64 per cent of agreements cut annual leave loading, 63 per cent cut penalty rates, 52 per cent cut shift work loadings, 51 per cent cut overtime loadings, 48 per cent cut monetary allowances and 46 per cent cut public holiday pay. In fact, in April 2007 it was revealed that 75 per cent of agreements cut shift work loadings, 68 per cent cut penalty rates, 57 per cent cut monetary allowance and 52 per cent cut public holiday pay. I do want to emphasise this, and I can go on as there are a lot of statistics about what occurred under your regime.