Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the senator for her question and I can assure Senator Abetz I will not be mentioning him six times; he is not that relevant. It is an important question because Labor have delivered on our promise to consign the coalition's Work Choices legislation to the dustbin of history and to put in place the Fair Work Act. That act ensures that workplaces are underpinned by fairness and delivers flexibility and opportunities for employers and employees.

We all know what Work Choices meant for hardworking Australians. Under that legislation workers could be forced to sign a take it or leave it AWA which stripped away basic entitlements without compensation and without the oversight of an independent umpire. The facts speak for themselves. Under Work Choices 64 per cent of AWAs cut annual leave loading and 63 per cent reduced penalty rates for ordinary working people. Women workers were particularly badly hit by those changes.

What the Liberal Party do not understand is that millions of Australian families rely on penalty rates to help meet their everyday costs. Those penalty rates are part of their weekly budgets and help pay for the food, the mortgage and the standard of living that they enjoy. The Liberal Party's intent to undermine penalty rates is fundamentally an attack on the wages and conditions of Australian families. They compensate people for working antisocial hours, but we have put in place the new better off overall test for enterprise agreements which ensures that those conditions are protected. Penalty rates are an important part of the standard of living of millions of Australians and they need to be supported.