Sue Lines (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is Anti-Poverty Week this week, not that you would notice in the Australian parliament as the government continues its attack on ordinary Australians. Since the new management took over there has been no reversal of policies which hurt Australians. In fact, the rhetoric on cutting penalty rates has increased under the Turnbull government.

Anglicare's report today, Who is being left behind states:

It's pretty hard to make a difference when the larger wheels of government policy, political ideology and economic forces are all stacked up to go the other way.

Under its new management, it is the same old, same old in terms of their direction. Despite election night promises when the old management promised the Australian people, 'We will not leave anyone behind,' we know that whoever is running the Liberal Party and their compliant mates in the National Party, Australians have seen broken promise after broken promise, and many Australians have been left behind as a direct result of the policies of this now Turnbull government. As these attacks on penalty rates have increased, Mr Turnbull, the new Prime Minister, has led the charge. No matter how many selfies he takes using public transport, the real truth is that the Prime Minister and his party are completely out of touch with ordinary working Australians who rely on penalty rates to supplement their low incomes.

Despite the PM's assertion that we live in a seven-day economy, the facts do not support that. None of our government institutions are open on weekends and all of our major sporting events and grand finals are held on weekends. It is when Australians enjoy leisure time and enjoy time with their families. Remember when the old Prime Minister said to weekend workers, 'If you don't want to work on weekends then you don't have to.' Now the new Prime Minister is saying we live in a seven-day economy. The government wants to create a two-tiered system for weekend workers, where it would seem that some workers are more entitled to penalty rates than others.

As the recent Productivity Commission report suggested, some workers—emergency service workers and some of our health workers—should get a penalty because it recognises that working weekends takes those workers away from their families. Of course, that report ignores the thousands of other workers in retail, in hospitality, in aged care, in disability services, cleaning and security workers and many more who work weekends and miss out on family time, but do not rate a mention and do not deserve a penalty rate according to the government. It is okay for their penalty rates to be cut or completely abolished. There are 4.5 million Australians who rely on penalty rates. It makes up between 30 and 50 per cent of a worker's pay. Many weekend workers are low paid.

Recently, at Labor's Fair Work Taskforce inquiry in Perth we heard from three Western Australian workers. One was aged-care worker, Judith, whose base hourly rate is $20.50. Obviously, Judith relies on her penalty rates to boost her very low pay. Without it, she told the inquiry, the family would have to sell their house or let their private health insurance go and forgo their very meagre family holidays.

In Western Australia, we have had this experiment with losing weekend penalty rates before under another Liberal government, which interestingly, like the Howard government, lost office because it went too far with harsh industrial relations law. The Court government experimented with individual workplace agreements, and for the first time in Western Australian history these agreements were able to absolutely undercut the award. What did we see over the six or seven years that these individual contracts were in force? We saw women workers' wages fall way behind. They are now 26 times more behind average male weekly earnings. Western Australia is a stand-out in terms of women being particularly low paid. We saw hospitality workers lose their weekend penalties. We saw aged-care workers, childcare workers, security officers and cleaners—all of the areas where the government thinks it is okay to take penalty rates—lose their weekend penalties.

I heard Senator Back say before that somehow this is going to create more jobs. From the Parliamentary Library's research into what happened in Western Australia I can tell you it made not one scrap of difference to the unemployment rates in Western Australia. Despite the meagre 25 or 50 per cent—or even 100 per cent that penalty rate workers lost in Western Australia as their penalty rates were completely abolished under another Liberal government—the unemployment rate remained the same, so the profits simply went into the bosses' pockets. They did not create employment.

And what is this employment that the Turnbull government thinks will be created by saving 50 per cent on a weekend penalty? More low-paid jobs and more workers who will need the support of a government that is also intent on cutting family tax benefits and making pensions line up with CPI—a government that has done nothing but cut all of those safety net benefits. That is what the government is going to do if it intends to go ahead with cutting penalty rates. If it is successful—and the Western Australian experiment was quite the opposite; it did not create more jobs. And that is a fact. That is not a survey by their boss, John Hart, from the Restaurant & Catering Industry Association—not a survey from their friend that somehow says thousands of new jobs will be magically created. This is fact, not fiction. This happened in Western Australia. One of the team in my office got a flat rate as a chef in 1998 for $13 an hour for Friday work, Saturday work and Sunday work.

When the Gallop Labor government came in and abolished individual contracts, she then started to get a penalty. And what happened? The number of workers in the kitchen remained exactly the same. Even when the boss was paying her $13 an hour there were not more workers in the kitchen. Then, when it got converted back to the award rate and she got the penalty she was entitled to, the staff remained the same. What has happened to that employer? Since then, that employer now has three top-class restaurants in Western Australia and a cafe, so obviously they never had a problem with paying penalties. The penalties that were not paid to Claire when she was there as a chef simply went into their pocket. So it is a myth to suggest that abolishing penalty rates creates more employment. The facts are there in Western Australia: not one single job was created.

I do not know where this other thought bubble of creating tax credits comes from. We know that in the UK that is another failed experiment. We know that the Turnbull government wants to remain joined at the hip to the mother country, but the reality is that tax credits in the UK have failed. Of course, we know the government can put in place schemes like tax credits and indeed can take them away. The only sure thing that workers have got is to keep their penalty rates and to make sure that employers and not our tax system continue to fund penalty rates. This is another failed Turnbull government scheme.