Zed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Social Services and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Of course, Deputy President. If Senator Bilyk, through you, Deputy President, is going to talk about the SDA, we might point out what the SDA and other unions have done for some of their workers. It goes on. The Fairfax Media investigation uncovered new evidence of some of Australia's biggest and best-known employers paying many of their employees less than the award under deals done with the SDA—Coles, McDonald's, Woolworths, Hungry Jack's and KFC—a number of businesses. This goes to the cosy relationship that the Labor Party and large unions have with elements of big business. There is no doubt about it. It has always been the case that they will always choose to do a cosy deal that suits union leaders and that might suit some big businesses over workers and small businesses who always end up coping it.

Senator Bilyk interjecting—

Senator Bilyk might think it is funny that small businesses and workers cop it, but we do not. In February 2016, we heard that the Fair Work Commission was told that the union representing low-paid workers at Coles stores knew some workers might be financially worse off under an agreement it struck with the supermarket giant but did not tell its members. An industrial officer for the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association also told the commission that the union knew some workers could be financially more worse off under the agreement than under the award when it signed a statutory declaration saying the agreement should be approved. The union that Senator Bilyk has chosen to rely on for evidence around penalty rates is a union that has systematically ripped off and sold out workers and systematically done deals that left workers worse off.

I need to respond to another point that was made by Senator Bilyk in this space. She claimed, in her contribution, that in fact when Mr Shorten, the SDA, the AWU and other unions are lowering the penalty rates, they are doing the workers a favour and that they are actually getting a better deal. Well, that is not true. Let's go through a couple of examples.

Under the McDonald's enterprise agreement, a part-time level 2 employee working a total of 20 hours during the day from Monday to Friday and six hours on Sunday would be $15 worse off in dollar terms under the agreement negotiated by the union than if they were paid under the Fast Food Industry Award. So a worker on the award is $15 better off. I wonder whether Senator Bilyk was happy with the deal under which a worker who worked 20 hours from Monday to Friday and a few hours on Sunday was left $15 worse off every week. It goes on. A part-time level 2 employee working two shifts of seven hours each between Monday and Friday and seven hours on Sunday will be $33 worse off. The union deal has left them $33 worse off. So they miss out on Sundays, but overall they have less money because of the deal negotiated by the paymasters of the Australian Labor Party, unions like the SDA. Further, a part-time level 2 employee only working weekends—seven hours each on Saturday and Sunday—would be $79 worse off under the agreement than if they were paid under the Fast Food Industry Award.

So there are more and more examples that we have seen of unions—big unions who fund the Labor party—not telling their workers that they are going to be worse off, and doing deals with large businesses that leave workers with less penalty rates on a weekend and less money in their pocket at the end of the week. Many of these workers, of course, have paid the union to represent them and cut their wages. That is what they have paid for. So they pay their weekly or fortnightly dues, and the SDA, or the AWU under Mr Shorten, go out and do dodgy deals which leave those workers, who are entitled to think that their union might be looking after them, much worse off. Any discussion around penalty rates needs to look at this fact.

Why would it be, do you think, that we would see these kinds of deals? There are a few theories, but before we get to the 'why' let's look at the disparity between large business and small business that the Labor Party supports, which makes it so difficult for many small and medium businesses who do not have the clout and cannot make the payments to unions to get them to commit to the deals that would lower costs for those businesses. Let's do the comparison. A bed and breakfast pays $10 an hour more than a five-star hotel. A five-star hotel in the CBD of Sydney would pay $10 an hour less than a bed and breakfast in a regional or outer suburban area. There are often pretty tight margins for a bed and breakfast, but they would pay $10 an hour more than a five-star hotel, normally owned by a multinational, often overseas owned—large companies. A family chicken shop must pay $8 an hour more than KFC. The Labor Party, of course, supports that. A family-owned takeaway pays $8 an hour more than McDonald's. A family greengrocer pays $5 an hour more than Woolworths. A pizza takeaway pays $8 more than Pizza Hut. A boutique clothes shop pays $7 more than David Jones. A family bookshop pays $8 more an hour than Target. A family newsagent must pay $7 more an hour than Officeworks. A family bottle shop pays $7 more an hour than Dan Murphy's, and a family hardware store must pay $5 an hour more than Bunnings.

So here we see the real-life experience when it comes to penalty rates. If you are working in a big business and you have a union agreement, which is ordinarily the case for these large businesses—Bunnings, Woolworths, Coles, McDonald's, KFC and any number of these other businesses—the penalty rates that are the subject of the decision of the Fair Work Commission were traded away a long time ago. So the bulk of workers who work for those large businesses have seen a reduction in their penalty rates a long time ago, and I pointed to some of those examples.

So what we are actually talking about is a range of small business that this decision would primarily apply to. It is worth looking at the situations for some of those small businesses. I have spoken to a number of these small businesses here in Canberra, such as local newsagents. Newsagents normally have a requirement to be open seven days a week. They do not have a choice as to whether to open on a Sunday. What ordinarily happens in those circumstances is that, because of the very high penalty rates, the family business owners normally work seven days a week. They will work on the Sunday, because they simply cannot afford the level of penalty rates that they have to pay but that some of the big businesses that they might be competing with in various ways do not have to pay. The Coles around the corner, which sells the newspaper and the like, has traded away penalty rates. Their penalty rates on a Sunday are much lower than the local newsagent has to pay. So what they end up doing, because they cannot close in many cases, is stay open. They do not have much of a family balance. They go in and work seven days.

So there are two impacts from that for that newsagent. One impact is on their family: it makes it just that bit harder for them to run a business and to have any sort of work-life balance. The second is on those in our community who are unemployed and looking for work and those who are underemployed. You might be working in the newsagent and only getting 15 hours during the week, and you would be pretty keen, perhaps, to get some Sunday shifts at time and three-quarters or time and a half, but that is simply not available, and what those newsagents choose to do in working for themselves puts more stress on them as a family and takes away the opportunity for the unemployed person to get a job or the underemployed person to pick up those extra five or seven hours that would make a big difference.

So these are some of the real-life impacts when you do not get the level of penalty rates right. No-one in this discussion argues that there should not be penalty rates. But the Fair Work Commission has looked at this independently and said there should be an adjustment to some penalty rates. I just make the point again that, for the big businesses dealing with the big unions, those penalty rates were traded away a long time ago. What would the motivation be for the unions to be doing this? What would the motivation be? We know what the motivation is because it was laid bare during the trade union royal commission about some of these corrupting payments—