Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

They're pretty good, too. I'm glad you like my video, Senator Bernardi! Senator Cash tried to conjure up this scare campaign involving a couple—she didn't say if they were a same-sex couple or a heterosexual couple—who were doing a kitchen renovation and might be liable for underpayments made to workers in their kitchen renovation who were engaged through labour hire. Listening to her talk about this I was worried that before long we'd be seeing inspectors run on to The Block or Renovation Rescue, one of those programs, to bail up people who might be underpaying workers on their sites. We all know that's not what this bill is about. This bill is about tackling genuine labour hire arrangements where people are getting screwed and getting paid less than what they are owed. It's not about, as Senator Cash would have you think, the courier who drops stuff off to a small business. It's not about the person who brings in replacement cartridges for the printer, or the person who brings in the new water to go in the water cooler. It's not about those people. It is not about the small business being held liable for underpayments they might make. It's about businesses, whether they be large or small, being held accountable when they enter into a contract with a labour hire firm to employ people—when they try and pass on that responsibility for employment and payment to someone else—but then don't want to have any responsibility whatsoever for making sure the people who are employed are paid properly.

These amendments will go some way to making even the balance between people who are employed via labour hire firms and the host employer who actually has them working on their site. It won't go all the way, and Labor have put forward a number of other proposals which we'd like the government to take up to try to impose greater regulation on labour hire firms that are doing the wrong thing. We've now seen at least two state governments, the Queensland government and the Victorian government, require licensing of labour hire firms to make sure that they meet the legal standards, and we would very much like to see the government take up that proposal as well. In the meantime, the very least that it can do, and the very least that crossbenchers can do, is to support these amendments from Labor to make sure that people who are working via labour hire arrangements actually get paid what they're owed.