Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

They don't care, as Senator Polley says. They don't care—or, perhaps, they don't understand. It's pretty dangerous when a government doesn't understand. When you put not understanding and not caring together, you've got a big problem, and that's what we're seeing from this government.

It's clear to everyone that there's only one reason this government is running this piece of legislation. It's an ideological agenda. It's all about attacking the unions. We see it time and time again. We've seen it through Senator Cash and her involvement in the attacks on the AWU, a union that has, 100 per cent of the time, provided documents that have been requested of it, both by the royal commission into the unions and by the ROC. But that wasn't good enough. They had to overreach, they had to stretch out and they had to go and have a raid. It was a bit of entertainment for those opposite—another attack on the unions.

It's just plain wrong, and it's a massive abuse of the power of government—and we're still left with the question: what did Minister Cash actually know? She is refusing to answer questions. She was hauled back to the Senate to answer questions last Friday by a vote of this Senate. That was the only way we could get her there. She's running. She can run, but she can't hide. She can't hide the fact that she represents a government whose No. 1 priority is to attack working people and the unions that support them and to attack the Labor Party that stands up for fairness for all Australians.

I want to speak briefly about a particular union, the SDA, which the government has continued to blindly attack throughout this year. The SDA is one of the largest trade unions in the country. Its membership exists right across this country in every community—in retail, in fast food, in warehousing, in hairdressing, in pharmacy and even in modelling. The SDA's continued and consistent advocacy has helped ensure that Australian retail and fast-food workers are among the most highly paid in the world. That's what a union does for you. It stands up for you collectively.

When a boss says, 'Sorry, there's not quite enough cash in the till this week and I'm going to drop your wages'—that's the way it is when you haven't got a union to represent you—unions say: 'No, there are standards. You should expect a reasonable rate of pay. These are conditions that you should expect in a safe workplace. They're the things that unions have been fighting for.' Thanks to the action led by the SDA, 27 expired Domino's enterprise bargaining agreements were finally terminated. Thanks to the leading advocacy of the SDA, more than 20,000 Domino's workers will get a pay rise.

The SDA is launching a very important campaign to stop customer abuse of retail workers, particularly at this time over Christmas. Sometimes Christmas is the season of joy, but sometimes there is a lot of pressure. People who are standing and waiting to be served perhaps forget their manners sometimes. This is the work of the unions, which is far different to the way in which it's characterised by those opposite: the SDA union is running a campaign to encourage better behaviour in the shops to provide a safe working place for their outward-facing retail employees.

It seems, sadly, that every other day there's another story of sexual harassment of women in the workplace. The coverage has been focused most recently on the media industry, both here and overseas. But it's not limited to the media industry. The latest ABS personal safety survey indicated that more than one in two women had experienced sexual harassment, and, following the #MeToo campaign, no-one can be surprised by that statistic. On the weekend the New South Wales branch president of the SDA, Bernie Smith, stated that one in eight SDA members experiences sexual harassment from customers. So what is this union doing? It is responding to the challenge of that reality and taking on a social advocacy role to change the systematic abuse that is, overwhelmingly, faced by retail and food workers. That's what unions do.

The leaders of those unions and the people representing those unions are standing up in the boardrooms discussing future investments to make sure that the people that they have worked with on the floor get a fair return on their investment. In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald over the weekend Jenna Price described some of the experiences that are going on that the union is rallying and fighting against to make sure those experiences are more acknowledged in the Australian community and to drive the change that's needed. This is a description of a few:

Try working in your local bakery where a customer paws the girl behind the counter (for girl she is, in Year 10 in her first job, and she's being told she has luscious lips). Or a customer waits to rape the woman locking up the shop at night. Try stacking shelves while some arsehole rubs his unzipped pants across your buttocks. Or dealing with a customer whose only request of you is to have "quick sexual intercourse", or with a customer who is buying a Bluetooth speaker for the shower and suggests you have a shower with him. Or the young retail worker approached by two twenty-something guys who said they were doing a bet.

"They needed me to give them a kiss. I felt very awkward and confused as my training instructs me to be polite and acquiesce to customers, but I felt violated. After a few minutes of awkwardness a colleague saw I was distressed and when they spoke to her she awkwardly told them I had other work to do, so they left."

These are the real lived experiences of people who are being represented by unions.

After a lifetime of working in an industry, facing the public where that sort of behaviour has happened, the least people can expect is that the people who have been working to get them the advantage of their superannuation savings have been getting them the best amount that they possibly can. But unions do these things at the same time—advocating for the financial health and wellbeing but also the social health and wellbeing of workers of this country.

I would also like to refer to the Health Services Union, who helped ensure thousands of New South Wales health workers, including former employees who've worked as casuals, won the right to include time as casual workers towards their long service leave entitlements for the first time. I would like to acknowledge the very hard work of all the members of that union who worked to achieve that outcome. I would particularly like to acknowledge Gerard Hayes for his fantastic leadership in that union.

Does the Turnbull government believe in decent wages for workers? Do they believe in the social advocacy of unions? Clearly not. Let's have a look at who the Turnbull government are listening to and working for. The Turnbull government are focused in their efforts not on the support of workers but on tax cuts to millionaires and multinationals—those that don't even pay tax in the first place. And, of course, they continue to attack unions and protect the banks.

This bill also indicates that the government wants to turn the super industry into the banking industry, and you have to ask why. After all we've seen about the toxic culture of banks, why on earth would this government, at this point of time, want to force a model that replicates the banks' practices rather than allow industry super, which is doing two to three per cent better on average over 20 years? Why do they want to meddle in this space? It's clearly just an ideological attack. It seems that every single day we read a new article about a scandal in the banks—scandals that hurt families and particularly hurt small businesses, who are the employers in the regions across this country.

Labor have been calling for a royal commission into the banks for years, and, instead, we've had delay after delay from the Turnbull government—until Malcolm Turnbull was attacked by his own backbench and had to face a discussion with the banks, where they've written their own terms for a royal commission. In closing, this piece of legislation is opposed by Labor for all of the reasons that I put forward in my comments here today. I urge those on the crossbench to support us in rejecting this attack on workers' wages and futures.