Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to begin my contribution to this debate on the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia’s Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021—the government's changes to workplace laws—with a story of a guy in Central Queensland who I've got to know pretty well through my travels in Central Queensland over the past few years. His name is Chad. Chad's a coalminer, employed as a casual, through a labour hire company, by a major multinational mining company.

Chad has been treated as a casual, paid as a casual and employed as a casual by that mining company and the labour hire firm despite the fact that for over seven years he has worked the same roster, week after week, month after month and year after year. If any objective person were to look at Chad's employment and recognise that he works the same shifts, week after week, month after month and year after year, they would say that he is a permanent employee. And if Chad and the thousands of colleagues he has who are employed on the same basis were treated as permanent employees they would get job security, they would get annual leave, they would get sick leave, they would be able to get a home loan and they would be able to take a day off when a member of their family was unwell and needed attention.

But of course Chad and his colleagues who are employed as casuals, despite really being permanent employees, get none of those benefits. Chad, and every casual employee—whether they be coalminers or in any other industry—who are really permanent workers, don't get job security, they don't get annual leave, they don't get sick leave and they don't get a whole host of other benefits that permanent workers get. And of course they can't even go and get a home loan from a bank, because they're casual employees and banks don't lend those sorts of sums of money to casual employees.

Chad is just one example of what I have come to learn is an epidemic of casualisation in the mining industry across regional Queensland. It's not just in the mining industry, and I'll come to that shortly, but it's certainly something which has changed dramatically in the mining industry in Queensland over recent years—the explosion of casualisation and labour hire at the expense of permanent employment. Major mining companies in this country now employ the majority of their workforce as casuals through labour hire firms. It's being done as a cost-cutting exercise; the mining companies don't deny that. It's important that mining companies make profits and it's important that mining companies employ people, but it is a tragedy that in recent years, on this government's watch, we have seen that occur at the expense of coalminers and workers in general.

I'll give another example, of two other miners who I've met: Simon and Ron. Simon is the permanent employee, paid the EBA rate of pay. He has permanent employment, job security and all those types of leave benefits that come with permanent employment. His colleague Ron, who does exactly the same work as him—day in, day out, week in, week out, month in, month out and year in, year out—is employed through a labour hire firm as a casual. Ron doesn't get the permanent employment, he doesn't get the job security, he doesn't get the leave and he doesn't get all the benefits of permanent employment.

This isn't just some academic exercise; this has real-life consequences for people. As I said, they miss out on all of those benefits and they can't get loans. It puts immense stress on their families because they never know from one day to the next whether they're actually going to have a job. That's one of the consequences of casual employment: you don't have job security. You can be terminated by your employer at very short notice and without the usual redundancy pay that permanent employees get. So you're in constant fear and your family is under constant stress.

It's a disgrace that this casualisation epidemic has exploded across regional Queensland on this government's watch. Day after day, we see members of this government from the LNP in Queensland say how much they love coal, dressing up like coalminers and parading themselves around as if they're the friends of coalminers—