Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] On Friday, in evidence to the job security Senate inquiry, labour hire companies, including Hays, gave evidence that 2,500 staff contracted in the Australian Public Service have no access to paid leave for time spent isolating or being vaccinated for COVID-19. This is despite the fact that many of these staff do exactly the same job as their directly hired colleagues, who are entitled to this leave. What's more, I later heard from an APS worker, on a different labour hire contract, who said she did receive vaccination leave. So it's not even as though it's impossible for labour hire firms to do it; it's just that they are allowed by the government to get away with not bothering to.

The government says it's not its responsibility to keep labour hire workers safe from COVID. This kind of two-tiered system is becoming endemic in Australia, and it's unacceptable that it should be allowed to operate within Scott Morrison's own government departments. It's this sort of evidence that led to Mr Morrison teaming up with One Nation to axe the job security inquiry last week. Mr Morrison knows that Australia's industrial relations system is broken, and he wants to muzzle the voices of workers experiencing severe job insecurity. Hays received $380 million from the federal government last year—that's $380 million of taxpayer money—and yet they can't afford to stump up for COVID vaccination leave.

Also revealed at the inquiry on Friday was the fact that no-one is even keeping track of how many APS staff are engaged on a temporary basis. There's no central record keeping or reporting of numbers, so not even the government knows what proportion of its own staff are casual at any given time.