Page 3142 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 24 September 2014
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More women are paid at the award minimum than men. Women are the ones who work in the cafes, community workers, childcare workers, cleaners …
When Abetz was trying to sell this concept last year, he said: “It stands to reason that [a mother] would be trading up by sacrificing penalty rates two days a week for the non-monetary benefit of spending time with her children.”
That is a quote from Senator Abetz. The article then makes this comment:
So, we are more poorly paid, we are more likely to work at award rates, and less likely to have the opportunity to advance. And somehow, now, we are expected to make another financial sacrifice.
If this gets through, no one will be monitoring these arrangements … “What we really need is to protect employees, we need some mechanism for lodgement and review of content.”
There is reference to a Michele O’Neil, who said:
“We have already seen K-Mart vouchers for work on a Saturday. This is exactly the sort of trade-off that companies will try and impose on workers.”
That is an extract from an article in the Canberra Times. I would ask anyone here, on either side of the chamber, whether they think it is fair and reasonable that we trade off conditions for Kmart vouchers. Would we offer, to women who work casually at Kmart or to young people who usually work part time and whose first jobs are in industries such as this, to reduce their pay and conditions and give them Kmart vouchers? I think it will be a very sad indictment of our society if this gets through—and, indeed, of the Liberal Party that would support it.
There is no doubt that the amendments introduced in the Australian parliament have been presented as fair and reasonable, but nothing is further from the truth. We know, and the people of the ACT know, that when the coalition talks about a common-sense and practical approach to workplace relations, as Senator Cormann did in the Senate, this is code—code that marks the desire of the Liberal Party to reshape the industrial landscape of Australia. It is code to strip the rights of employees away, to destroy those who would seek to protect them and to seek the system that has served us well for over a century to be done away with.
We are starting to get a sense of what the thinking of the Liberal Party is on industrial relations. Indeed we heard from Mr Wall this morning that he supports business. He said that these changes do not go far enough. That is quite a frightening thought, given that we are trading off Kmart vouchers—
Mr Wall interjecting—
MS BURCH: You can be on any side but you will be judged by your words, Mr Wall—that you could accept seeing Kmart vouchers being traded off for working on a Saturday, and you support that. I also make reference to Karen Andrews’s speech on 26 August in Parliament House. She said:
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