Mr HAMILTON (Groom) (12:16): I’d hate to be seen as seconding the motion, but I’m happy to speak to it! The member for Hawke is a good man, and I think he has good intentions. But, sadly, we’re in the game of politics, where consequences are what we’re judged on, not our intentions. Ultimately, in this bill, Labor has chosen to exercise its right to disconnect from reality and, simply, from the workforce by pushing a narrative that I believe is driven along ideological bounds that will ultimately hurt workers.
I’m going to talk to an exact example of that. This legislation has caused a lot of concern amongst particularly small and medium businesses who are trying to understand what this means for them. They already exist in a very complex IR framework and, on every change that’s required, they seek guidance. I’ll give an example of starting out in a small business. My father was a concreter. He knew how to do his work. What he didn’t know was IR legislation. For him to navigate these changes required external help. That’s fine. But when you don’t engage with that bottom level, the people who are starting out and really trying to make their way, you get problems like this.
We had an IR forum. I had wonderful support. We had speakers from the Master Builders Association, the National Farmers Federation and the Recruitment, Consulting and Staffing Association come and speak to local business owners in Groom. We held it at Gold Park. I’m happy to disclose that that is the ground of my wonderful football team, the Rangers Rugby Union Club. We held it there. They have a convention centre at the back. To run the meeting, they had to engage one of their casual employees to come out and staff the bar, a young man called Jason. Jason was homeless in his early years and had some of the problems that you find amongst homeless people, particularly getting his way back into employment. Thanks to the good people at Bates services they got him on the employment bandwagon. He wasn’t attractive to employers in a full-time capacity, but they were willing to give him a go as a casual to start his way out. Here’s a young man who has absolutely pulled himself up by his bootlaces. He’s done everything he can. He got himself into employment. If you ask about his first pay cheque, the smile on his face is something that you just know what it is. It is aspiration coming through. Anyway, Jason’s there, manning the bar, serving drinks to people as the IR conversation is going on. As the conversation is going on, both he and the manager of the bar are sitting there, and you can see their faces getting more and more ashen as we discuss what this means for Australian workers. At the end of the evening, once we went through the legislation and what it meant for casuals, the bar manager came over and said: ‘Garth, I’ve got a problem. Under this legislation Jason loses his job. I can’t afford to employ him full time. I do not make enough money in this bar to keep everyone else running and to employ him full time. He comes along on a regular basis, on a Wednesday evening, and runs the convention centre. He chooses Wednesday evening because he’s studying the other evenings to try and get ahead in life.’ This ridiculous legislation will strip this young man of his career—his employment at that place.
There was a time when Labor was in touch with labourers; that’s long gone. There was a time when they were in touch with the working class; that is long gone. This is the sort of legislation that is just another nail in the coffin of ambitious young men and women across Australia—people like Jason, who didn’t have the greatest start in life. He’s not going to be working for the high end of town, which this legislation won’t change. The big banks, Qantas—get all the photos with Mr Albanese and Mr Joyce, if you want to throw that into the conversation—those guys don’t care. They’ve already got IR lawyers. They can navigate another 300 pages of legislation. Little pubs and little places like this can’t. When faced with the question, ‘Do I keep this guy on, or do I not?’, they don’t have a choice. Jason will lose his job because of this legislation.
The fundamental misunderstanding by this Labor Party is to think that every casual will have a 100 per cent conversion rate to full-time employment. They won’t. You’re costing people their jobs. You’re costing people their aspirations. If you just went out and listened to people, and ran a proper consultation process, you would have heard this and we wouldn’t be having the absolute shemozzle that we’re seeing on IR from this government.
