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Legislative Council - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2016-06-08 Daily Xml
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Shop Distributive and Allied Employees' Association

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (15:50): I want to talk about the hypocrisy of the Labor Party, the SDA and former SDA union bosses Don Farrell and Peter Malinauskas. I refer to the recent scathing decision of the Fair Work Commission on the enterprise agreement between the SDA and Coles, and I quote from that judgement:

Taking into account all of these matters we are not satisfied that the Agreement passes the [Better Off Overall Test] BOOT. For some employees, particularly those who work primarily at times which attract lower penalty rates under the Agreement when compared to the Award, the loss in monetary terms is potentially significant. The potential loss is likely to be of significance for part-time and casual employees.

The judgement highlights some employees were up to $3,500 worse off. Former union boss Peter Malinauskas, on 1 July 2015, strongly supported the enterprise agreement with Coles. He said, 'The union is not in bed with Coles and Woolworths.' He went on later to say the union was proud that retail workers for the two big chains were getting pay rises of between 2.5 and 3.5 per cent by trading off some penalty arrangements at weekends. He said:

They have seen negotiations achieve a far higher rate of pay—sometimes $80 to $90 a week above the award pay—but in exchange for that there is a negotiation around penalty rates.

Grace Collier, writing in The Australian, has said that about 30,000 of 77,000 workers covered by the SDA agreement were worse off. She also said that an estimate was that those workers had lost about $70 million in entitlements as a result of the cosy deal that has been done between the SDA and Coles.

The hypocrisy of Mr Malinauskas, Mr Farrell and others from the SDA on this issue is stunning and well apparent, and I will refer to that in a moment. The cosy deal with the SDA and Coles, why? The first reason is that Coles pays SDA significant sums, still unspecified, for unspecified training purposes—cash payments from Coles, the companies and others who have signed these agreements with the SDA go into the SDA. What also happens, as Judith Sloan writing in The Australian notes, is that this was a dream deal for the SDA:

Union officials could attend employee induction sessions, the company handed out union application forms and the company deducted union dues from workers' pay. As a bonus, the sole superannuation fund nominated in the agreement is REST, the union-affiliated industry super fund whose union trustees are dominated by SDA officials.

As anyone who is aware of some of these agreements that the SDA has signed, not only with Coles but with McDonald's and others, employers are required or strongly encourage their employees, in particular young students and others, to become members of the SDA. What is the reason for that? Of course, what it does is it builds up the membership numbers of the SDA. It obviously builds up their finances, it builds up their membership numbers and what it does, as members of the Labor Party know, is it gives the SDA more power within the Labor Party in their conventions and in their preselection colleges.

What it does, of course, is it enables them to deliver members of parliament like the now Hon. Peter Malinauskas in this chamber and the potentially soon-to-be senator Don Farrell in the federal election, and indeed many others in both houses that we have seen. What employers are doing is strongly encouraging, on the basis of these particular enterprise agreements, their employees to become members of the union. It increases the power base of the union within the Labor Party and they can deliver their members.

Of course, the ALP also benefits from all of this, because since this government has been elected in South Australia, the SDA has donated $1.1 million to the Labor Party and has also made other contributions of $1.5 million to the Labor Party. So $2.6 million has been contributed by the SDA to the Labor Party since this government has been elected in South Australia.

The hypocrisy of people like the Hon. Mr Malinauskas and others is just stunning. We have a situation where they campaign on their websites and publicly that penalty rates are at risk from a federal government or a state Liberal government, yet it is actually people like the Hon. Mr Malinauskas and soon-to-be senator Farrell who are the ones who have actually dudded their workers according to the independent umpire, that is, the Fair Work Commission. Not according to Liberal opponents, but according to the Fair Work Commission, it is people like the Hon. Mr Peter Malinauskas who, through these cosy deals with Coles and others, have dudded their own employees, and the beneficiaries ultimately are the SDA and the members of parliament who they elect into this chamber and the federal parliament.

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