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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-09-17 Daily Xml
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Wage Theft

The Hon. J.E. HANSON (15:34): I rise to speak on something today that I have spoken on quite a bit and, indeed, lots of other members have over the journey. It is a complex matter but something that everyone has come to know by a really simple handle, and that is wage theft. There are many, many Australians who have been subject to wage theft. Indeed, very recently we have seen quite high-profile employers, such as Qantas, have very large claims made against them that have been successful in the courts. The reason they have been successful is that, unfortunately, some employers continue to see wage theft as a business model.

So it is really only fitting that, going back when this government was in opposition, we saw then that we needed to act on this growing wage theft problem. It has been really heartening to see this week that the government was able to take action and put in place a bill that says that one of our state's largest employers, that being the state government, will also be subject to the conceptual idea of civil penalties for wage theft. We did say at the time when we were in opposition that we were going to up the penalties for wage theft in this state, and the bill that we put through just this week actually goes further than that. It says that we are going to have a civil penalty regime just like what we have in the federal system, just like what exists in many other jurisdictions in this state.

That is pretty important. It was really quite heartening that in this chamber we saw pretty bipartisan support for exactly that. We put in the cupboard the old dark days of the Hon. Rob Lucas, who used to really struggle even to say the term 'wage theft'; in fact, I recall during debate he would often refer to it as an 'underpayment' or something else like that. He had struggled even to come to the conceptual device that wage theft was a thing. Thankfully, in large part, we saw those dark days put away, but in the truest conceptual device we are not always able to see the Liberal Party completely ditch their dark old ways.

I do not know if it was out of a misunderstanding or perhaps not quite knowing how wage theft works, but I suspect it might have been more a bit of an attack on unions from the Hon. Mr Ben Hood. We saw an attempt to say, 'Well, workers might not see those penalties.' Let me correct that conception: if a worker is underpaid, under the laws put in place this week, they will get that underpayment back—every single cent of it—because they are the subject of wage theft, and this government has legislated to make sure that, in this jurisdiction, if you are a local government worker, if you are a public sector worker, you will have the same access to the same kinds of laws that exist federally for private sector workers.

So we do not see any worker missing out under the laws we put in last week. Equally, any union that takes those claims is entitled to civil penalties that result from that. The importance of having those civil penalties is outlined not just by someone like me, with the background I have in the union movement, but also by the Federal Court, where we heard Justice Lee say:

…but for the Union commencing and prosecuting, Qantas' contravening conduct would never have been exposed and it would never have been held to account for its unlawful conduct; hence the Union has brought to the attention of the Court a substantial and significant transgression of a public obligation by a powerful and substantial employer…

That is important and we need to make sure unions do have the right to continue to pursue exactly that—hold people to account. I can imagine some workers standing around a flag back in the day in Ballarat seeking exactly this thing: the right to gather together, to combine together, to hold power to account, and that is what these laws do. That is what a civil penalty is, and I encourage everybody, including the Hon. Mr Ben Hood, to join their union, to be part of that democratic organisation, so they can continue to do exactly that, comrades.

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