Public Holidays Bill

29 November 2023

Second Reading - House of Assembly: Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (20:23): It has been really interesting sitting back and listening to the debates from both sides of the chamber. One side of the chamber says it is all about employees, cost of living, looking after members and union rights and union members, quality of life and everything that life at the moment is bringing in this unusual world that we are living in after COVID.

There are a couple of things that no-one talks about, which I find quite fascinating. One is that when the Australian women's soccer side got very close to winning the grand final there were suggestions out there—and it was put to the Premier—that we could have a public holiday on the success of the women's soccer. I had about 10 phone calls from businesses in my region saying, 'Over our dead bodies would we think that's a good idea.'

One of the reasons—and it was actually stated in the local media—was that if a public holiday was declared in South Australia or even across Australia it would cost around $60 million just in aged care. No-one talks about these sums and what they mean. The last speaker, the member for Finniss, was talking about businesses that operate 365 days of the year. These are businesses like hospitals, aged-care facilities, factories for milk production and food production with workers who are having to work on a Sunday so there is work on a Monday ready for the working chain to actually begin, fuel transporters, anything that operates 24 hours—airports, hotels, all the employees where things never shut down.

When you start rolling out three public holidays, no-one here has considered at all what it does to inflation. I have not heard anyone talk about the health bill, which might have imposed on it three more public holidays in South Australia, and what it will cost our health portfolio as a whole—is it $1 million, is it $100 million? Are you now $100 million short on your side of the chamber? No-one has told me anything about what it will cost for the 5,000 or 10,000 employees in the health sector. It is fascinating that no-one comes up with it.

I can tell you right now that the Limestone Coast would love $100 million to service the health needs of my constituents. We do not have hospitals that are modern, all the services are not there, there are not enough GPs in the hospitals, not enough nurses in the hospitals and not enough specialists down there—but we are really quick to change the rules that actually add to our problem. Then we talk about inflation, which is running at 5, 6, 7 per cent. Does anyone consider what that will be when you roll out these sorts of expenses into payroll?

What is really fascinating about this is that the argument I heard from this side is not wrong either, because if employees are working on Christmas Day why are they not valued at double? Why should they not be remunerated well? Now I am an Independent, I can take the middle road, and I am going to take the middle road. There is either side of the coin, and there is a right and a wrong, and there are both sides there.

What I would say is that I think Christmas is really obvious. It is a special day. It is the one big one of the year, unless you are totally non-religious of any type—almost like me—then with Christmas it can be any day of the year, if you want to make it that way, but we do try to celebrate it and we do try to do it well. The majority of people do see Christmas as one of those special big days of the year and an event. Any of those sectors I have talked about—health, aged care, running a hotel or motel, airports, anything that is going 24/7, 365 days a year—are always going to need staff in those facilities, and they do need to be recompensed really well and, obviously, remunerated well.

The other thing that never gets brought into this context is how this place—government as a whole, opposition and/or government—thinks that they have to rule by a line and a sentence and legislation, and they cannot leave it up to employers to remunerate over and above by themselves. Where there is an award, it is a base, and no-one talks about being paid more than the base. It is a line in the sand and you must not go below it, otherwise you will see yourself before the courts that look after employees to make sure they are remunerated fairly and appropriately.

One of the things that I find fascinating is that the major supermarkets, Coles and Woolworths, have a wage agreement with their staff but talk about a five, six or seven-day week, depending on what the employee is looking for, that will cover the spectrum of public holidays, leave loadings, time-and-a-half or double-time periods when the employees might find themselves working, that will cover the 365 days of the year. They are agreements between a worker and a boss, and this is what has been lost again in this discussion.

I would have loved to hear in this discussion, perhaps, when we talked about where we wanted to mandate and make sure those really important workers—as we heard from the member for King about how they sacrifice and give up that special day to serve others, those workers who sit inside the government circles—we could have talked about them separately from the outside industries and sectors in the greater wider world of the private sector in the South Australian economy.

Those sectors like health, aged care and any other public service that operates 365 days a year, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, they do need government to be legislating, mandating and calling it out for what it is, because no-one else is going in to bat for them.

In other words, the bosses, the bureaucracy, it is a black-and-white line, it is what it is and they have to roll it out, but everyone else can be subject to a private agreement, private enterprise, and they can talk and negotiate between their private employers, no matter how big they are. That goes from a massive company like BHP right down to a small supermarket chain, be it an IGA or a Foodland, where an owner is involved. They can have negotiations, so long as they do not fall below the award and the structures that are there; that is all that needs to be met.

A great opportunity would have been to able to distinguish and work out—and I have not heard any figures from the government side about what adding these three days might cost to the public sector, which will come back and hit the government purse and the government coffers (no doubt it will be in the millions of dollars, but I just do not know the extent of it)—whether there was an opportunity to work with the lowest base award employees and whether they were all being remunerated well enough if they did have to work these public holidays.

Normally, these lowest paid workers do not have to work public holidays because the employer cannot afford it, straight out cannot afford it. The product they are trying to produce and the work they are trying to do is why they are on the bottom and are the lowest paid—because if you are not in that area and that spectrum it just does not exist.

The other fascinating thing that no-one has mentioned is that, when you start adding to the costs of employing people, it becomes marginal and you start making more rules, making it harder for employers to pay employees, and you actually work against creating more jobs. In fact, it goes the other way and you perhaps take away jobs. It is not proven or an exact science, but the government has a really strong argument to say, 'Well, there are a lot more jobs out there nearly than workers, so what does it matter? We've got a really low unemployment rate, so if some of the sectors didn't employ so many people it would free up a workforce.'

I can tell you right now that in this current game it is really hard to find employees out there, skilled employees. If this breaks some shackles on some employees and some businesses slow down, do not employ as many, or do not employ them to do those days when it now will be double time or greater—2.25 I see some hospitality penalty rates are for a public holiday—then maybe these other workers will be freer to do other work where workers cannot be found at all. Maybe that is a motivation here that might be a great consequence of the government's move. I can tell you that from an employer's perspective there are ramifications in this bill getting through.

There used to be a lot of banter in my family when we saw award wages going up by an exponential amount and, if there was not productivity in the workforce to pay for it, we only added to inflation. We start paying our employees more, but they are worse off because everything costs more. One of the things I find really fascinating and an interesting statistic relates to the meat processing game. Right now, we are going through a real glut, where the abattoirs in Australia cannot find workers and they can only operate the one shift. Protein out the other end is not much cheaper for consumers, and I think you have seen around a 6 per cent reduction in some meat products, maybe a bit more, but producers have seen a 50 to 70 per cent correction and you have seen a 6 to 10 per cent correction on the supermarket shelf.

One thing I would like this place to know is that, way back about 15 years ago, I heard that in Brazil it cost $50 to break down a beast, a cow, a steer—cattle; it was $100 to break it down and kill it in America; it was $150 to kill it in New Zealand; and it was $200 to kill it in Australia—15 years ago. I can tell you that those figures are irrelevant, but the ratios are still the same.

We suddenly say, 'We just must be paying all our employees too much. Australian abattoir workers are all just getting way too big wages.' That is a nonsense. That is not the case at all. They are not like that. It is everything else surrounding it: the energy costs, the inspections, the transport costs. Now we are going to have drivers driving cattle, sheep and lambs into the abattoirs on a Sunday on a public holiday, who will need to have some sort of remuneration for working public holidays. All this has to be taken into account.

Then we add the diesel costs, we add the fuel tax and then we put in the wear and tear on our roads, which barely keep up with it as well, so the trucks are more expensive to operate on the roads. Then, when you take the product away from the abattoir, that is also more expensive. Our whole chain around processing meat is more expensive than anywhere else in the world. It is not just the wages that are a problem; in fact, wages might be a portion, but they certainly may not be a majority. There may be a number of other things in there.

These are the consequences of what we are rolling out and I am seeing today. They do have consequences down the line and so in the end, when you try to buy your hamburger or your sausage—let's say you are a lower socio-economic wage earner and that is a lot of your staple diet—they are not going to be any cheaper by these sorts of processes. I can also probably say that the wage earner, because they will not get the opportunity to work on a public holiday, will not get the benefit of what those over that side have just been arguing about, that all wage earners are going to get this double time. This person does not get to work on public holidays, but his food and his cost of living are going to go up, so they are no better off.

You have gone in to bat for workers to be better off by receiving these benefits, but the problem is there are consequences, and they are not widespread. They are not all benefits; sometimes they are hits to the hip pocket. I can say to you to you honestly that perhaps the poor get poorer with the rolling out of these types of works because they are not receiving your bonuses, your three public holidays and your double pay that you think everyone is going to get when you roll it out—because they do not have jobs on Christmas Day or on public holidays during Easter. They may not have a job at all. I wonder whether you are then going to lift the social payments and Jobseeker as well to keep up with inflation at the rate we probably need to.

These are the sorts of things that I think both sides of this chamber—in other words, the government and the opposition—need to be fully cognisant of. There are wider ramifications than just saying, 'We look after workers, and we are going to be the great person for all the workers who have to work these days.' On this side, it is all about small businesses, and I heard about the Stirling butcher shop or supermarket, and I heard about the pizza bar and so forth. Yes, they are there. They will either put it into their cost structure or they will not open. They will keep the doors closed and it will not matter. The jobs are not there. They do not make the losses, and you do not get your pizzas, you do not go to the butcher shop, the supermarkets remain closed and no-one really wins. These are the sorts of ramifications of this sort of legislation.

I will agree and happily support that any Christmas that does not represent a public holiday is a missed opportunity, and I am with you on that. I think even this side recognise that. They found it really hard to argue against you, I can tell you that. Their arguments were not that strong, and rightly so.

In summing up, this is perhaps a two-pronged approach in its consequences for workers and for businesses. I think that in the end it is not worth the fight. The government will get this through. Employers will have to work to the way this will function and operate. The Labor Party will look like it is looking after its workers, it will look like it will have its Easter public holidays, it will look like it will have Christmas Day and all Christmas Days will turn out to be a public holiday—tick, tick, tick—and there will be some financial losses, costs and problems with that as well.

How do you define that—how it actually is recognised when the budgets do not match up in the health sector or in the aged-care facilities and they are finding it hard to make the sums stack up today. Some of the workers in the aged-care sector are some of the lowest paid workers in the economy. We have to bring in overseas workers to fill these positions as it is because Australians do not want to do them. All I am going to say is good luck to everyone. I hope we enjoy the fact that we get a Christmas Day and that every day is going to be a public holiday on a Christmas Day. It will be interesting to see how Easter looks, how many businesses are open and how many function during Easter Saturday and Easter Sunday. May all businesses be fruitful and successful with this.

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