Page 1964 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 5 August 2014
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between nine and 11 hours every day, compared with 38 per cent of workers globally. According to this survey, Australians are working longer hours than people in countries like Britain, the United States, Canada and China.
I think workers in Australia deserve their public holidays. They deserve some time off and they deserve full public holiday entitlements when they work on those public holidays. In any case, this is not a controversial change, in my view. As the minister noted during his introduction speech, the New South Wales government has already made the same change to enshrine these public holidays. The ACT government has also legislated in individual years to make subsequent weekdays a public holiday where the official holiday fell on a weekend. So this practice has been occurring and today’s bill simply makes that permanent.
The ACT government will itself bear some costs in order to implement this change. That is something we need to weigh up, just as we need to weigh up the impact it will have on private businesses, particularly businesses in hospitality and retail for example. As I have said, I think the right side of this balance is to look after the workers and to ensure they have options for a reasonable work-life balance and family time and access to reasonable entitlements.
On the subject of balance, I think it is also worth noting that there is a sweet spot of productivity that actually comes from ensuring people have access to entitlements such as time off and work-life balance opportunities. It is quite well known that issues like overwork, lack of family time and fatigue can actually lead to problems such as reduced health and lower quality of work. These can impact the overall productivity of a business and also have wider costs to society. So even from the pure productivity perspective, I think it is still important to be mindful of the value of holidays and entitlements. In conclusion, I will support this bill and I thank the minister for bringing it forward.
MS BERRY (Ginninderra) (12.15): As Mr Gentleman has outlined, the Holidays Amendment Bill 2014 amends the Holidays Act 1958 to ensure that Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day are counted as public holidays for workers, regardless of the day of the week they fall on. In addition, when any of these days fall on a weekend, the bill provides for an additional public holiday the following Monday or Tuesday, as appropriate.
This is a good Labor reform, Madam Speaker. It is one that will help many members in our community. Today we are expanding the rights of retail, hospitality and service industry workers to have their work properly compensated when working on days that are normally set aside for family time and recreation. I would like to acknowledge the work of Minister Corbell in steering this legislation through during his time as minister for industrial relations. I would also like to acknowledge the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, who are here today. The nurses union are here as well—the ANMF. I thank them for campaigning for the inclusion of these holidays and for their efforts in defending the rights of workers to be compensated for work on public holidays and weekends.
This amendment allows me to again make the case in this place for the importance of penalty rates. And let us be clear: the “penalty” in penalty rates does not refer to any
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