The prime minister has pledged to enshrine penalty rates in law if his government is re-elected and sought to reinvigorate a clash with the Coalition over working from home.
With two weeks until Australians cast their votes, both major party leaders headed to the Sydney Royal Easter Show to pat animals and push for advantage.
In the morning Peter Dutton spruiked a plan for tax breaks for small business startups, claiming there had been a record number of insolvencies under Labor.
At lunchtime it was Anthony Albanese’s turn through the turnstiles, and he aimed his pitch at industrial relations.
The Australian Retailers Association and others have asked the commission to vary the award, proposing some workers be given a 25% pay rise in return for giving up their penalty rates, overtime and other allowances.
Around three million Australian workers are on awards, which are overseen by the Fair Work Commission.
Albanese said penalty rates had helped get him through university while working at Pancakes on the Rocks.
“We want Australians to earn more and keep more of what they earn,” he said. “We will support your penalty rates.”
Asked whether the penalty rate policy was a “dangerous precedent” in terms of the government interfering in independent processes, Albanese pointed to Labor’s right-to-disconnect laws, “same job, same pay” laws, legislation defining casual work and lobbying of the FWC on minimum wage rates as other examples of Labor’s push to protect workers’ rights.
The employment minister, Murray Watt, said penalty rates were “an essential feature of minimum terms and conditions in modern awards” and that Labor’s policy would legislate to ensure they cannot be reduced.
“In recent months big business lobby groups in the retail, clerical and banking sectors have made applications to the Fair Work Commission to cut penalty rates of lower-paid workers from awards,” he said.
“If successful, these applications by employer groups would reduce the overall income of workers by thousands of dollars each year.”
Earlier in the day, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, announced tax offsets for small businesses and called Labor’s plan to protect penalty rates a “stunt”.
“The independent umpire sets the conditions, it’s been abided by from both sides of politics and we don’t propose any departure from the current arrangements,” he said.
The education minister, Jason Clare, flanked Albanese and pointed to a profile of Dutton in the Nine newspapers on Saturday that quoted Jane Hume saying the Liberals’ anti-working from home policy was “a good policy that hadn’t found its appropriate time”. She blamed a “terrible scare campaign by Labor” for not giving the policy clear air.
The Coalition had to backflip on the plan after it sparked a backlash, particularly from women. Dutton said at the time: “We’ve made a mistake.”
Clare accused Dutton of “pretending” that he doesn’t want to stop people working from home. “This is Dutton dressed up as lamb,” he said, claiming that Hume’s comments made it “absolutely clear” that a future Liberal government would stop people working from home.
Albanese said Hume had “said the quiet bit out loud”.
Albanese also criticised the Coalition’s promised tax break for food and entertainment expenses, saying “bosses’ long lunches” would be subsidised by the Coalition’s reversal of Labor’s surprise budget tax cut.
