Mr GEORGANAS (9:46 AM) —I rise to speak today on the appalling situation that still exists in relation to entitlements for Ansett workers. With Adelaide airport smack-bang in the middle of the electorate of Hindmarsh, it is not surprising that there were a great many Ansett workers living in the area when Ansett went broke in 2001. Although that was more than three years ago, the issue is still very much alive for those who lost their jobs and entitlements back then. During the campaign and since I was elected, I have been approached by several workers who are still distressed that their entitlements have not been paid. There were 16,000 workers in Australia who were directly affected by the collapse of Ansett and another 45,000 who were in associated supply and service industries.

There were around 3,000 Ansett employees in South Australia and many of them came to see me in 2001 when it became obvious that employees would not be receiving their entitlements. Their stories were heart-wrenching and the circumstances in which they found themselves were just plain unfair. Many of these people still contact me to this day. These were Ansett workers who had spent decades with the company and then found themselves left high and dry. These were people who had worked hard, who paid their contributions towards their superannuation. They did the right thing: they planned for their retirement so they would not be a burden on future governments. They made plans for holidays after they retired and for improvements to their homes. I know of one couple approaching retirement who had just taken out a mortgage for their home renovations and had planned to pay it off when they retired. They suddenly found they had no way of paying it off. Many workers are now in lower paid jobs or working casually or they have retired on incomes far less than they had worked towards.

After intense lobbying in 2001 by the opposition, the federal government imposed the $10 ticket tax to help recoup workers' entitlements. But workers have still not seen their full entitlements. The tax raised almost $300 million but workers are still owed about $210 million and the government has chosen to use close to $100 million of the money raised through the ticket tax on airport security rather than on paying Ansett workers' entitlements. The public did not pay their $10 levy for airport security. They expected the government to deal with that anyway. It was never called an `airport security levy' and there would have been an outcry if it had been back then. It was always known as the Ansett ticket tax.

The people who have been hardest hit by the Ansett collapse are those who were approaching retirement. As I mentioned earlier, many still have not found jobs. They have retired on lower incomes. They have not gone on the holidays they planned. They have not paid off their mortgages and they have not done the home renovations they had planned earlier. The federal government argues that an eight-week payout is somehow a good deal, but workers make the point that, for those who had been with the company for decades, an eight-week redundancy payout simply is not good enough.