Ms BURKE (11:03 AM) —I rise to speak on the Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment) Bill 1998 . I listened with interest last year to the second reading speech of the Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business. I remember noting at the time that it was high on rhetoric and minimal on fact. I have now listened to the member for Herbert and I ask him: what if a junior has the ability or the experience? What is their appropriate rate of pay?

We can talk about maturity and we can talk about age, but what if you can demonstrate that two people standing side by side are equally capable of performing the same duty, the only discrimination in terms of how they are paid being how old they are? That is totally unfair. It is anachronistic. Everything about this bill smacks of traditional conservative ideology. It is the same old viewpoint: slash youth wages—slash wages in fact—and you will have a ready-made recipe for solving the unemployment crisis. It is a same tired theory from the same tired party.

The amendments to the Workplace Relations Act 1996 contained within the youth employment bill seek to entrench the discriminatory wage structure known as junior rates. The bill seeks to insert into the act justification for its determination to support discounted wages rather than the concept of a rate for the job. There are three main criticisms I would like to make in relation to this bill.

This bill attempts to reconstruct an outmoded, unfair and totally arbitrary system. Junior rates are an anachronism; they belong in earlier times—times when discrimination on the basis of sex, race and marital status was still considered acceptable. The past 30 years have seen a series of hard-fought gains, such as equal pay, modernise our industrial relations system. It is now time for the junior rates system to be updated to reflect the modern principles of equity and fairness.

The Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business has cited as a defence to this bill that juniors do not have the requisite maturity and experience to deserve an adult rate of pay. But how does one define junior? Is it a young person aged under 18 or 21? Or is it simply someone of any age who is experienced? There is no definition of junior in this bill or in the principal act.

The term `minor' was historically used to describe someone who had not obtained the age of majority. Up until the early 1970s, the age of majority was 21. Since then, age of majority legislation in all states and territories has been amended to reduce the age of majority to 18. As members of the House are aware, 18 years of age is now the legal age when all entitlements and obligations are bestowed upon young people. At the age of 18, a young person is able to obtain their driver's licence—indeed in some states you can be even younger; cast a vote in local, state and federal elections; legally marry without parental permission; drink alcohol; be named an executor to a will; obtain a credit card; gamble—which is probably equivalent to obtaining a credit card—and even run for a seat in parliament. In fact, at age 18 you can do just about anything—that is, other than earn a fair day's pay for a fair day's work.

Fair wage outcomes are a fundamental belief held by members on this side of the House, a principle obviously not shared by this government. Young workers aged between 15 and 20 years of age who are covered by awards that provide for junior rates receive only 50 to 90 per cent of the adult rate of pay. Yet they receive no corresponding discount to help them pay for their basic items such as accommodation, food, gas, electricity and transport. In the ACOSS submission to the junior rates inquiry, it was found that in 1994-95 the average wage of 15- to 19-year-olds was $290 per week—less than half of the average weekly earnings for adults.

Even young people who still live at home with their families are required to meet their own living costs and can barely make ends meet on their discounted wages. Consider somebody who is living out of home and generally paying rent of $100 plus a week: I do not know how they make ends meet if they are only earning $290. The problem is even more acute with adult unemployment hovering around the eight per cent level, leaving many young people with no option but to contribute significantly to the finances of the family budget.

What we need is a system that produces a fair outcome for both workers and business. This brings me to my second point. The globalisation of the economy demands that employers have a well-trained and multiskilled work force. Rather than regarding their low wage juniors as fodder, employers would be inclined to provide skills training and a proper career path for employees if they had to pay them a higher wage rate. Debate so far seems to have excluded the one group who will be most impacted by any change to this legislation, those persons currently under 21 who are employed on the basis of junior rates—young people. It will be even harder for those juniors who are currently under 21 years of age and are not on junior rates. How will the bill affect them?

We have not heard from these people, who are currently being discriminated against on the basis of their age. Yes, we have had assertions that they will not thank us for the loss of job opportunities and we have had rhetoric about economic factors and the need for people of less maturity, experience and age to develop before they can earn a proper wage, but we have had nothing about the actual views of young people. I would like to right this wrong and tell you about an experience of mine when I was at the Finance Sector Union and was dealing with an ANZ bank employee, a customer service officer who was employed in Western Australia. This individual was 19 years of age, going on 20, and had been employed by the bank for three years. To put it into context, a customer service officer is not a junior entry point position into the bank and this person had actually progressed through the ranks to attain this role.

As many of you have read in the papers recently, people in banks are subject to performance appraisals, which are predominantly driven by performance targets which are increasingly about sales and referrals. These appraisals are not just feelgood exercises for your manager to say, `Gee, you've done really well this year.' They actually determine your remuneration outcome. These appraisals are based on target driven figures, so you are given a score. You are told how many sales to refer, how many people to move on to phone banking and things like that.

Each year this junior had to undergo this appraisal. Each year this junior received four out of a five-point scale for that appraisal. At the ANZ at the time, they had a system of a five-point scale based on the rate for the job and on a category base of `adequate', `competent', `commendable' and `outstanding'. This person was assessed as `commendable' three years out of three years for her appraisal. This is not just remarkable but extraordinary because, as you will know from anyone's experience, nobody gets `outstanding' in an appraisal assessment.

She had not only done her job well but excelled in that position, so much so that she had actually been put in charge of training other staff. She had also been placed in a position of managing when her manager was not in the building. If anybody has been in a bank recently, you would know that managers are quite often not there. So, year in, year out, she had demonstrated she had the maturity, the ability and the experience to do that role well beyond the ability of the majority of her co-workers, the bulk of whom were over 21. But, because she was a junior, she was not entitled to any performance outcome. She sat the test and she did brilliantly but got no remuneration reward. All she received was a percentage of the base adult rate of pay. I ask the member for Herbert to tell me if that is fair, because obviously this junior had demonstrated her ability to do that role.

Mr Lieberman —What is she doing now?

Ms BURKE —I am getting to that. If the argument is about the need for young people to serve time to gain experience and maturity in a role, that is fine, but pay it on the basis of proven ability to do the job and not arbitrarily on age. This sort of predicament, in which many young people find themselves, acts as a disincentive to work harder and to strive to achieve. Why should a young person pursue excellence in the performance of their duties if they know they will never be remunerated for their efforts until they reach the supposed adult age?

This story is not uncommon. It is a real situation faced by many young people like the woman I have spoken about today. However, her story has a happy ending, as I will explain in a moment. Encouragingly, many people have begun to see the light of day in relation to junior rates. It is now not unusual for employers to agree to adjust their wage regime by removing junior rates. This has occurred within the context of enterprise bargaining, with some collective agreements abolishing junior rates of pay and replacing them with competency based rates. This is another reason why the government's proposal to spread the application of junior rates is so onerous.

We do not wish to see the clock turned back on enterprise agreements where advancements have been made towards eliminating wage discrimination. Worse still, in the commission issues paper it is estimated 56 per cent of all people in the work force aged less than 21 years are employed on junior rates. How many of the remaining 44 per cent will soon be forced to accept junior rates as well? The inquiry has examined 196 awards, of which 118 were found to contain junior rates and 78 did not. Of the 274 enterprise agreements examined, 43 per cent contained junior rates. This leaves a lot of scope for imposing junior rates of pay on many more young Australians, therefore raising the spectre that this bill could lead to many young people going backwards in their pay.

I spoke earlier of the ANZ staff member who could not be recognised for her ability, only her age. This was addressed in the recent ANZ enterprise agreement, with the bank agreeing to phase-out junior rates between now and 2001. The bank realised that if it wanted to retain skilled, competent staff it had to pay the appropriate wage. It arrived freely at this decision—a decision based on sound business sense. If employers such as ANZ, Westpac, National Australia Bank and the Commonwealth Bank can accept the notion that there should be one rate for the job, then why can't the government?

If we look at the industrial relations agenda since the election of the Howard government in March 1996, we find a sorry list: the stripping back of awards, the watering down of unfair dismissal legislation and the hobbling of the powers of the commission. Then there are the second term ambitions of this government in regard to industrial relations—the so-called `second wave'. Some of their designs have already been introduced into this House, such as the attempt to remove unfair dismissal protection from a whole raft of unfortunate workers. One can only conclude that these miserable so-called `reforms' are reflective of the ideological bent of this government—anti-worker, anti-union and now a push for discounted wages.

The justification for entrenching discriminatory rates of pay appears to centre around an imported theory: if you keep youth wages low there will be a corresponding decrease in youth unemployment. To support this theory the government trots out the occasional `foreign expert' ignoring the legions of economists who are unable to agree on the subject. With youth unemployment levels running at 24.8 per cent, junior rates have hardly been the panacea for youth unemployment in the past. Junior rates have always applied in retail and hospitality—the two areas of high youth employment. Yet youth unemployment remains stubbornly high. If the government was serious about addressing youth unemployment it would invest in the genuine labour market programs that were so successful in redirecting young people into the work force in the early l990s under the Labor government.

The existence of junior rates also gives the dishonest employer—of course, my colleagues on the other side of the fence have been saying that there would never be any of these out there; no, no, never—an economic motive to reduce the hours of work or dismiss em ployees when they reach the age at which they are finally entitled to receive the full rate of pay. An extension of junior rates would only intensify these problems. Surely this is not the government's intention?

This leads me to my third and final point. Whilst the bill inserts the partisan notion that age based rates of pay are not discriminatory, it leaves intact section 120B of the Workplace Relations Act which is the provision for the Industrial Relations Commission inquiry on the feasibility of replacing junior rates with non-discriminatory alternatives. The commission has received submissions to the inquiry and must report back to this House by June 22 this year. It is one thing for the government to break its agreement with the Democrats in the Senate and introduce legislation to retain junior rates; it is even more farcical to predetermine the outcome of an inquiry even before it is finished deliberating.

The minister and the government obviously have no regard for the role of the independent commission or any of the parties who have sought to be heard on the matter. The bill makes a mockery of the inquiry and the Industrial Relations Commission. Most disturbingly it supports an unfair, antiquated system which discriminates against the nation's future—our young people—and ought to be opposed by all members of this House.