Many older workers from across Australia seasonally pick fruit on the Apple Isle. Photo: Ave Calvar.
The Australian Council of Trade Unions has warned the electorate about what it says are recent comments made by a Tasmanian Liberal candidate that show the Dutton Liberals’ intent to cut minimum wage rates for Australian workers.
Mal Hingston, the Liberal candidate for Braddon, told a local forum that a Dutton government approach would be to “rewind stuff the Albanese Government has done and put things back to the way they were”.
Mr Hingston said the Albanese Government’s reforms had brought unintended consequences, such as preventing older workers from coming to Tasmania to pick fruit.
The Liberal candidate said older workers used to “come down here to Tassie and just plod along, and they were happy with $10 an hour, or whatever it was”.
The statement attracted the scorn of the ACTU, whose secretary Sally McManus said: “The Coalition say they won’t release a workplace relations policy this election. Now at least one Tasmanian Liberal has been honest enough to say that a Dutton government would rewind Labor’s workplace reforms.
“The Liberals’ Mal Hingston sees nothing wrong in expecting older workers to work for piece rates of $10 an hour. He’d like low wages to come back and confirmed that’s what a Dutton government would try to do if elected.”
Mr Hingston also told an audience of Braddon businessmen and women that older workers “didn’t care about the low hourly rate”, going on to state that for older workers performing manual labour for less than the minimum wage, fruit picking was “a social outing”.
The candidate claimed they were happy earning piece rates at just $10 an hour, roughly half the minimum wage.
“Now they don’t want to get employed for fruit picking because they don’t want to work that hard to justify minimum wages,” he said, believing that people are willing to work below minimum but unwilling to work for the minimum.
The statement was slammed by Ms McManus.
“Wages would also be cut because all of the employers’ wage-cutting schemes would be back again alongside the boom in wage theft we saw under the last Coalition government,” she said.
“The Coalition will say one thing in a boardroom or in private, they will flip-flop when under pressure in a campaign, but in the end, they are on the side of big business and big business wants to unwind workers’ rights.”
