Dan Repacholi is smiling. He’s posting victory messages. He’s celebrating what he calls a “win” for workers under Labor’s new Same Job, Same Pay laws. But here’s the truth: while Dan Repacholi celebrates in the Hunter, your electricity bill just went up.
This is the problem with politicians who don’t understand economics—or worse, don’t care. They govern based on slogans, not outcomes. And when you scratch beneath the surface of this policy, you realise it’s not about fairness. It’s about power. Union power. Political power. The power to punish private industry and reward Labor’s backers.
Because under Same Job, Same Pay, companies are now forced to pay contract workers the same as full-time employees, even when those contractors were brought in precisely to save money during peak periods. Labor’s message is simple: flexibility is bad, cost-efficiency is evil, and industry must be restructured around union demands.
Now imagine running a coal or gas company —the industries that still, somehow, keep the lights on in this country. Labor just made your workforce more expensive overnight. Your ability to scale up or down in response to market demands? Gone. And those increased costs? They don’t just vanish—they land directly on the power bills of everyday Australians.
This is happening in the middle of an energy crisis. Power prices are soaring, the grid is under pressure, and investment in new fossil fuel infrastructure has already slowed to a trickle. Labor’s answer? Make it more expensive to hire people who extract the very resources we need to survive.
So when Repacholi posts smiling selfies and pats himself on the back for this “win,” you need to ask: who really won here? Because it wasn’t the consumers. It wasn’t the small businesses, the manufacturers, the pensioners, or the working-class Australians already getting crushed by inflation. No, the winners are the union bosses and Labor’s political machine who is actively working to destroy the mining industry with net zero.
This isn’t about fairness. It’s about control. And the price for that control will be paid—month after month—on your electricity bill. So yes, Dan, congratulations. You got your win. The rest of us got screwed.
