At $200k, celebrity chef George Calombaris ‘got off light’

The Attorney-General says he is open to tougher penalties after the celebrity chef’s “light” fine for $7.8m wages underpayment.

Celebrity chef George Calombaris. Picture: Nicole Cleary

Attorney-General Christian Porter has declared the $200,000 “contrition payment” by celebrity chef George Calombaris a “light penalty”, saying he had an “open mind” about legislating higher penalties for the underpayment of wages, including criminal penalties for serious repeat offending.

Mr Porter told The Australian he believed many Australians would agree the payment made by Calombaris through an agreement with the Fair Work Ombudsman was light given 515 workers were underpaid $7.8 million over six years.

“My sense is it was light,’’ he said. “The sheer quantum of the underpayment and the period of time under which it spanned seemed to me that, as a penalty under the system, that that was a light penalty.”

Mr Porter said the appropriateness of the current penalties for underpayment of wages would be examined by the government as part of its review of the industrial relations system.

“As to the proposition that there could be further penalties for underpayment, including at the very, upper reaches, criminal penalties, I think that is a debate and discussion worth having, and I am open-minded to it,’’ he said.

“But those types of penalties would have to realistically be reserved for the most serious instances of underpayment. I think, generally speaking, they would be indicated by many counts, so repetitive underpayment, or, indeed, people who have a history of doing this type of thing previously.”

Calombaris, who faces union calls to be dumped from MasterChef over the scandal, said last week the underpayments were self-reported and wages owed had been backpaid to all but a handful of workers.

Speaking generally, Mr Porter said “self-reporting and backpaying might not necessarily be an indication of good faith or of accidental underpayment — in some instances it might be an indication that underpayments were so repetitious and so gross you had no choice but to confess”.

“The measure is not whether or not it is self-reported. The measure would be: how many breaches were there? Over how many years did they occur? Has the person a history of this type of behaviour inside their organisation or inside other organisations they’ve been involved with?”

He said the Calombaris case was an “instance, in my observation, of a very serious pattern of underpayment of employees but we need to have a debate and a public consultation through our IR review process as to where you might draw the line of seriousness past which people would be subject to criminal penalties”.

“I am sure in airing this issue and debating it through our IR review process, that that particular example will be one of several which will be considered as to whether or not the present penalties are sufficient. I must say I am open-minded to views that are put that they are presently not sufficient,’’ he said.

Mr Porter said he would listen to employers, unions and individuals about the adequacy of current penalties and “if you were to take the step of having criminal penalties for serious, repetitious instances of underpayment, how would you define those?”

The government will this week bring on a bill to make it easier to deregister unions and disqualify union officials for debate in the lower house. In response to proposed amendments, Labor workplace relations spokesman Tony Burke said yesterday the opposition “still had significant problems” with the Ensuring Integrity Bill.

“We will not support a bill that could leave workers without the representatives that protect them from wage theft, superannuation theft and dangerous workplaces,’’ he said.

Mr Porter dismissed Mr Burke’s response as political spin.