Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to continue on from the contribution from the shadow minister and member for Gorton about how the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2014 seeks to abolish the cleaning guidelines. These guidelines currently are enabled by regulation 7B of the Finance Management and Accountability Regulations 1997, which in turn enables section 64 of the Finance Management and Accountability Act 1997. This bill seeks to repeal section 64 of the act and, therefore, would render these cleaning guidelines inoperable. The section clearly states:

The regulations may authorise a Minister to issue guidelines …

I want to take a moment to let the House know what the impact of abolishing these cleaning guidelines will be on the lowest paid yet hardest working Commonwealth workers: the cleaners. As the shadow minister has outlined, cleaners stand to lose $344 a week because of this government's decision. Buried in the pages and pages of the document before us is this cruel measure to abolish the cleaning guidelines. It means a cut in the take-home pay of so many people working so hard in government buildings. There will be a cut in the Clean Start rate, which is $22 an hour currently, back to the award rate of $17.49. That is a pay cut of $5 per hour to people on very low wages. This hit to cleaners, who, as we know, are some of the lowest paid workers, just shows how ideologically driven this government is. Labor opposes the decision to abolish the guidelines that apply to the hardworking cleaners of Australian government agencies and their contractors. We will do everything we can to ensure this move is blocked.

Let us just take a moment to reflect on who these cleaners are, because it is very easy in this place to pretend that they are a section or rule in a bill before us and forget about the faces and the actual people. On International Cleaners Day, which was recognised only a few weeks ago, we acknowledged the people who are quite often forgotten—the people who came out of the basements to be remembered and recognised. The government, it appears, need to be reminded every day about these hardworking Australian cleaners, who keep their workplaces clean. They include Chris Wagland and Carlos Pavez, two people who live here in the ACT and in Queanbeyan, just outside the ACT. I remind you that Queanbeyan is part of the marginal electorate of Eden-Monaro. They are two people in the direct line of attack who will face the potential of having wages cut if these changes go through. The repeal of the Commonwealth Cleaning Services Guidelines means that people like Chris and Carlos could face the loss of $340 per week.

Chris is the President of the ACT branch of United Voice and is the cleaner of a government building. She has worked in government buildings and in cleaning for almost 30 years. Her story is a direct reflection of decisions that are made here in this House. Thirty years ago, Chris started cleaning a Defence building. At the time, she was directly employed by the government, only for that contract to be outsourced and put out for private tender. While she has taken on many other jobs, she continues to work in cleaning. In 2006, she lost that contract in Defence. She refused to sign an Australian workplace agreement that was dropped on the cleaners in her workplace as a result of Work Choices legislation, so she lost her Department of Defence cleaning job. Today, she is back there, after a battle and after a cleaning contractor who was not introducing AWAs and who was a signatory to the Clean Start guidelines won the contract. Today she has proper wages and conditions. But from 1 July this could change again.

As I mentioned, Chris lives in Queanbeyan. She leaves to go to work in Canberra every day at 3 am, to start at 4. She is the proud mother of three sons, and her youngest is still at school. She said that one of the benefits of starting early is that she gets to be at home to help with caring duties. She has strong Christian values, and that is what has motivated her to fight. She has spent her working life standing up to say that cleaners deserve respect and decency—particularly our cleaners working in Commonwealth buildings. Every single other public servant is paid much more than our cleaners. Yet the government seems determined to go after its cleaners' wages. And how? By these amendments in this bill today and by abolishing the cleaning guidelines.

Carlos is a refugee from Chile who arrived in Australia in 1974. He is almost due to retire. He has been cleaning in Canberra's institutions for over 35 years. At the moment, one of the places where he cleans is the department of forestry building. He is a family man with four sons and 10 grandchildren. He is a community leader. He is passionate about his soccer, and I am sure he is spending many nights at the moment staying up and, if he is not working, watching the World Cup.

Why I tell these stories is to remind the House that decisions they make affect real people—ordinary people doing a job that most of us would choose not to do, but doing it to support their family. The workers that work in these government buildings are being punished as a result of this bill. Their campaign to ensure that they had decent rates of pay will be undermined and undercut as a result of decisions made by this government on red tape repeal day and today with this bill. These are some of the lowest paid workers. It is so rich coming from this government, which talks about pay parity, that it has forgotten about them or is trying to hide what it is doing to them in this legislation today.

The PM and his ministers constantly stand up, campaign and rant about the need for pay parity when it comes to paid parental leave. They stand up and say that women in the private sector should have the same benefits as women working in the public sector, and that is why they are pushing for a very generous paid parental leave system which would see the government subsidise private sector workers—women—to the tune of $50,000. Yet here today we have seen the government do the complete opposite and backflip. Today they are seeking introduce guidelines that could see the cleaners' wages cut so that they would not have pay parity with their fellow workers in the private sector.

As we speak, cleaners working in the private sector in Melbourne doing similar work to this—cleaning offices, working in big buildings in the CBD, working in big corporate offices—are paid in accordance with the Clean Start rates, the Clean Start agreement and, therefore, these cleaning guidelines. Yet we are seeing this government make the push to see its cleaners be pushed back to the award. And that is what really stinks about this—a government that is willing to push for pay parity for the private sector in a paid parental leave scheme but, in another bill before the House, push its cleaners back to the award. It is not interested in pay parity for our lowest paid cleaners. It is not interested in ensuring that cleaners can actually afford to put food on their table.

Let's be honest about what it is like to live on the award today. You can work full time as a cleaner with a pay rate is as little as $17 an hour, and you do not have enough money in your budget to pay the bills. One of the motivations for putting my hand up to run for the seat of Bendigo was a conversation that I had with cleaners in Bendigo at the Bendigo shopping centre. We were sitting around talking about what would be a fair pay rise to ask the boss for. They laughed and said, 'Lisa, we couldn't ask for the price that we need to help pay our bills.' They say that they are always one bill away from disaster. The award is too low. There is something simply not right when someone working full time cannot pay the bills. Yet that is the destiny that this government is trying to force these cleaners onto. It is trying to force its cleaners in government buildings back to those poverty wages currently experienced by people working on the award.

What is also clear is that this government does not understand how cleaners working in government buildings will end up on the award. It is clear that the PM, with his comments before the House, does not understand how the contracting system works and the nature of competitive contracting. Wages are a core component of contracting. Eighty per cent of the cost of a cleaning contract is wages. So, if you can tender on the award rate of $17.49 against a company on the Clean Start rate of $22 per hour, you are $5 an hour cheaper than the company that is paying the cleaners in accordance with the Clean Start rates. That is why the Prime Minister's statement 'I want to make it absolutely crystal clear that no cleaner's pay is reduced' is either a demonstration that he does not understand how contracting works or he has misled this parliament, because, when the cleaning contract for this place—or for other government buildings—goes out to tender, there will be a company that currently has a contract tendering on the Clean Start rates of $22 an hour base rate competing against a company on the award, which is $17.50 an hour. That is what this government has done. It has reintroduced competition based upon price, not quality. So that company has the choice, if it wants to continue that contract, to either bust its cleaners back to the award, costing those cleaners $344 a week, or lose the contract to a company paying the award.

The fact that the government is gagging debate on this bill highlights how little care or regard this government has for its lowest paid workers and how little understanding they have for how some of the measures in this bill will hurt working people.

The fact that the government is trying to hide that it will abolish cleaning services guidelines is another demonstration of the twisted priorities of this government. These guidelines will enable companies to compete for government contracts on the award, directly undercutting the wages of hardworking cleaners—cleaners working in government buildings. As I have said, these are already some of our lowest paid workers. They worked hard, they campaigned and they got themselves a decent pay rise. There were protections in place to ensure that they got a decent rate of pay, yet one of the first acts of this government has been to delete the very instrument that ensures that they continue to get these rates.

We are all for competitive tendering, as long as it is a fair competitive tendering process. This bill takes away the fairness. This bill will see companies which respect their cleaners and pay them at a decent rate having to compete with companies paying the award. Ultimately, it will result in a $5-an-hour pay cut. That is why the words of the Prime Minister are so disingenuous when he stands up and says, 'I want to make it absolutely crystal clear that no cleaner's pay will be reduced.'

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