Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

When we are talking about the Fair Work Amendment (Corrupting Benefits) Bill 2017, we are talking about a prime example of what this government is all about. It is the government of the meaningless gesture and the government of the political agenda. It is a shameless political agenda of trying to destroy the Australian trade union movement. We have heard talk in this last speech about fairness and about superannuation issues. We will come back to that. We will talk about whether this government is really interested in fairness and in prosecuting criminal behaviour and establishing the rule of law.

My good friend and colleague—the member for Burke, who is actually an expert on a lot of these legal issues—quite rightly pointed out that the alleged criminal behaviour that is to be addressed in this legislation is already tackled by existing crimes law. I am not sure what the window-dressing here is all about. We do know that instead of spending $60 million or $80 million on a royal commission, which obviously had a shameless political agenda, that money would have been better spent on enabling our police and criminal investigators to actually do their jobs in prosecuting the law. Of course, the Labor Party is more than supportive and willing to back measures that deal with crimes in the union movement, as we are in any sphere of Australian life. But it would have been a better result to enable our law enforcement agencies to actually get out there and do that job instead of engaging in meaningless gestures, like this sort of legislation, where laws for these crimes already exist.

We could talk about wanting to deal with vandalism, harassment in the workplace, issues of tracking the dubious transfer of money, allegations of relationships with the mafia and these sorts of things. That actually describes a lot of the allegations that have been directed towards the federal parliamentary Liberal Party and describes the way the Liberal Party in New South Wales has operated. We know all about how the Free Enterprise Foundation worked to launder money from developers to the New South Wales Liberal Party. The Liberal branch in my own town of Queanbeyan was central in that process. Developers were literally handing brown paper bags to the head of the Liberal branch in Queanbeyan, who then drove them up the highway to Sydney.

There is all sorts of activity that goes on out there that is worthy of attention, but this is about the choices this government makes. When it talks about 'the right choices', it makes highly political choices that are directed at a particular agenda. That particular agenda is the destruction of the union movement. Talking about the sorts of issues that are out there in the workplace and out there in industry—corruption and the rule of law—why was there no interest in setting up a royal commission into the banks and why was there no interest in looking at the vast array of examples that have been exhibited recently about the underpayment of workers? We have heard those sorts of stories about 7-Eleven, Domino's, Crust pizzas, McDonald's and Caltex. There are all of those stories out there that are all worthy of some sort of analysis from the point of view of systemic violations.

We recently found out something thanks to the National Union of Workers. We heard these references from the previous speaker on superannuation. Again highlighting the need for unions and why they exist, the National Union of Workers ran a process of analysing superannuation through an online wage calculator and uncovered that thousands of workers—not just one or two but thousands of workers—are being absolutely ripped off in relation to their superannuation. Based on the data that was coming in back in November last year, where nearly 20,000 workers' pay details were entered into this fair pay campaign calculator over three weeks, the calculator revealed that more than half of all restaurant industry submissions showed that staff were being denied minimum rates of pay.

These are systemic issues that are worthy of deeper analysis, investigation and perhaps royal commissions. But there is no interest from the government. What is the message that is being sent that we heard from the previous speaker? It is a message that says: 'It's all fair in love and war if you're a business. That's okay. Go for your life. People are only widgets. They're only part of the production process or the business calculation. You can do what you like with them.'

Well, that is not how we think. I have often heard the Prime Minister come in here in many question times, look at the Leader of the Opposition and slander him mercilessly. We heard some more of that previously in relation to enterprise bargaining arrangements and whether or not the Leader of the Opposition is at all interested in the welfare of cleaners. Let me tell you he is, and was and still works tirelessly in their interests. But when you hear the Prime Minister talk about cleaners—his very toilet in his own office is cleaned by workers who are being ripped off blind in this building, whose wages have been frozen since 2012, who are struggling to put food on the table and who are being squeezed like pips to do more work for less in this very building, cleaning his room, his toilet—does he care about them at all? Does he even see them as humans? The hypocrisy of this man is unbelievable. Pointing to a man who has worked all of his life to look after the interests of those sorts workers, he said that penalty rates have been given away by the unions. Well, they have not been.

The issue here is that in an enterprise bargaining agreement there is a trade so that some aspects of productivity arrangements will be entered into in exchange for benefits for workers. They may raise the general level of the wage of workers to compensate for loss of penalty rates or they may create a safer workplace. A lot of the examples we have heard mentioned are about money that has gone into assisting developing safer workplaces.

These are not bad things. It is not a bad thing that a union takes the approach that they want the enterprise to benefit, to be profitable and to be productive, and that they are prepared to talk to their employees and employers to enter into those sorts of arrangements. That is the sort of thing that we want to encourage. We want to encourage enterprise bargaining arrangements of that nature. To slander and slag them like the Prime Minister does is totally disingenuous and frankly dishonest. What they are doing now is more evident too in their approach across the board to every issue in this space, such as penalty rates.

Of course we know that the government has completely vacated the field on penalty rates. They basically said: 'Fair Work Commission, we are not going to give you the benefit of government modelling, government analysis and government submission on this. You just fly blind and just listen to whatever submissions you may get from business. But we are not going to help with this because we do not care. In fact we want penalty rates to go.' And they backed that in. They supported the decision, as they announced, and made no submissions whatsoever. Then, to compound that, they went out there when we were talking about the minimum wage and the Fair Work Commission and said: 'We do not think that should go up either. In fact, we are happy to see that continually erode through inflation and lack of pay rises.' Of course, what we are seeing in that process is a steady erosion of the working conditions of Australians and record low wages growth. They are more than happy to sit back, fat, dumb and happy, and watch that process roll itself through and watch workers suffer.

In all of this, we have never seen one piece of modelling that shows that there is going to be more employment or wages growth through any of these measures. There has been no modelling whatsoever. The Treasurer is never able to answer those sorts of questions on any of these issues. There is no evidence, whatsoever, that any of the theories of trickle-down economics will work in any respect.

I have talked about the impact, for example, of penalty rate cuts on a region like mine, and of course rural and regional Australia in general. We know that 700,000 Australians in the lowest-paid workers category are going to lose significant elements of their pay, but the deep effect on rural and regional communities like Eden-Monaro is amplified much more. The McKell Institute analysed that impact. When we are talking about retail and hospitality workers in rural and regional areas, it is 18 per cent of the rural workforce. We also know that under their analysis, retail and hospitality workers in rural Australia losing penalty rates will lose between $370 million and $1.5 billion each year. What does that do to our regional economies? No amount of shuffling departments out of Canberra and across the nation will address the impact that just cutting penalty rates will make on rural and regional areas. It will reduce disposable income in those areas between $174 million and $748 million, the McKell Institute reveals to us.

In Eden-Monaro, retail is the second-biggest industry, employing 12,000 workers. Food and hospitality is the fifth-largest industry in my region, employing 5,286 workers. We are going to lose $16 million of disposable income in my region. That is going to hurt. Compounding that is the fact that this crazy decentralisation policy that the Nationals in the coalition are pursuing is going to devastate my region even further. We are suffering—as is the rest of the nation—from the casualisation of our workforce. We in Eden-Monaro are one of the most intense victims of that process. Look at that in the context of penalty rates: for someone who is working two or three days a week, it is the penalty rates that are putting food on the table and helping to pay the rent. Casualisation, penalty rates removal, decentralisation—it is all killing my region. All of the small businesses that benefit from the driving holiday makers from Canberra are suffering a hit. All of the workers that live across the border and in the conurbation that goes from Yass to Bungendore, Queanbeyan and Cooma are suffering from this crazy proposal.

The worst of that, as a person who is deeply interested and concerned about farmers, is that we are seeing the farmers losing support for what they have to do. They do not want the APVMA, for example, to be sitting there in the paddock next to them; they want them to be coming up with solutions to their issues. If you take the APVMA away from the CSIRO and the ANU, they are only going to get hurt in their capacity to deliver those answers. What we have seen is that most of the scientists—the people at the engine of the APVMA—will not do the move or will not be part of the organisation anymore. Not even the CEO will do the move. This move will cost $60 million during a time when we are supposed to be exercising budgetary restraint.

This decentralisation policy is just another example of the shameless political agenda and pork barrelling. As we know, Barnaby Joyce, the member for New England, is obviously the first beneficiary of the move of an instrumentality. It is clear that that is not a good idea. It is just moving jobs from one place to another; it is not creating new jobs. The sorts of processes we need to engage in in rural and regional Australia—the policies that need to be put in place to generate new jobs and new economies in the regions—are not even being considered and looked at effectively.

Mr Deputy Speaker, if you were a young person, how would you feel about this government in all of this process? They are not tackling climate change, so they are burning your future. They are ripping out the school funding. They are hurting you through the family tax benefits cuts. I mentioned the penalty rates situation. A lot of young people in my electorate—it is they who are going to be hurt most by that, along with women. You ask them and they will tell you, Mr Deputy Speaker. In all the surveys done in Eden-Monaro, 60 per cent support the retention of penalty rates. In Queanbeyan it is even higher, at 79 per cent.

As for Newstart, that is now off the agenda because we forced it to be off the agenda, but we know that the government want to go there again and they keep it in their back pocket. They will do it whenever they get a chance. With casualisation you know as a young person that you may never get a full-time job under this government. Obviously, that means you have no hope of ever being able to take out a mortgage. Of course, because the government will not tackle housing affordability, you have absolutely no prospect of ever being able to own your own home under this government. Along with all of that, the government also want to raise your pension age to 70. They still want to do that. That is a great prospect for our young people as well.

As a young person, if you want to go to university you are going to get slammed. Your university is going to get penalised, so it will not be able to provide you with an affordable education. If you want to grow the new economy you have be investing in the knowledge infrastructure. Not only is that being attacked but the participants from our rural and regional communities are being prevented from getting there through these measures. And, of course, we are not having the NBN out there to support you either in your need to do online studies or the rest. (Time expired)

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