Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

Okay. That is fine. The other point I touched on but would like to go to in more detail is the fall, as forecast in the budget, of jobs in this country. As I said, the budget forecasts 100,000 fewer jobs over the forward estimates when compared with last year's budget. We have already had a stubbornly high unemployment rate of 5.7 per cent, so there are some real issues that any government would confront in dealing with the unemployment statistics—the significantly high unemployment rate and the highest underemployment number in our history, with over 1.1 million Australians looking for more work but not being able to find it. You add those 1.1 million underemployed Australians to the 730,000 unemployed and you have got 1.8 million workers in this country either not being able to find any work or not being able to find sufficient work. I ask the minister to consider, in light of that, what it is that the government is doing to ensure there are more opportunities for prospective employees, jobseekers, or indeed part-time employees who are seeking more work so that they can find work? What is it that the government seeks to do?

As I said earlier, we have a situation where wages are falling and hours of work are declining. Aggregate hours of work over the last few months have fallen in net terms, and yet there seem to be, at the same time, improvements to profits. That is a good thing—it is good to see companies profiting, and indeed we applaud and welcome that—but we are concerned about the disconnect between profits of companies on the one hand and the fact that wages are falling and unemployment is not falling on the other hand. I refer to an article by the economics correspondent Adam Creighton that was published recently. He says:

Company profits rose more than 30 per cent in the year to March, the best result of 33 years, while wages rose only 1.5 per cent, leaving the share of wages in national income at 51.5 per cent — the equal lowest level since the early 1960s. A lower share doesn't mean most workers are worse off in absolute terms, but wage growth has been below consumer price inflation for six months, suggesting living standards are falling.

Mr Creighton and other commentators are pointing to this disconnect between, on one hand, good results for company profits and, on the other hand, wages falling in real terms. Given that the government now wants to consider things through the prism of fairness—or so it seems ostensibly—what is the government seeking to do to ensure that workers are beneficiaries of productivity improvements or increased profits? At the moment, it is apparent that wages have fallen since the life of this government and they continue to fall. They are going to fall again on 1 July as a result of the first stage of the cuts to penalty rates as a result of the decision of the Fair Work Commission. The government does not seem to be seeking to doing anything to arrest this decline in any way nor does the government seem to have any plan to provide opportunities for work, given that the budget's own figures forecast a 100,000 drop in employment figures over the course of the forward estimates.

If I can just remind the minister of my questions. Firstly, what has happened to wage growth? Why is it going backwards and what are you doing about it? Secondly, why is it that there are so few job opportunities? Thirdly, why is there such great growth in profits and such a fall in wages?

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