Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

( It's Wednesday so the government must be attacking unions again. I'm astonished at this approach by this government, at this time of at all times. Between 1997 and 2012 wage growth averaged around 3.6 per cent a year. Since 2012 wage growth has slowed right down to average just 1.9 per cent a year. This is the lowest wage price index data since the data has been collected. Corporate profits are at an all-time high and wage growth is at an all-time low. Wages are more than what a person takes home at the end of their work day; they're also what they spend in the business next door. While I've heard some businesses argue for cuts in the wages of their workers, I have never yet heard a business argue for cuts in the wages of their customers. Yet, when wages fall, that's exactly what happens. When the cost of living rises higher than wages, the spending capacity of people is lower and lower, and we see what we're seeing in our community right now, which is entirely predictable: the slow decline of retail. Retailers are keeping all their fingers crossed and hoping for a great Christmas because they so desperately need it, yet wage growth is at an all-time low.

Under those circumstances, when we need to start finding ways to drive wages up, it is not the time that you start bagging out and trying to destroy the union movement. The union movement is one of the mechanisms that argue for that levelling off between corporate profit and wage growth. The moment wage growth is low and corporate profit is high, usually unions are the ones in the middle starting to argue for a fairer share of the pie. Don't let anyone tell you that wages aren't growing because productivity hasn't grown—because it actually has. Real labour productivity has gone up by 20 per cent in the last 10 years. Yet real wages grew by just six per cent. Over the last four decades, real wages for the top 10 per cent of income earners have grown 72 per cent, but for average earners they have grown only six per cent—an extraordinary moving of wealth from working people and middle-income people up to the higher echelons of our society.

Unions have an extraordinary role to play in this. The IMF—hardly a bastion of progressive or radical thinking—has recently been saying that the impact of declining unionisation is felt across the entire income spectrum. They find not only that the trend reduces the welfare of the lower income worker but that in fact it makes the rich richer. The IMF state, 'The decline in unionisation appears to be a key contributor to the rise of top income shares.' They say that the decline of union power has increased income inequality. Because of the government's ideological—I will use the Prime Minister's way of pronouncing the word; usually he uses 'iddeological' for us and 'eyedeoligical' for them, but I'm going to fold it back on him—obsession and hatred for unions, they are attacking one of the very mechanisms that would help this country address rising inequality and the stagnation of wages. This is an extraordinarily poorly thought-through strategy by the government.

In Parramatta we really need the government to start addressing wage growth decline and cost of living and the way the two issues intersect. In Parramatta, rents have risen much faster than wages. The median house price in Parramatta is now $1.2 million. Median rents are now sitting at well over $400 a week. We've just had a toll put back on the M4, which is going to rip $80 a week from a commuter's pay packet if they drive to the city every day. If you drive your kids to the soccer on Saturday, it's going to take $13 out of your pocket. Honestly, it's extraordinary. In Parramatta 12,300 people, or one in six workers, in the retail, food and accommodation industries are affected by the cuts to penalty rates. Again, that is something that the Turnbull government are more than happy to see happen. They're more than happy to see up to $70 a week ripped out of people's pay packets through these cuts to penalty rates, and they're happy to see that roll across the rest of the workforce as enterprise agreements are renegotiated. They're happy to see wages not just not grow fast enough but actively be cut. In Parramatta we are seeing up to one in six workers losing up to $77 a week in penalty rates, an additional $80 a week for the tolls, rents well over $400 and new Medicare levies coming in for lower-income workers as well.

They are a government that seem intent on driving down wages and, in doing so, driving down the wages of businesses' customers, because that's how main street works—people earn a living and they spend it in a business. The workers in that business who earn a living spend it and the money circulates. Take the money out and business slows down. We can see it already happening.

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