Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On the weekend, we had reports coming out of the Liberal convention that was held in New South Wales. We had reports that the coalition weren't coming up with things that they could do to make life easier for people. We didn't get any practical things that would address the things that Australians are concerned about in their day-to-day lives. What we had was game playing—this whole notion that the coalition would basically be setting tests, as it were, on Labor in returning to parliament this week. We're not sitting that much for the rest of this year because the coalition, as has been evidenced for quite some time, have no idea about what they will do now that they're in government and have not set too many weeks for this parliament to sit to get things done that would make life easier for people. But, instead, they've always got time to play games. They've always got time to politic.

We've got this piece of legislation before us, the Fair Work Laws Amendment (Proper Use of Worker Benefits) Bill 2019. This is not about tackling what a lot of people are worried about, which is, for example, why their wages aren't moving. When they've got bills to pay or things that they want to do with their families, why aren't wages moving higher than what they are? Why is it that you can have a government in a budget say that they expect that wages will increase in the next 12 months and it never actually happens? You have, apparently, a Treasury that has the best forecasting capability in the country making predictions that this government take forward and include in their budget, but we never see them actually occur.

Look at the stats. Look at the way the wage price index grew over the five years to December 2018—so the bulk of the time the coalition have been in office. It grew at an average of 2.2 per cent. But if you look at the five years leading to December 2013, when we had a global financial crisis, with all the pressures on businesses and the way that economies were performing, wages grew at 3.3 per cent. So they grew at 2.2 per cent in the five years from 2013 to 2018, but before that they were growing at 3.3 per cent. Where is there a bit of legislation, where is there some sort of action by those opposite, that will actually help people get more in their pocket, not less? I ask that because that's how people feel—that they're not actually keeping pace. They can see all these other people doing very well. Profitability is up, shareholders are doing well, and big CEOs are getting big pay packets and bonus on bonus, yet there's very little to show for people expecting to see some better outcome for their own wages. In fact, wages growth is getting worse under the coalition, and they don't have a plan.

They do have a plan to politic. They do have a plan to game play in this place and bring these bits of legislation forward, instead of actually doing the hard work of making life easier for people. As has already been pointed out, it's not just that people are not getting better wage growth than they expect. Look at the number of people who are unemployed—700,000, roughly. It doesn't really change much. As much as the coalition talk about 1.4 million jobs being created under their watch, there's still this stubborn unemployment rate of 700,000 people. On top of that, when the Australian Bureau of Statistics asks people, 'Are you happy with the type of work you're getting? or 'Are you happy with the hours that you're working?' over a million people are saying no. This is underemployment. Whenever you hear about this, there are people saying that they want to work in a much more secure job and they want to be able to get more hours to pay their bills.

I have people in my part of Western Sydney coming up to me and asking: 'How much longer do I have to work as a casual for? Why can't I get a full-time job that gives me the certainty that I can pay the bills, put the kids through school, put clothes on their back, get a house and pay the mortgage?' In some suburbs, over three-quarters of the people are renting because they can't get the homes that they want. They can't get finance, and if they can't get finance then it's largely because they haven't got the type of job with the type of pay coming in that allows them to do it. We don't see anything that shows this coalition government is determined to fix that. There is nothing to fix insecure work, nothing to fix the fact that there are some people who have been forced to work, particularly in labour hire agencies, for extended periods of time, going from job to job but still with no sense of permanence. In Sydney or in some of the big housing markets across the country, not only are people not getting the wages that they want, the work they think they deserve or the hours that will help them out but the ones who do have homes have seen house prices plummet. That is because the coalition, in their desperate attempt to do anything other than reform negative gearing, badger regulators to pull the handbrake on the housing market. So those workers who thought they had a nest egg in their home worry about prices dropping like a stone in some of the biggest housing markets in the country, because the coalition are playing games and doing things they reckon will make the smart win on the floor of this place. They tell everyone they're not part of the Canberra bubble but are very much at the heart of the bubble themselves.

The coalition come in here with their stunts and this type of legislation, with all the so-called tests they are putting to our side of politics, instead of being able to meet a test themselves. The test for those opposite is: what are you doing to make life easier for people across this country who are doing it tough, who aren't seeing their pay packets increase, who aren't seeing their hours increase, who aren't seeing security in their work and who aren't seeing the value of their homes increase to give them a nest egg? But those opposite come in here and beat their chests and say that they have taken a stand on this.

I referred earlier to wages growth declining in this country. The coalition, over the last 20 years, have made it their big deal to make it harder for working people to bargain. They have made it harder for people to call for things in their wage agreements for better outcomes. It's no surprise that we're seeing a floundering of wages growth under this government, because they have totally watered down the power that exists at the negotiating table for working people to work together to get better outcomes. Why would we be surprised that there's no improvement in wages in this country? It is no surprise that the coalition would stick to the view that they don't want working people to be able to organise against very powerful employers, who have an army of HR experts and an army of lawyers and who can basically skew agreements in the way that they want to deny working people the right to stand up and say, 'No, I deserve better. I deserve more. I can't keep living from pay cheque to pay cheque or holding down more and more jobs.'

The ABS also revealed that the rate of growth in the number of people who are holding down not two jobs, not three jobs but four jobs, just to make ends meet, has doubled over the last 12 months. This is stuff we don't talk about in here, but people have to live it every single day and there's no game plan from those opposite. We keep saying we want to leave a better place for the kids who follow us than the one we inherited, yet when I was growing up people never had to work four jobs at all. It was one job, and maybe mum went out and worked. They didn't hold multiple jobs between them, yet those opposite have no game plan on that. Why? It is because the coalition will never fix this up. The answer is to give working people stronger rights so they can say, 'I deserve better.' In an economy where the businesses are getting more profit, where the shareholders are doing well and where the CEOs are doing well, working people should be able to expect more. I know those opposite will say this is the ranting of a red-flag-waving Labor Party member. Wrong. The economy is strong when we all do well, and if there are a lot of people that are doing well in this economy we should also see working people do well, because it will give them more confidence in the economy working the way it should. But, if you say to those opposite, 'Let's see a better outcome on wages; let's see people do better and be able to argue better at the negotiating table,' you will never, ever see it come out of them—not at all. There's no way in the world they will argue for that. They'll say they want a better wages outcome. They won't have a wages policy. They'll have game-playing like this type of legislation, but they won't come to the parliament and say, 'We've worked out a way that working people will do better in the economy.'

When you look at economic growth, profits are always getting a larger and larger slice of the pie, with very little for wages, and this is undermining people's faith in the way the economy's working. Some businesses get that. They know that stronger businesses come when people have a commitment to those businesses because they've got a share in the growth. That is the thing that people get. If we continue the way we are going at the moment, we will have less and less faith in enterprise bargaining being able to deliver for working people, because they'll say: 'We turn up to the negotiations. We're told what we can't negotiate. We're told we can't do X, Y or Z in terms of taking a stand for ourselves, and then we've got to cop something that's below average or just mirroring the inflation rate, where people feel like they're not getting ahead. We've just got to cop that.' So what happens then with enterprise bargaining, which we're told is supposed to be very good for the economy? It can't constantly be good for one side of the negotiating table as opposed to the other. Otherwise we just go back to the old way we used to do wages, a centralised wage-fixing system that delivered an outcome every single year. That's what business and the coalition have got to think about when they're thinking about the future of the way in which wages get determined in this country.

Again, these are serious, difficult, tough issues to fix, but you're not going to get the answer from that side of politics, because they're quite happy with the arrangements the way they are. As long as they pretend they're doing something, we're all supposed to be okay with that. Wrong. People should be doing better out of this economy. People should be getting a fairer share. We should build confidence in the way that everyone has a slice of that pie, and we're not going to get anywhere debating these types of pieces of legislation that are more make-work for the coalition to make them look tough and give them something to do on the floor of parliament whenever it actually does sit through the course of the year. In the meantime, people are struggling with the number of jobs that they've got, not being paid the wages that they really deserve and being told they have to work the hours that they cop when they know they need to work more. We constantly have this downward spiral. Working Australians deserve better than this government playing games in the way that it is doing with this legislation.

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