Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, am very pleased to join in this debate on the Coronavirus Economic Response Package (Jobkeeper Payments) Amendment Bill 2020. I support the amendments that have been flagged by the member for Watson—very necessary amendments to this bill.

We are, of course, in historic times. The pandemic has shaken everything that we knew. It's brought our lives and our world to a halt. Events like this are what we read in history books. They're events that don't fit in with our economic plans. They're what our public health professionals spend their lives planning for but hope never happen. Nobody who starts a business expects a pandemic to force them to close their doors. No year 12s expect to miss out on their formal because of social-distancing requirements. No nurse or doctor expects to be put up in a hotel so that they don't infect their children. No cleaner or supermarket worker expects to be the front line of a pandemic response. And nobody expects to be unable to visit their parents in aged care—or in my case, my dad, who has just spent 42 days in hospital—in case they introduce a contagious, deadly disease to the people they so love.

At times like this, we are all in it together. We must all take responsibility for social distancing, wearing masks and washing our hands, and we also need to take responsibility for looking after one another. Sadly, though, not everyone has been supported through this pandemic. There are countless Australians who have been left behind by the government's decision not to extend JobKeeper to them and many more who will continue to be left behind by the bill that we debate today.

The government introduced JobKeeper only after Labor, unions, economists and businesses called for it, after there were queues and queues of Australians at our Centrelink offices around the country. The government planned to end JobKeeper next month, driving our economy off a fiscal cliff until, again, Labor, unions, businesses and economists all called for them not to. This government introduced JobKeeper only after massive political and community pressure was placed on them. They're extending it today, again, only because of that same pressure.

The wage subsidy we'll vote to extend today unfortunately still leaves many in our community behind. It leaves behind the arts workers who create our cultural institutions and enliven our cities and towns. It leaves behind the council workers who teach disadvantaged children to read in our libraries. It leaves behind those who run local museums and those who watch over us in our public swimming pools. It still leaves behind many casual workers, who in a fairer industrial system would be permanent workers but whose bosses are allowed to exploit loopholes to strip them of their rights. It leaves behind childcare workers—those taken off JobKeeper too early as part of a misguided snapback. It leaves behind workers at council airports, the men and women who keep vital air links open in towns like Longreach, Exmouth and Bendigo. It leaves behind the workers at dnata—5,500 Australian workers who carry out essential work at our airports across the country. Every time you've flown in the past, or hopefully will fly in the future, it's been a dnata worker that you need to thank. But those workers have been denied JobKeeper because of a decision to outsource their jobs from Qantas, not because of who they are but who their boss is. It's left behind the 6,000 Qantas workers who were sacked the day after the Prime Minister refused to provide assurances to the airline regarding the future of this JobKeeper scheme. And it leaves behind the 2,500 workers who were told that most of their jobs would be outsourced by Qantas just yesterday.

The government give this support to businesses in the form of JobKeeper and other supports but they have not asked enough of businesses in return. Qantas has benefited to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, but under this government they can decide to outsource their ground staff, pushing them into insecure, likely lower-paid work. This at a time when we are seeing firsthand just how dangerous insecure work can be. The government should have secured these jobs and the jobs of thousands of aviation workers.

Over this year, I've spent many days speaking to heartbroken aviation workers—cabin crew, maintenance workers, ground staff, pilots and cleaners. They all love their job and their industry and they're terrified about their future. They know what they contribute to Australia. They know their importance to our economy and our society. But now, in a time of their greatest need, they know that the government have not got their backs, and they certainly have not got a long-term plan for aviation to help them recover. It's frankly shattering. They've worked all their lives. They've paid taxes. They've raised their families. They've contributed to their communities. But when the future of their industry is, frankly, in crisis, they've been left mostly to face it alone. That is only one industry, but I know that there are countless around Australia like that where the government has failed to put in place a plan to protect jobs, let alone to preserve and rebuild jobs as we head into recovery.

We hear a little less these days from the government about the snapback. But we can't forget that that is exactly what the government thought would happen. It seemed to think that we were somehow in a short-term crisis, that if you just waited six months and put a few things in place that somehow it would all just go back to normal. We can never forget that, in fact, the government is deciding that it is slowly withdrawing its support to Australians. A snapback, we know, would break many communities. Businesses simply would not have been able to survive.

My own community of Ballarat, of course, thought we were on the way out of this. But, like many, we were wrong. Our community did everything right. We followed the rules, we stayed at home, our health staff have done a remarkable job and we drove new cases in our community down to zero. We thought it would stay there, but it didn't. That is the nature of a highly infectious virus, without a vaccine. It comes back. I saw the Prime Minister in question time yesterday decide to use what's happening in Victoria as a political opportunity to distract from his problems in aged care. This problem, this re-emergence of the virus, can happen anywhere. It's happened in our community. It is foolish for any of us to think that it has just passed us by and that we have won. We haven't won until there is a vaccine. Over the past few months, Ballarat has been relatively lucky. We've avoided the worst of the second wave. Our hospitals have remained uncrowded and our aged care facilities, despite some positive cases in Bill Crawford, have remained secure, thanks to some remarkable work by our local health service.

But so many in our community have connections to Melbourne. So many of us have lived there in the past, our families live there, our friends are there and many work there. We know how quickly this virus can come back, and that's why we've been so prepared in our community to prevent its spread. To stop the spread, we're again staying home. Our bars, our restaurants and our stores are shut. So many of our, again, lowest paid workers, the ones who've been at the frontline of this crisis, have kept our freight moving, have ensured that we have food in our supermarkets, have cleaned our hospitals and aged care services and often the very streets that we walk on. It is more essential than ever that the rights of working Australians, particularly those low income earners, are protected throughout this crisis.

The stripping away of workers' rights was, we were told by the government, necessary to implement its JobKeeper program. Now, ridiculously, the government is telling us that the stripping away of workers' rights needs to apply where workers are no longer eligible for JobKeeper or workplaces are no longer eligible for JobKeeper. The thought that low income workers could have their hours unilaterally reduced by 40 per cent by an employer that the government has basically deemed has recovered, seems absolutely ridiculous. For those businesses that are still eligible for JobKeeper, and for whom the bill doesn't propose to strip JobKeeper away, the bill proposes to reduce the rate at which it is paid. In Victoria, these changes will hurt businesses and individuals, just at the moment when they need the help most. We know we're in for the long haul here in Victoria. We know that we're going to need assistance for a long time to come. The government needs to think about what the implications are for the economy in Victoria, which provides a substantial economic contribution to the state, and they need to think about what that means in terms of the reduction of rates here in the Victorian community.

It is very clear that the pandemic won't be over in a few weeks, or even months, and that government support needs to be there for the long haul. We've had a government that was reluctant to bring a wage subsidy into place in the first place. We've had a government that was reluctant to, and in fact almost opposed to, extending the wage subsidy beyond the time that they thought it was going to be needed. We've had a government that has been reluctant to take responsibility for those areas in which it has direct responsibility and accountability—whether it be quarantine, or aged care, or supporting businesses more broadly as we recover from this terrible health crisis.

What we're seeing in this bill is an important extension of the JobKeeper payment. It will provide a very necessary lifeline for many small businesses and many businesses across the community. The reduction in rate, particularly for those in Victoria, is problematic and remains so. I think the government needs to think long and hard about what is happening here in Victoria, what support businesses are going to need for a longer period of time and what the very nature of those businesses are when you think about that support more broadly.

What the government is also continuing to do, as it has done throughout this crisis, is to try to hide, through the crisis, some of the very bad things that it wants to do in relation to industrial relations. We're seeing that writ large in this bill. The thought that you could have a 40 per cent reduction of your hours from a business that has largely recovered, makes absolutely no sense at all. If the government believes the business has recovered and if the business is negotiating on working with unions, it needs to also ensure that there are protections in place for workers so that they don't unilaterally have their hours reduced. That will be huge amounts of money out of their pockets, particularly of many low-income earners, as we recover through this.

Again, I encourage the government to think more broadly about how they are looking at recovery. We haven't seen a plan for aviation. We've seen a patchwork of various initiatives that the government has put in place for aviation. None of the initiatives look at a plan for aviation, referring to the future. None of them articulate what the jobs are that we want into the future, in terms of aviation, and how we make sure that we protect those workers. At a time when we're seeing mass job losses from the aviation sector—whether it be from Virgin, with 3,000 lost, or from Qantas, with 6,000 lost and then 2,500 lost yesterday—we've seen employers such as Qantas take the opportunity to outsource some of those important workers that they've had in their employ for a long time and create more insecure work for those workers. At a time when we should be protecting the rights of those workers, we have a government that's seeking to continuously undermine them.

Again, while Labor will be supporting this bill, I think it's important for people to understand just what it means. Whilst it does mean that JobKeeper will be extended, it also means the rates for those who are on JobKeeper will be reduced. It also means that, for the very important workplace rights that many workers have fought for for so long and rely on so desperately, many of those workers will find themselves in circumstances where they will have no negotiating power at all to work with their employers to ensure that they don't have such significant job losses.

While I commend the government for extending JobKeeper, a very important initiative that Labor was very pleased to push and get the government to bring in place in the first place—we're very pleased to support the extension; we've been calling for it for some time—I do encourage the government to look seriously at the amendments proposed by the member for Watson and make sure that it is ensuring that those vulnerable workers, particularly those low-income workers and those workers in Victoria who so desperately need to be able to rely on JobKeeper well beyond March, are actually able to do so.

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