Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Financial Services) Share this | Hansard source

A couple of weeks ago I met with some workers who had recently been sacked by our national airline, Qantas. They, along with 2½ thousand of their loyal fellow employees, had been shown the door by Qantas, but, in the ultimate insult to them, it's likely that Qantas is going to bring in a foreign corporation to take these workers' jobs and pay workers on lower wages and conditions. Many of these people have been working for Qantas for well over 20 years, and some of the workers that I met with said that, basically, aviation is all they know. They're in their late-50s and early-60s, they've just lost their job during a pandemic, and they're thinking to themselves, 'What hope do I have in the labour market? How am I going to get a job when all I've done in the past is work for an airline? Aviation has been decimated, and there's no support at all from the government for me.' Last week's budget confirmed that.

This government has abandoned older workers in the budget. There's no support whatsoever for those that are going to find themselves without work, without employment, due to this pandemic. Let's face it: when it comes to making people redundant, it tends to be the older members of the workforce who end up in the redundancy situation when a business is shedding labour. That's going to be the experience in this pandemic. It's not going to be any different. Yet in this budget there is no support for older workers.

Those Qantas workers I met with a couple of weeks ago are saying, 'What is the government doing to support us?' They ask that particularly given the Treasurer and the Prime Minister have said the focus of this budget is jobs. Last week they were out spruiking the budget and saying it is all about protecting Australian workers' jobs. I'm sorry, but you're not about protecting jobs when you allow the national airline to get rid of 2½ thousand of its loyal employees and bring in a foreign corporation with lower wages and conditions. You're not about jobs at all. You're not about jobs when you cut the penalty rates of some of the lowest-paid workers in the country so that they take home less money to their families each week. You're not about jobs at all. And you're not about jobs if you abandon older workers, which is exactly what this scheme does. It's poorly designed and targeted and it doesn't deal with some of the inherent problems that we have in the Australian labour market at the moment, which were there before the pandemic.

I'm speaking, of course, of the increase in casualisation and part-time work: people not knowing whether they're going to have a shift the next day, whether they're going to earn an income that week and be able to feed themselves and their families, pay the rent or the mortgage, and continue to get by. I'm speaking of the chronic underemployment that we've had in Australia for many, many years now, which has caused such social problems and dislocation, with people feeling they've been left behind by the rest of the economy. This scheme doesn't deal with some of those problems. It doesn't tackle some of the issues we've had in the labour market.

This pandemic is an opportunity to try to deal with some of these issues. It's an opportunity for us to look at some of the problems in our economy and fix them. But, once again, the government have rushed this. They're very short-sighted and, really, all about just getting money out the door. They're making poorly designed schemes aimed at getting money out the door quickly but not actually sitting down and solving some of the problems that we have in the labour market. For instance, under this scheme it is technically possible for an employer to hire two workers on 20 hours a week and receive the job subsidy twice, rather than simply employing one person on a full-time wage, as a full-time worker—providing that security of employment—and receiving the subsidy once. There's a big question about employers abusing this scheme by contracting out to another corporation, another company, work that's being done by the group of people they currently employ. By contracting that work out and allowing a contractor to come in, they would be able to get the subsidy, because the contractor might be increasing their payroll. That's a key point with this subsidy: the employer needs to demonstrate that they are increasing the numbers on their payroll. A contractor may be doing that, but one group of Australian workers will be out of work because they've been sacked and a contractor has been brought in, probably with lower wages and conditions. That is another one of the problems that exist in the labour market in Australia at the moment: workers are losing their jobs to people on lower wages and conditions. It should be 'same job, same pay and conditions'. It's a principle of equity, of fairness in the Australian labour market, that has been ignored by this government. Again: they say they're about jobs when really they're not.

In the Treasurer's speech outlining this program on budget night, he said that it will support 450,000 jobs for young people, but the Treasury briefing points out that it could be 450,000. 'It could be' is very different to 'it will be'. That's something the Treasurer and the government need to come clean on with the Australian people, because this scheme has a cost of $4 billion. It's reasonable for us to ask—and this will be teased out in the Senate inquiry process—whether or not that $4 billion relates to the take-up of 450,000 employees or whether it 'could be' 450,000 employees that have been budgeted for. These are all of the issues that the Australian people deserve to know about and that have been rushed by this government and that really risk a good recovery for our economy and risk making sure that Australians are in good, decent work with fair wages and conditions post the pandemic. The Prime Minister and the Treasurer need to assure Australian workers that they won't be sacked and replaced by younger workers or have their hours cut so that an employer can access the hiring wage subsidy.

There are no new reporting requirements to prevent wage theft and other endemic exploitation that disproportionately affects younger workers. To date, proper regulatory oversight and integrity measures have not been made clear, and we simply don't trust this government when it comes to putting the interests of workers first. When it comes to the labour market, when it comes to the jobs of Australian workers, we know that those on that side are always going to back the bosses. They're always going to back the employer against the worker. That's why Australian workers don't trust them on these sorts of issues. The government's presided over insecure work and underemployment for too many years, and we're going to end up with well over a trillion dollars worth of debt out of this. Unemployment and underemployment will remain too high for too long and the jobless rate isn't expected to get back down to pre-crisis levels even over the forward estimates period. So the Australian people are rightly asking, 'Well, for over a trillion dollars worth of debt, are we getting bang for our buck with a program like this?'

The legislation also doesn't specify any safeguards that the government's publicly stated apply to the subsidy. The legislation makes an amendment to the Coronavirus Economic Response Package (Payments and Benefits) Act, the JobKeeper enabling legislation, which authorises the Treasurer to make the rules about payments for financial support to entities directly or indirectly affected by coronavirus, and the opposition haven't even seen a copy of the draft rules yet. And the bill allows the Treasurer to create payments with the stroke of a pen. The only constraint on such payments is that they are primarily for the purposes of improving the prospects of individuals getting employment in Australia and increasing workforce participation. Labor's been calling for wage subsidies since the beginning of the pandemic to support vulnerable workers, businesses and communities. But we've also been making sure that we call for payments and programs that are targeted and deal with some of the endemic issues that we have in the Australian labour market at the moment related to insecure work, underemployment, a lack of security in the workforce, casualisation of work—people without the protections and conditions that we all consider reasonable and that ensure that Australians have a high standard of living. None of those issues that have been endemic in the Australian labour force have been dealt with through this wage subsidy. That's why Labor will be recommending that this bill is referred to a Senate committee—so that some of these issues can be teased out. Hopefully, we can work in a bipartisan manner to improve some of the conditions in this program so that it's better targeted and achieves the aims which it has stated—that is, getting Australian workers back to work, protecting jobs and ensuring that we deal with some of those issues that have seen Australian workers feel like they're being left behind under this government.

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