Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question and her interest in this area. The COVID-19 recession has created these two related employment challenges. The first is obviously unemployment, and there's this need to drive job growth. But the second, which we also have to focus on, is underemployment, and the need to create more hours for people who have stayed in employment and are moving into employment. When you look at employees who kept their jobs during COVID, there was a loss in hours at 9.7 per cent—a decrease in hours, across the economy, of 9.7 per cent. Underemployment, in February and May this year, peaked at 13.8 per cent. This is a real part of the challenge of growing our way out of the COVID recession.

Part of the process of fixing known problems in the industrial relations system is how you institute this central idea that relates directly to work structures: that there should be a reasonable, flexible way—by agreement and with protections—that permanent part-time workers can work more hours on reasonable terms and conditions at their usual rates of pay. That, of course, should be done with protections, by agreement and sensibly. But this has been a very particular problem in the retail sector, which is one of the sectors hardest hit by the COVID recession.

In some sectors, part-time permanent workers can work more hours at ordinary rates. That can happen in the telecommunication industry award, but, in retail, where you probably need this ability the most and where the effects of COVID have been their greatest, there's no real, simple, flexible way to let this happen by agreement. The result is both that fewer part-time permanent positions exist and that, where they do exist, there's more underemployment. So, when we announced yesterday a commitment to fix this problem, this is what the National Retail Association said:

For nearly a decade, retailers have been crying out for a simple way to provide more hours to their permanent staff, instead of having to rely on hiring additional casual employees to fill gaps in the roster …

They said that the government reforms:

… are an important first step to simply Australia's complex and often counterintuitive industrial relations system, which will help create more permanent jobs.

Woolworths is a good example of the way this works. They have this flexibility—to offer more hours to part-time permanents at their usual rates of pay—built into their enterprise agreement, so people get more hours of work. But that business also has an increased proportion of permanent part-time jobs as a result. They have about 75 per cent of their workplace team on an ongoing, non-casual basis, which is in excess of 10 per cent higher than the usual average.

Small businesses in retail tend not to have that sort of enterprise agreement, and it's not built into the retail award. Imagine if we could give them the flexibility as part of these reforms. That would mean that, based on the experience of operations like Woolworths, they'd be able to have more permanent part-time staff employed—rather than needing to achieve that flexibility with the employment of casuals—and give more hours to those permanent part-time staff. This is a 10-year problem that we are endeavouring to fix with legislation that will be introduced tomorrow.

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