Daniel Mulino (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We debate the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020 at an important crossroads in Australia's history. We are coming out of Australia's first recession in almost three decades. Preceding that recession, Australia had experienced a period of seven years in which wages growth was at its most anaemic in Australia's recorded history. Of course, during the last year, we have seen many Australians bear the brunt of this COVID pandemic. Many Australians in our lowest-paid jobs, many Australians in our most insecure jobs, were at the front line. They got us through the COVID pandemic.

It is at this juncture in Australia's history that Australians look to this parliament to see what is the vision for the future. This bill represents this government's vision for how we should emerge from the COVID pandemic and the recession that we have just endured, and it is a bleak, ideological and backward-looking vision. It is a vision in which the burden on those least able to bear it is increased.

What we argue is that we should have a positive vision, a vision that deals with the long-term economic and social challenges that our country faces, a vision in which wages growth is boosted, a vision in which the changing nature of our labour force is reflected by more appropriate and fair regulation of insecure work.

So this bill fails. It fails because it is going to result in workplaces in which there is less secure work. It is going to result in lower wages growth. It is going to result, for many of our least secure and many of our most vulnerable, in worse pay and worse conditions.

It is also important to point out this bill is not a consensus-driven approach to this complex set of issues. The government entered into this process claiming that it was going to seek consensus. It set up a process that looked as though it was going to try to deal in good faith with stakeholders from across varying perspectives, but that is not where we have ended up. It is absolutely critical that that be established right from the start.

In its response to the introduction of this legislation, the ACTU said:

The Bill fails the Government's own test: workers will be worse off … The Government's changes will make jobs less secure; they will make it easier for employers to casualise permanent jobs and allow employers to pay workers less than the award safety net. This is the opposite of what the country needs.

Nothing could be clearer: what we have here is very, very far from a consensus approach, when that is precisely what we need in this policy area. Labor has stated right from the start that it would have supported a set of policies that reflected a consensus outcome. We cannot support this bill, because this bill does not reflect a consensus and because this bill contains any number of measures that are going to make our most vulnerable worse off.

I want to briefly set out, before looking at some of the specific provisions of the bill, the labour market context in which we are examining this bill. Firstly, even before COVID, this economy had experienced an extended period of extremely low wages growth. Indeed, the first seven years of this government was the worst period of wages growth on record. I can quote Mathias Cormann, who was the Minister for Finance during much of this period, that this was in fact 'a deliberate design feature' of much of their economic policy architecture.

In April 2019 the RBA held a major conference, which was titled 'Low Wages Growth'. It really says it all—that the RBA sees that as one of the major policy conundrums society has to face at the moment. And, as I'll lay out, this bill makes that persistent problem worse. It's not just that wages growth has been low; there's been a decoupling between wages growth and productivity. There has been productivity growth over the seven years of this government but it hasn't been shared with most workers. This decoupling, this wedge, between productivity growth and wages growth is something the government should be concerned about. It is one of the core economic policy challenges that our nation faces. But this government is silent on that issue. In fact, it is moving in the reverse direction: it is actually reducing the bargaining power of the most vulnerable. It is going to set up an architecture, a regulatory structure, that will make their outcomes worse. So whatever we've seen over the last seven years in terms of an unfair distribution of the productivity growth that our economy has produced is going to become worse should this bill pass.

At the same time, many workers can't get enough work to get by. Underemployment has gotten worse over the last seven years. Underemployment has increased by over a percentage point—and that was before COVID. Many of the areas where underemployment has gotten the worst over that seven-year period are in regional Australia. The burden of low wages growth is falling on what might be described as non-standard types of employment. I quote from that RBA conference: 'The share of non-standard employees in total employment is markedly higher today than at the start of the millennium, and all this increase occurred since the GFC. Further, we have established that both casual and permanent part-time employment are associated with significant lower rates of growth in real hourly wages.' This is what the government faces—an economy where wages growth is the worst ever and it's our most vulnerable workers, in non-standard employment, who are experiencing the worst wages growth—yet they have introduced to this parliament a bill which reduces their bargaining power.

Finally, I want to say that this issue of non-standard employment, of people in casual and part-time employment, is becoming even more urgent than it has been over the last seven years. Over the last year, as we have come out of this recession, so much of the employment growth has been in casual employment. Between May and November 2020, casual employment grew by 400,000, by far the biggest expansion of casual employment in Australia's history. What is this government's response? Their first response—fortunately it was short lived—was to weaken the better off overall test. This government has already gone through a humiliating backdown on that, but you could not have a clearer indication of a regulatory test which is designed to worsen the conditions of workers and in practice would have been a change that would have most directly impacted on our most vulnerable.

It is crystal clear that weakening the better off overall test would have made some people worse-off overall. That is the whole purpose of it. In question time and in other forums, we put to the government, time and time again, very specific case studies of people who would have been made worse off were that protection weakened. But we never got specific rebuttals, we never got anything in detail. All we got was hollow, blanket responses saying, 'Don't worry. Trust us, that won't happen.' Fortunately, it looks like the government has backed down on that. But, at the very least, their attempts to weaken the better off overall test is a clear indication of where they're coming from ideologically and their intentions in the future.

Let's look at casuals and casual conversion. As the shadow minister pointed out in detail, and so clearly, in his contribution earlier, casual conversion is a clear instance of where those opposite are trying to enshrine in legislation provisions that will put incredible burdens, unrealistic burdens, on those least able to protect themselves in our workplaces—for example, the burden of having to take an employer to the Federal Court in order to take advantage of the ability to convert to full-time work. It is utterly ridiculous and, clearly, doesn't reflect any kind of understanding of people's resources or capacity to take advantage of provisions in this bill. It is absolutely clear that that legal provision is something that will not be able to be taken advantage of in reality. So this provision that provides for casual conversion is, like so many other things in this bill, a hollow provision. It's a hollow provision that doesn't reflect the power imbalances in the real workplace.

There are also a range of provisions around retrospective application of workplace conditions which, under the government's own figures, would involve cancelling an estimated $18-plus billion in entitlements. These provisions, as the minister outlined, obliterate rights that are currently in common law arrangements and are an entirely imbalanced approach to the conditions of many vulnerable people in the workplace.

Award simplification and the negotiation of awards is a set of conditions that reduces the bargaining power of unions and workers. Part-time employees might agree to situations in which there is a potential risk of this provision normalising a standard 16 hours commitment, with simplified additional hours being used to top up on an as-needed basis. This would, potentially, reduce job security and casualise part-time work.

There will also be a significant extension of flexible work directions, both in time and in who those flexible work directions apply to. The flexible work directions might apply to a considerably broader set of employees, and, as is so often the case in these arrangements, we know precisely what 'increased flexibility' means. Increased flexibility so often means that those least able to bear it will have to work under conditions where they have to take on demand-side risk of the firm, where they have less security when it comes to the number of hours they work or when they work. So when it comes to award simplification and the reduction in union bargaining power, when it comes to the extension of flexible work directions, we clearly see that there will be a change in bargaining power relativities and that many of our most vulnerable will be at risk of their conditions being worse off.

In relation to greenfield sites, we will see a significant extension of conditions that lock in arrangements, potentially to the detriment of workers. Labor has indicated that it is not necessarily opposed to arrangements for greenfield sites. Firstly, what we see in this bill is a significant extension in duration of those arrangements to eight years; secondly, we see a significant expansion of the projects to which they apply, to many smaller projects than originally envisaged. So we see that many workers may be locked into conditions for far longer than was originally envisaged—in many situations, potentially, to their detriment.

Time and again, when we look at the provisions of this bill, we see that the balance of bargaining power is changing. It is the workers who are being expected to bear the burden of less security or lower wages. This flows from the fact that those opposite fundamentally believe that an economic recovery has to rely upon lower wages or worse conditions in order to be sustained. That is a fundamental economic policy prescription that we do not agree with. What we are faced with here is that we are coming out of a period during which we have had our first major recession for 30 years. Even before that recession we had a decade of absolutely anaemic wages growth, and during that period of anaemic wages growth we had productivity growth which wasn't being shared with workers.

This government's response is to weaken bargaining power to reduce workers' rights so as to boost the economy through reducing their pay and reducing their conditions. We see that not as the economy of the future but as harking back to the worst of the past. After this year of so much sacrifice, we believe that what workers need is a fairer deal in which they get a better share of the productivity that this economy generates.

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