Ged Kearney (Cooper, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

Insecure work is a scourge. For many, it is designed to keep workers compliant, scared to speak up about unsafe conditions, about sexual harassment, about wage theft, about unpaid overtime. I have been telling these things here today to paint a picture of a serious underbelly of insecure workers in our workforce out there. This bill, the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020, does nothing to secure work for anyone. It does not fix the casualisation issues. It certainly does not address other forms of insecure work. In fact, it makes it easier to employ people as casuals. The details have been explained very clearly by the shadow minister, the member for Watson, and many other speakers who have spoken to this bill today. So I won't spend time going through the details. But I have spent my whole career fighting alongside workers for their rights, for decent pay and conditions. I became a job rep for the nurses' union as a very young nurse. I actually held honorary positions for the nurses' union, the ANF, now called the ANNF, as president of the Victorian branch and as federal president, and then I held a full-time position as federal secretary of that great union. I then was ACTU president, and here I am in this House still fighting for workers' rights; and it beggars belief that we are still fighting over similar things

This government has form when it comes to attacking workers' rights, when it comes to attacking their pay, their conditions and their bargaining rights. This is in its DNA. So this bill is no surprise to anyone. It's no surprise to us. It certainly isn't any surprise to so many hardworking Australians who have had to fight for their rights time and time again because of this government, whether it was Work Choices—remember Work Choices?—whether it was cutting low-paid workers' penalty rates—if you ask, 'Where are those thousands of jobs that cutting penalty rates was supposed to create?' the answer is that they're nowhere—whether it was the so-called, weasel-word-entitled ensuring integrity bill, which tried to cut the right to organise to maintain pay conditions, whether it was leaving workers in key industries out of JobKeeper or whether it was cutting superannuation increases. That is a short list. I could go on forever.

The government have said that they will amend this bill, but after the amendment it will still fail the test. It doesn't create secure jobs and it doesn't ensure decent pay. It makes it easier for employers to casualise jobs that would otherwise have been permanent, it makes bargaining for better pay and conditions more difficult than it already is, it allows wage cuts, it takes rights away from blue-collar workers on big projects and it weakens wage theft punishments in jurisdictions where wage theft was already deemed a criminal act, as in my state, Victoria. The Minister for Industrial Relations can pop some lippy on this legislation if he likes, but it is still a pig of a bill. We will not support this bill. We stand up for workers, for workers' rights and for decent jobs.

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