Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I probably shouldn't eat many happy meals, you're right! When we look at these things we have to look at them holistically; we can't just take little bits and pieces. We have to look at what is going to be the overall test that we set as legislators. The test is that we should always be working for the betterment of employees, to ensure that when they go and work for companies and businesses they have protections in place to keep them safe and to make sure that they get a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. What we see in the bill is that it makes it so much easier for employers to casualise jobs which should otherwise be permanent and it makes bargaining for pay and conditions a lot worse than it already is.

I'm thinking about the time I worked with large employers. Think of a 15-, 16- or 17-year-old kid, trying to get into employment and expected to negotiate their pay and conditions with a multinational company. They're not sitting and negotiating with the foreman of the workshop. They're sitting with the foreman of the workshop and a heap of papers prepared by teams of lawyers—teams of white-collar workers who are in there and focused on the one focus that a lot of businesses have: focusing on profit. Businesses should make profit, yes, but not at the expense of the people who make those businesses run. It's very hard for kids to be able to do that.

I can remember an example myself from when I was younger, working in an automatic transmission place. 'Yes, great, you've got the job, and we're going to pay you a casual rate. But you're working five days a week, eight hours a day and all the benefits.' But they never say: 'Yes, we're paying you a casual rate, but we're putting you on as a casual employee. So when you get injured there's no sick pay. There's no holiday pay. There are a whole range of things that won't happen.' And that still happens today. These are the sorts of things we should be doing something about, making sure that we protect people who apply for jobs and ensuring that we support employees who do the right things. As I said, it's not that hard.

But when we come to this bill we hear the rhetoric on the other side about how great employers are and how great this government is. It's a Liberal-National government and it's their true values. Yes, their true values are very clear: in every single industrial relations case—every single one—it has been the Labor Party and the union movement fighting for better pay, better conditions and better, safer workplaces, not those opposite. They side with the big end of town that fight to stop these things happening. It's Labor that always fights. We fought against Work Choices and we will fight against this. Because despite the rhetoric that comes out from those opposite, it's in their DNA that they do not fight for workers' rights and workers in this country. They consider them an expendable part of a business enterprise, and they're not. These are people's lives we're talking about.

I've got a letter here that I received—and I have got to thank Minister Sukkar for responding to my letter—about employees getting ripped off at workplaces. I thank him because it's only taken him four months to do that. For four months an employee has lost work, going down from 10 hours a week to three hours a week. At 25 years of age, she's trying to work and save and build herself a life. She's been short-changed. This is what happens with the way this government works. This is not something that's important to them. But it's important to her to get ahead. We see this each and every single day.

When you bring a bill into parliament that's going to make work less secure and increase the option for pay cuts, you know it's the wrong thing to do. We're going through a massive pandemic that's delivered the Morrison recession where people in insecure work are working in three, four or five locations, trying to make ends meet. That's not what we should be about. We should be about trying to build better jobs, secure jobs. Let people know when they go to work that they're going to get paid and they're going to get their superannuation.

That's another subject that the government's backtracked on. They have lied to the Australian people—flat out lied. They legislated a superannuation rise but now they don't want to do it. Of course, they're quite happy to ensure that they've got good superannuation. This is the wrong thing to do. What does the government do? It blames the workers. It says it's their fault, that the economy is not safe, that we can't do these things. Yes, you can—it's about the choices you make and it's about values you have. Stand up and do the right thing and ensure that people get paid the superannuation that they deserve and are entitled to.

As I said, when this bill came out we asked one simple question about whether this is going to make workers better off. It failed that. Each and every day, we've seen that when this gets discussed the government brings out their rhetoric and lines, and blames the victims—something they're getting quite good at. We've seen the better off overall test pulled out. That was one of the most appalling things in this bill, but it's not the only thing. There is a whole range of things here that will make it harder and harder for people to get good, secure work and good pay. When you see bargaining rights and protections for workers whose pay and conditions are covered by agreements being attacked, you've got to sit there and say 'that's not the right thing to do'. It's not what we should be about.

We should ensure that we have safety nets. We heard at question time today, time and time again: do people deserve to have a minimum wage? Do they deserve to go to work and be paid on the reasonable expectation that, for the work that they have done, they will get a wage that actually pays the bills? The government says no—they're disposable. Not to worry—if someone goes to work and works eight hours and only gets paid $40, well, so be it. That's bad luck. We've seen this right through in the way that the government values workers. We've seen the attacks on retail workers.

The Attorney-General was carrying on over the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal. I tell you what, I don't think any one of you guys on the other side has ever gone to a truck accident in the middle of the night and seen what it causes. If you actually had to go to a motor vehicle accident—where people are working longer and harder to try and make ends meet and being forced by unscrupulous employers to work harder and longer for less money—you would see what happens. The carnage that this causes on the road—let alone actually going in and looking at what it does to families and communities—it's appalling.

Yet the government sits there and says: 'Well, it's not the right thing to do. They can get paid whatever they want.' When it comes to a negotiation on these sorts of things, the person who is paying the money wants to pay out the least amount possible. The person who is doing the work wants to get the highest amount possible. That's fair. But when you're in a bargaining situation where you have nothing but your employment to give versus someone who has got millions of dollars and teams of lawyers behind them, you're behind the eight ball. That is a simple thing to think about when you think about values, morals and ethics.

The right thing to do is to ensure that we build a stronger and better economy by making sure that people in the workplace get paid properly—make sure that they get the entitlements that they rightly deserve and make sure that we aren't bringing stuff into this place that makes work less secure and cuts pay. Without measures to create more secure jobs, where are we going as a country? Where are we going as a nation? Workers will have less capacity and less confidence to spend. That, in turn, suppresses demand, and it's a snowball effect. If people aren't getting paid, they can't spend money. If they don't spend money, they lose jobs. That's what happens. If the government can't understand that, that explains why we're in the Morrison recession. This is not a recession brought on by COVID; COVID's the cover that the government's been using. The fact is that deficit and debt is higher under this government than under any other government in the history of this nation. One person has been in control of that for the entire time, whether as the social services minister, bringing in robodebt; whether as the Treasurer, making cuts for Australian working families; or whether as Prime Minister. And what does he do there? He delivers the biggest recession, debt and deficit we have ever seen.

When it comes to these sorts of things, you have to ask, 'Who are the people who are most going to stand up and deliver the better results?' It's not going to be the government. It's those in the labour movement—the Labor Party and the union movement—who have worked consistently for decades to support workers and workers' rights. It's not a government that has spent every opportunity attacking those working rights, attacking the safety nets that we have and attacking people who find themselves in positions from which they can't defend themselves against multinational companies.

I implore those opposite: look into your morals and values. Just sit there and ask: is the right thing to do to make it harder for people to get paid a fair wage for a fair day's work, or can you turn around and see inside yourselves that what you should be doing is trying to strengthen employment opportunities for working Australians, to give them jobs that pay bills and give them the opportunity to build a life? That's the simple test that needs to be done. As I said at the start, the test of the bill was: will it create more secure jobs and decent pay? It didn't then, and it doesn't now. The government should not be supporting measures that make it harder for people to get ahead.

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