Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

We support the amendments that are being moved by the government, but it does need to be noted that the government is now moving an amendment to a section of the bill that the government has spent two months claiming wasn't there. When the bill was introduced—that day—we made clear that this section constituted a pay cut. That day, and in every question time that followed, we made clear that the impact of removing the better off overall test was that workers would no longer be guaranteed to be better off. It's not complex—it's a little bit obvious—but, every time we raised this, we had two responses from the government. The first was to say, 'That's not true.' If it's not true, it does beg the question of why we're now having an amendment to remove that section. And the second thing that was raised was to say, 'Well, that clause is already in the bill.' If it's already in the bill, then why is there an amendment? An amendment, by definition, does something different. If you're not doing something different, it's not an amendment. You can't stand up and move that the legislation remain as it is and introduce a bill that does that. That's not an amendment to a bill.

Yet we have spent two months in the strangest of arguments, where there's a real issue out there for Australian workers, where we had legislation before the parliament that, if implemented, was going to allow a situation where their base rate of pay could not be changed but where every single penalty rate, every shift allowance and every overtime rate could be gone, and the normal protection to prevent that from happening would already have been taken away from them. That's what we had for the whole of summer. I would remind the government that, the day after they introduced this bill, we moved a suspension of standing orders to have the bill removed because of this provision, and the government voted against that. The government voted that they needed to keep this clause here, and they moved between the two arguments that I've referred to. But there was a third argument that came up from time to time, and it was advanced not by the Leader of the House but by the Prime Minister. When he got caught in the corner from time to time by the fact that this is clearly what the legislation was designed to do, he then defended it on the basis that that's the way to create jobs.

At its core, I think this is the debate that we're in. We're about to find ourselves, in the coming months, in a period—we don't know how fast—of some form of recovery. That's where we all want to be. All the indicators are that that's where the economy will be heading, and that is good. But, on the pathway of that recovery, there are two different views as to how you get there. One view is that you give business as much money as possible, and that means they will simply invest across the economy and all will be well. The other view is that you need to give workers the capacity to spend. The economy is going to be more dependent on domestic demand than it has been at any other time in our lifetimes. If people don't have the confidence to spend, the next few years, on the other side of this pandemic, are not going to look nearly as good as they should.

This bill in the form it's in right now, where the amendment has not yet been carried, creates a real danger that people won't have that confidence, because you don't have the confidence to spend if you don't have the confidence that your take-home pay will be retained. It's not simply keeping your take-home pay at the current rate or better; it's knowing that you're not going to be subject to future cuts that gives you the confidence to spend rather than to hoard and save because you're in fear of what might be coming next.

So, in this debate, we've been at the core not simply of the old-style debate of trying to get a better deal for Labor versus capital; we've actually been in something very specific to the other side of this pandemic. If people have the confidence to spend, the recovery is going to be that much better. But, if the approach is to attack wages, to attack superannuation and to attack the payment system, that won't only hit the recipients of those payments— (Time expired)

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