Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

COVID-19 and the recession have taught our country, I hope, a lot of things and revealed things about us, good and bad. One lesson that I believe we must not let go of is that casual and insecure work in this country has gone too far. The pendulum has swung too far. There are millions of Australian workers now that cannot get a permanent job. They want a permanent job but they're stuck on casual contracts or employed by these insidious labour hire firms that have gone way beyond what they were originally for, a bit of surge or a bit of unexpected work. They now constitute the dominant share of the workforce in some industries and companies. Some people choose this—fair enough—but most people don't. It means they can't get a home loan. How can you ever buy a house if you can't get a home loan, because you're stuck on a labour hire contract? They have no sick leave, and we saw from the pandemic what that did to our health systems. Sick people felt they had to go to work with the virus. They have poorer OH&S outcomes and an increased chance of wage theft and exploitation.

They were originally used for surge and seasonal work, but there are many reasons now why employers are increasingly using them. They use them to cut costs and cut wages. They get around unions, so unions can't collectively bargain for a pay rise. They get greater control over their workers because labour hire inherently splits the contractual and the control relationship. That's what it does. The contractual relationship is with the labour hire firm, and the day-to-day control is with the employer. That means it's much easier to exploit employees and workers to cut corners on safety and cut wages, because you can literally just flick off your labour hire worker overnight if they speak up about anything. If they ask for a pay rise—gone. If they say, 'Hang on, that safety practice isn't right'—gone. In the case of the government, they shifted out the permanent public servants and replaced them with labour hire workers, who were not going to call out their blatant illegality with robodebt. The Federal Court called them out on that scam. But the labour hire workers knew that if they spoke up they'd be given the flick overnight. That's exactly what happened.

For workers who choose this, fair enough. But it's no longer a minor add-on, a small bit of flexibility at the margins. In some sectors, mining for example, labour hire is now significant; it's even the majority of the workforce. Up in north Central Queensland—I've been up there—I've seen in Rockhampton two people doing the same job, side by side, with one of them being paid 30 to 40 per cent less because the labour hire firm clips the ticket on the way.

Even before COVID, wages were falling under the Liberals. They don't like talking about this: their fake good economic record. Wages in this country went backwards under seven years of this failing, miserable government even before the COVID economic crisis, according to OECD data. One of the big reasons is that casualisation of the workforce has gone way too far and workers can never bargain for a pay rise—that's how the employers like it—which means we need structural changes to the rules. A decent government would address this. They'd learn the lessons of the pandemic and the vulnerabilities revealed in our society. Not this mob. Instead, the Morrison government passed laws with their good mate Senator Pauline Hanson and their mate Clive Palmer—now the leader of the Palmer party—to entrench this unfairness: they are anti workers. Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer are just Liberals in drag, in disguise.

A Labor government will end the labour-hire rorts that rip off casual workers. We've got a clear plan for this. Workers doing the same job should get the same pay. It's a simple, compelling and fair proposition. It's part of Labor's Secure Australian Jobs plan. We'll overturn the government's nasty scheme, end the rorts and restore rights to workers. This is really important stuff. We get to choose the kind of society we want to be. We don't all have to walk like lemmings off the cliff, off to the free market where employers have all the rights and workers do what they're told. We don't have to be that passive. There are choices that we could make.

The government always talks about flexibility. It's funny, isn't it? The solution to every economic problem that the government sees is a cut to wages, and more rights for employers, and a cut to workers' rights. Always. This mad ideology has now infected the Public Service. Their privatisation by stealth through labour hire workers is trashing the Commonwealth Public Service. Tens of thousands of jobs in the Public Service are now labour hire. It wastes money, paying an overhead to a firm instead of employing a public servant.

The Auditor-General has found $2 billion to labour hire workers in the last few years. There's no job security, it's unfair, it's differential pay, someone doing the same job gets less, they don't get the same training, we lose the capability for the taxpayer and the services degrade. We've got the veterans affairs minister now employing McKinsey, we've learnt, to fix services in Veterans Affairs. Why didn't you employ the public servants instead of labour hire workers? They cut the public servants, bring in labour hire workers and then bring in overpriced consultants, who are mates of the government, to try and sort it all out. It's a scam and a sham! (Time expired)

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