Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Corangamite for the question, particularly today. Members might not know that when the member for Corangamite was the mayor of Surf Coast Shire it became the first employer in the world to establish family and domestic violence leave. So, it's a real pleasure to receive that question, particularly today.

The question asks about getting wages moving again, and it matters, because we've had a decade of wages being deliberately kept low. When you look at the inflation figures that are coming out now, imagine how much worse it would have been for people right now had the government not already acted to get the minimum wage moving. There are three parts of what the government will be doing to get wages moving. The first is the formal processes under the Fair Work Act, the second is closing loopholes and the third will be to reinvigorate enterprise bargaining.

The first of those formal processes was to participate in the annual wage review. We remember hearing that the sky would fall if we advocated for the improvement, but there are now workers all around Australia who are being paid more than they would have been paid because they now have a government fighting for their wages to get moving. But the formal processes don't stop there. It won't be too long before the government is making a submission on the review of aged-care workers' wages, where we'll be supporting a wage increase there. The third area where formal processes need to be looked at is that we need to legislate to be able to make sure the formal processes can deliver pay equity, and our pay equity reforms will be coming as well.

The second area, though, is the loopholes. A whole lot of loopholes have appeared in the act that have never been closed. We get a loophole in the tax act, we come in here—there's a TLA bill at the moment—and we close them really quickly. But, for a decade, when there was a loophole that caused wages to go down it was just left here. So, we'll be acting on the gig economy. We'll be acting on the way labour hire is being used with the 'same job, same pay' principle. In that area I'm looking very closely at the unilateral termination of agreements where people, when they're voting on a new agreement, aren't simply voting on whether or not they get a pay increase but are potentially voting on whether their dollar rate of pay immediately could go backwards if there's a unilateral cancellation of agreements.

Finally, we all know that the best period for getting wages moving with productivity improvements is when bargaining is at its best. The Prime Minister has put enterprise bargaining squarely on the table for the jobs summit and will be looking closely there for where consensus is available and also where good ideas are put forward. We need to get wages moving again and, after a decade of them being stagnant, it's time for that to happen.

See this speech in context