Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There's one thing that people contacting me about how hard it is to pay their bills already know. They know they haven't had a pay rise for a really long time. In fact, the people who are in their 20s and even in their early 30s might never have experienced a significant pay rise except as a result of their own efforts to upskill or take on higher duties or more responsibility. That's particularly the case for people working in highly feminised industries: the caring industries, where people are caring for someone who's old, caring for someone who's sick, caring for someone with a disability or caring for someone who's very young. They might have insecure work, which might be as a casual but could also be someone who's working in the gig economy, someone who's with labour hire or someone with new forms of insecurity as a part-time employee or on a rolling fixed-term contract, which effectively amounts to a permanent probation period. They haven't seen any increases that are sufficient to keep up with the rising cost of living, really just living simply. They're paying a mortgage or rent, covering their bills, paying for their health care, putting food on the table. What we talk about as the cost of living is actually the gap between their income and the prices they're being asked to pay, and we all know prices are going up.

At a time when the pressures of global inflation are hitting every household, our workplace laws simply have not kept up with making sure that wages keep up as well. With inflation running at 7.3 per cent and wage increases at 2.6 per cent there's a gap, and every day the impact of a decade of wage stagnation continues. It's felt by households trying to make ends meet. We all know that supressing wage growth was a deliberate design feature of the previous government's management of the economy. We know that because the previous government's own finance minister Mathias Cormann explained that strategy clearly for everyone to hear. People were also assured by the previous government that, when unemployment went down, wages would go up. In fact, in the previous government's budgets there were predictions of wage increases, and they never came to pass. Despite a near record low unemployment rate of 3.5 per cent, inflation is fast outpacing wages growth, and that's why we have workers falling behind. With some exceptions, such as those who are very well placed to bargain strongly on their own behalf, most workers are caught in the pincer movement of flat wages and price rises.

You can't seriously claim to care about the cost of living without supporting a lift in wages. But what we've heard through the course of the debate on the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill because so many of us have been in here for such extended periods are the contradictions coming from the other side and their inability to keep to a single narrative. On the one hand they say, 'This isn't going to do anything to help lift wages,' and on the other hand they say, 'We don't need to lift wages.' It's been a joy to have the opportunity to hear the inconsistency that is coming from those opposite.

I think we recognise that the urgency of getting wages moving is most acute in feminised industries, where that gender pay gap is sitting at 14.1 per cent. The system needs to be recalibrated for all workers. Australia's current workplace relations framework isn't working to deliver a fair go for workers or, quite frankly, productivity gains for employers. This legislation will help with job security. It'll help close the gender pay gap and it will help get wages moving. The title, 'secure jobs, better pay', does sum up the key objectives of the legislation. I don't want to oversell what I think can be achieved. It will take time for this bill to result in improvements in workplaces and pay increases in the pockets of Australians. That's one of the reasons we cannot waste a moment in getting this through our parliament. As the Prime Minister said today, not everyone is going to love everything about it, but we know that this is a great step to getting more secure jobs and better pay for Australians.

Let's look at some of the elements. In the design of these reforms we've deliberately focused on the needs of lower-paid and feminised workforces. Everyone knows workers in feminised sectors are underpaid, overworked, undervalued and often in insecure work. This bill will put job security and gender equality at the heart of the Fair Work Commission's decision-making processes, where they'll be given equal weight to the other objects of the commission in making its decisions. That will lead to real improvements in pay packets. We'll also strengthen access to flexible work arrangements, so workers with caring responsibilities can better balance work and their caring role. The bill will ban pay secrecy clauses so that companies can't stop staff talking about their pay, if they want to. I think we can guess who is going to benefit most from that. Those who will benefit most will be women because these clauses have long been used to conceal gender pay differences.

The bill also implements one of the Respect@Work recommendations by prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace and providing a new dispute resolution mechanism so that all workers have access to quick, informal dispute resolution before the specialist workplace relations tribunal. It's a process that we could have seen in place years ago, had the previous government bothered. There's also strengthened protection against discrimination—for instance, breastfeeding mums—to align the Fair Work Act with existing Commonwealth antidiscrimination law. So it really does start to shift the dial a little bit further for women.

Another key change that will help women, particularly, but not limited to women, is putting a limit on fixed-term contracts for the same role. The number of workers on fixed-term contracts has gone up by more than 50 per cent since 1998. More than half of all employees on fixed-term contracts are women, and more than 40 per cent of fixed-term employees have been with their employer for two years or more.

Under this bill there's a limit on the use of those fixed-term contracts, for the same role, beyond two years or two consecutive contracts, whichever's shorter. If these rules are breached, the contract will remain valid but its expiry date will not. I want to be really clear. There are exemptions that allow employers to use fixed-term contracts for legitimate purposes. I think what we're seeing, though, is that many of these changes create a level playing field so the good employers are not undercut by the not so good.

In order to do that, another element is that this bill gives immediate effect to recommendations of the 2019 Migrant Workers' Taskforce. Yes, that was brought down three years ago. I want to thank the advocacy of migrant workers and their unions who I met with in his place. It will now be unlawful to advertise a job for less than the applicable minimum rate. That shouldn't be revolutionary. That is something that provides fairness across the board, and this whole parliament should be supportive. It will also provide greater ability to recover unpaid entitlements by increasing the cap on small claims under the Fair Work Act. The current threshold forces many workers to pursue pay claims through a more complex court process. Again, this is a reasonable and fair change that fair-minded people will not hesitate to support.

I want to touch on the issue of the impact of this on business, particularly small business. As someone who was in business for 25 years before coming to this place—I grew up in my dad's small business—the ability of our local small and micro businesses to thrive is really important to me but also to my local economy and community. I have no doubt of the ability of those opposite to spread fear amongst small businesses, and I've heard ill-informed commentary in this place about how we'll all be ruined.

Small business is facing tough times, and we're well aware of that. Finding and keeping great people is one of the challenges. But this contains specific rules that mean small businesses' circumstances will be taken into account. We know they will be relevant to determinations. It recognises that small business is different from big business and can't always have the same conditions as big business. There is also support for small business to really get their head around this. This is a criticism I've heard from those opposite but, in fact, we've provided an additional $7.9 million to help the Fair Work Ombudsman's employer advisory service. We care about small business. This is going to work for everybody.

See this speech in context