Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am glad to make a contribution to this debate on the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill 2023. Safe and fair working conditions are one of the building blocks of the Australian way of life. The existence and guarantee of those conditions are one of our core values and core operating principles. That's not surprising because, without those conditions, working people and those who depend on them, which is the vast majority of Australians, are at risk. Their core wellbeing is at risk and their physical and material wellbeing is at risk. This Labor government is going to do what Labor governments have always done. We are going to be the responsible stewards of that building block of the Australian way of life, safe and fair working conditions, after a period of 10 years when that task was utterly abandoned by those opposite. Some of the things that have been said in this debate have just been utterly ridiculous on that front.

I've often said that the most important things are the things we share. That's my view. Those are the things that define our communal life together and that define our values in the way that we as a nation go forward as we live in our communities right around this country. If you think about what those things are, they are public health and education, our environment, community infrastructure and fair and safe working conditions. Every Australian ought to be able to go through their life taking that as a bedrock guarantee of life in this country.

When I have the privilege of participating in citizenship ceremonies and I talk about what becoming an Australian citizen means and I say, 'You are joining a country that is egalitarian and fair and that is multicultural and democratic,' I always make the point that all of the qualities that create our Australian way of life, including safe and fair working conditions, didn't happen by accident. Those things that we enjoy today evolved over time and they were fought for over time. In the case of fair and safe working conditions, they were fought for by workers, they were fought for by workers' representatives in the union movement and they were fought for by the Labor Party.

The things that we enjoy today haven't been with us forever. It wasn't really that long ago that we ended child labour. It wasn't that long ago that we made sure sick and annual leave entitlements were a permanent, expected and reliable feature of working life. It wasn't that long ago that we put in place effective occupational health and safety laws, and of course the developmental evolution of effective occupational health and safety laws is something that occurred over decades and needs to continue. It wasn't that long ago that there weren't awards, penalty rates, superannuation or bargaining frameworks with union membership rights, access and advocacy. All those things which we now take as being core to the framework of fair and safe working conditions in Australia were fought for. A hundred years ago very few of those things existed.

When I go to citizenship ceremonies, one of the points I make about lots of areas of life but is certainly relevant to this part of our life is that we have to be the stewards of those values. We have to be the stewards of those conditions. Fair and safe working conditions were fought for to get them where they are, and they need to continue to be fought for. We take that stewardship responsibility seriously. If you don't take that stewardship responsibility seriously, you will see an erosion in the degree of protection offered by the framework that is there to guarantee fair and safe working conditions, because things change. Times change.

We're talking a lot at the moment about the gig economy. When I was a kid, the challenge of the gig economy and way that puts people's pay at risk and puts not just their livelihood but their safety and their life at risk just did not exist in the way it exists now. The idea that you have people being seriously underpaid, taking jobs through a digital platform, being forced to rush from one thing to another on a bike, delivering takeaway food and suffering in some cases, unfortunately, fatal accidents as a result—there have been stories in recent times of delivery drivers ending up being hurt in a motor vehicle accident and, while they die, continuing to receive delivery order messages on their telephones. This is a feature of 21st-century life, and if we don't change the framework to protect those people, they will go unprotected. That's the way it is now.

But it's also the case that loopholes in any framework will be exploited. The vast majority of businesses and employers in Australia do the right thing. There are some people, organisations, consultants and peak bodies that, unfortunately, make it their business to look for loopholes where they can take otherwise fair shares of profits and productivity and shift them from the worker who has earned them to the corporation and to the CEOs. That's something that has to be resisted. That's something we have to keep our eye on in every area of Australian life and certainly when it comes to the framework that's supposed to protect workers, and we're going to do that.

It was a task completely abandoned by those opposite for the last 10 years. What did you see as a result? You saw stagnant and falling real wages, you saw a complete disconnection between productivity and profits and you saw rising inequality, and that's exactly what you'd expect. If you don't tend to that framework that should guarantee, to Australian workers and the people who depend on them, fair and safe working conditions, you will find that their share of the enterprises to which they contribute through their labour will diminish.

It's funny that those opposite talk about how wages rising can't be tolerated—that it'll cause this, that it'll cause that, that this will go through the roof, that business will close down, that building construction in Tasmania will stop altogether. I think the previous speaker said it would decimate innovation and ingenuity and destroy the building industry and that thousands of businesses would go out of business. When all the catastrophising and the hysterical, extreme rhetoric die away, what are they essentially saying? They're saying people can't be paid properly. They're saying that workers can't be safe—that the whole show will crumble into dust if people get their fair share of the enterprise to which they contribute. How utterly ridiculous.

What happened in 2022? We ensured that the minimum wage rose at a time of high inflation caused by global factors. That was so that all the cost-of-living pressures that the former speaker referred to actually don't hurt households to the extent that they otherwise would have. When you get wages that are at least keeping in touch with inflation let alone staying connected to record corporate profits and rising productivity, what you are doing is making sure that Australian families and Australian households are not falling further behind. We were prepared to support that rise in the minimum wage almost as soon as we were elected, as the Prime Minister made clear during the course of the campaign with the famous dollar coin, which those opposite thought would literally bring Armageddon to Australia. How utterly ridiculous.

But just to make it more ridiculous there's one thing you will never hear from those opposite. You hear all this catastrophising about wages and how dangerous it is that workers get paid properly, how dangerous it is that workers receive their fair share of the enterprises to which they contribute, but you never, ever hear those opposite saying a cautionary word about CEO wages. To them that is not the problem. The laws of economic orthodoxy that they have imbibed and they seek to apply don't seem to have any application in the case of CEO wages. Last year, ordinary wages across the Australian economy rose on average by 3.7 per cent, and that was apparently dangerous. CEO wages rose by 15 per cent, five times as much. Did you ever hear any one of those opposite say: 'Well, hang on a second, that is a bit risky, that is a bit much. That's a bit out of kilter with the circumstances of the day. That is going to make your milk prices go up and your gas prices go up and the building industry close and thousands of businesses shut.' No, there is never a problem with CEO wages going up or bonuses going up or share issues going up.

They think that is fine because it is within the laws of the jungle. They think that is a healthy economy in practice, people getting rewarded for effort, as the member for Fisher said. But God forbid that the people on the minimum wage should get a pay rise. To them that will let loose the four horses of the apocalypse the very next day, ridden by bikies from the CFMMEU or some kind of bizarre dark fantasy that those people have. They should put some employment the way of the counselling and psychology sector and get some of those weird fantasies attended to. That is what they should do. That would help the economy. Go and lie on the couch and confess to some of those bizarre visions and have them attended to, but we're not going to go along with that.

We know that fair and safe working conditions are a core value of the Australian community and that Australians absolutely insist on the right and on the inherent justice that is involved in workers being able to get a fair share of the outcomes of their efforts, to go to work and come home safely and to have the benefit of evolving reforms like we've done with 10 days of paid family and domestic violence leave. They have the benefit of having a government that doesn't say: 'Look what happened with asbestos and asbestosis. Let's let the next version of that creep up on us.' Instead this government is saying, 'No, we know that there is a problem with silica related diseases, and we are going to seriously get on the front foot about that before we see more people affected by something that will result in acute and in some cases grave health issues down the track.' What we're going to do are the kinds of things that those opposite somehow seem to regard as the most extreme changes in the history of the world, not something moderate and tempered.

We are going to make sure that there is a fair and objective definition of casual employee—shock, horror. We're going to protect bargained wages in enterprise agreements from being undercut. We think that, when people are working in the same job in the same place, you shouldn't be able to surreptitiously or cunningly make use of a labour hire arrangement, or at least not for a legitimate purposes because there are legitimate purposes to which labour hire arrangements can be put. But we don't think it's okay to simply create a labour hire arrangement as an additional subsidiary and subordinate workforce, with the purpose of undercutting the wages of people who are already there. We don't think that's okay and we're going to change it. We don't think that wage theft should go unchecked in this country. People—particularly young people, but not just young people when you think that 40 per cent of casual employees are over 35—should go back into their communities, or even to their families, and ask people that they know, 'Do you reckon you've ever worked somewhere where you weren't getting paid properly or where you knew what the award was but you got a couple of dollars less?' Perhaps they knew that there was a penalty rate but their employer quietly said, 'Yeah, but we don't pay that.' My kids have experienced it. My mum has experienced it. My brother has experienced it. You ask around. You will not find many people out of 10 who, at some point, haven't worked in a place where the employer has decided to cut a corner and help themselves to some of the output of their worker in order to put a little bit more coin in their own pocket. Well, we're going to do something to turn the wheel on that issue.

We're going to allow the Fair Work Commission to set fair minimum standards with respect to the road transport industry, an industry that has been beset, for understandable reasons, with risks to those workers for too long because of the nature of the work.

We are doing what any responsible government would do. We start from the position that fair and safe working conditions are an entitlement of every Australian; they are a core value of our Australian way of life. They didn't happen by accident. We didn't end up where we are today, with the existing framework, by accident. We fought for it. The labour movement fought for it. Unions fought for it. Workers fought for it. Labor governments answered those calls and implemented those changes and built that framework. But it is a dynamic living thing. It will always be subject to erosion. It will always be subject to the possibility that people will pay consultants to find loopholes and ways around things out of their own self-interest, and against the interests of workers. It will always be subject to being less effective over time because the world changes. Things like the gig economy—Deliveroo and all that sort of stuff—come along, when perhaps 25 years ago they weren't anticipated.

We are doing this, pretty smartly, in our first term, off the back of the jobs summit and all of the consultation, and with the clarity in the lead-up to the election about what our intentions were in this space. We are going to turn the wheel to make working conditions in Australia fairer and safer for Australian workers. That's what Australians deserve. That's what they insist upon, that's what they voted on, and that's what the Albanese Labor government will be delivering.

Debate adjourned.

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