Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to talk about the ongoing challenges faced by the working poor in Australia. One of the commitments I made in my first speech was that if there was one thing only that I was able to do in my time in parliament it would be to help with the predicament of the low-paid in Australia. Eleven months on, that remains my commitment, and I hope it does for the entire time that I am here. It is the case that the prosperity that Australia currently enjoys and has enjoyed over the last decade and a half or so does have a dark side: the enormous growth in the number of low-paid workers in Australia over that time. There are many, many reasons for that, most of them not partisan political reasons. That simply reflects the growth of the service sector, combined with a whole range of labour market deregulations pursued by governments of both political persuasions.

We know that in the 1990s fully 50 per cent of all new jobs created paid less than $300 per week. We know that during that decade around 87 per cent of all new jobs paid less than $500 a week. And we are told that average weekly earnings today are in the order of $1,000 a week. We also know that these trends were deeply exacerbated by the explosion in casualisation—and we have the second highest rate of casualisation in the Western world, after only Spain—as well as the growth in part-time employment. Today, there are over two million workers in Australia who are low paid, using the definition of the OECD, which is being paid less than two-thirds of median full-time earnings. That is almost a quarter of our workforce.

I was very privileged to attend the launch of a book, Living low paid, by Helen Masterman-Smith and Barbara Pocock. It followed a study over a couple of years supported by the LHMU, a union I worked for before coming to this place; the Brotherhood of St Laurence; and the Hawke institute, at the University of South Australia. For that book in-depth interviews were conducted with almost 100 childcare workers, cleaners and room attendants in luxury hotels. It goes at great depth into not only the financial hardship that flows from being a low-paid worker but also the lack of control over the hours of work that they experience and the consequent impact that that has on their capacity to live full and fruitful family lives and also the impact on their sense of dignity and value as a member of our community. I want to read this quote: ‘Luxury hotel workers spoke of their physically demanding and hazardous work. Childcare workers puzzled over the emotional labour and educational demands of their profession. Cleaners were bewildered as to why their unsocial hours and exposure to dangerous chemicals and disease were not worth more pay.’ This is an incredibly valuable study, and I applaud Ms Masterman-Smith and Professor Pocock. (Time expired)