Andrew Wallace (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have received a letter from the honourable member for Watson proposing that a definite matter of public importance be submitted to the House for discussion, namely:

The government's failure to increase real wages in line with the rising cost of living.

I call upon those members who approve of the proposed discussion to rise in their places.

More than the number of members required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The story of flatlining wages in this country is a story of insecure work. The government thinks insecure work is not a problem. Just the other day, the Minister representing the Minister for Industrial Relations in this chamber described same job, same pay as a made-up issue. Insecure work has changed fundamentally in Australia. As we grew up, we all knew there would be jobs you'd have as a student that would be casual or insecure job—it might be when you were at school—and unless you did further study afterwards you would have insecure work.

Those parts of the industry have always been around. But the change is that, increasingly, we now find people who are supporting families in insecure work. We find people who are relying on being able to pay the bills on their own in insecure work. We used to see insecure work in parts of retail and hospitality; we now see insecure work in the mining industry and in the aged-care industry. It's not just students in insecure work; we now have teachers in insecure work. We have people working at universities in insecure work. What does it mean for your payments? Your mortgage isn't casual. Paying the rent isn't casual. The grocery bills aren't casual.

Supporting a child isn't casual. Being a carer for someone isn't casual. And, yet, this government thinks it's a made-up issue. The issue there is real.

But we also need to remember that the government can act. It is within the capacity of government to fix this problem. If there was ever a moment when we showed that when government want to change things they can, it was during the pandemic. We have actually proven that this can be done. We had a situation where face masks weren't going to be manufactured in Australia. So the government investment came in, the direction came in, the support came in and it happened. We weren't doing hand sanitiser very much in Australia. We realised as a matter of sovereignty we needed to do it, so intervention happened and the change occurred. We had a wage subsidy going across the Australian workforce. It required legislation. It required government action. It wasn't done perfectly by any means, but in terms of a level of support it can be done. The pandemic showed that, when government wants to act, it can.

But the story of insecure work is one where the government does not want to act. When it comes to the evidence that they don't want to act, the person who gave the game away ages ago was Mathias Cormann when he was finance minister, making clear that low wages were a deliberate design feature of this government's plan for the economy. You deliver low wages by having people without job security. If you don't have job security, you don't have the same capacity to speak up and negotiate. It's hard enough getting people in insecure work to speak up about safety issues, let alone their entitlements.

But we also know from the pandemic not only is it possible for government to act; we also know that the Prime Minister, when it's time to act at different times, will just wander off. When we needed vaccines to be brought into Australia and brought in quickly, he just said: 'No, it's not a race. We are at the front of the queue. It's not a race.' We have just had economic figures today that would have been different were it not for the lockdowns—lockdowns which only occurred because we were not vaccinated early enough. That's the only reason they happened. Just like he went away during the bushfires, he walked away during the pandemic. And now he is walking away when it comes to acting on insecure work.

There are real consequences to this. 'Same job, same pay' is not a made-up issue. Can I tell you about two meat workers working at the exact same abattoir, both doing the same job, one working directly for the company and the other working as a labour hire casual. Those of you who've worked in retail or hospitality remember the concept that if you are working as a casual you get paid a loading. Have a think on this. The casual working for labour hire earns $500 less a week. The casual is on the lower rate of pay because of what labour hire is being allowed to do to insecure work. It's not that labour hire doesn't have a place. There can be times when it's appropriate for labour hire when there is surge employment or when you are employing people that the business normally wouldn't and you need people for a night or a short period of time. There's an appropriate role for labour hire, but that role is not to undercut wages and take away secure jobs.

In the same way, how many times do we hear them talk about mining, but we never hear them talk about mineworkers? Take two train drivers at Pacific National coalmine in the Bowen Basin, both doing the same job, with one working for the company, employed by Pacific National, and the other doing the exact same job but employed by a labour hire firm. The train driver employed by the labour hire firm is, once again, a casual. Does the casual get a loading? Does the casual get paid more? No. On the payslips, the casual gets paid $300 less every single week.

When we look at the fact that real wages are going backwards, it's not some accident. It's by design that the government has deliberately decided to not bring in legislation to close down loopholes as they've arisen. The other loophole we have seen is with respect to gig workers. Who would have thought we would be in a situation where earlier this term the previous minister for industrial relations was asked by the Leader of the Opposition whether or not every Australian worker should be paid at least the minimum wage?

That should not be a difficult question to answer. There's a link between the words 'at least' and the word 'minimum'. They sort of go together. What was the response from the government? It was: 'It's very complicated.' There is a direct link between the fact that the government has refused to act on the gig economy and the fact that this is an area where we see, right through to horticulture, people being paid in the order of $3 an hour, of people riding deliveries for us during the pandemic, getting food to people 's homes during the pandemic, and dying on the way there because they had to try to keep pace with an algorithm that was their employer. They are not earning the minimum wage. And the government 's response to all of these issues—whether it's this or whether it's endless consecutive contracts that people are on—is: 'Oh, but it's Labor 's legislation.' First of all, the gig economy and Uber were not that big in Australia in 2013. The Amazon model that's emerging now? It wasn't that big in Australia eight years ago. Tell me another piece of legislation where, when it is gamed, they don't come in with new legislation saying, 'We need to fix the loophole.'

We have the Assistant Treasurer, who will bring in legislation all the time when there is a new tax loophole, to say, 'We need to shut this down.' With the minister of immigration, there will be a court case and some loophole that he thinks has opened up, and new legislation will come in here. But, when it comes to workers having secure jobs, they want the loopholes to be there. They want the loopholes to cause people to have insecure work, because that puts downward pressure on wages. I will tell you, the safety net doesn't exist if you can be paid less than the minimum wage. The safety net does not exist if you have an enterprise agreement and the employer can just undercut it by bringing in labour hire. The safety net doesn't exist if you can endlessly be on one short-term contract after another so you effectively are never off your probationary period. People are now qualifying for long-service leave before their job becomes a secure job.

Honourable Member:

An honourable member interjecting—

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's not a made up issue for the miner who is being paid less than the person they are working beside. It's not a made up issue for the person delivering food to the homes of people in this room and being paid less than the minimum wage. It's not a made up issue for the person working in what might be called some sort of posh professional job who works in the industry their entire lifetime and never has a permanent contract and never has job security. We want people to have the confidence to go to the bank and get finance, we want people to have the confidence to go to their local shops and spend money. We want people to have the confidence to spend again, with consumer consumption getting the economy moving again. That doesn't happen if you are in fear every day as to whether your shift will be here next week. It's not only that they don't have a plan to fix the problem of secure jobs; it's not only that they deny it. They want insecurity.

Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What the government wants and what the government has shown throughout this pandemic is that we have a dedication and commitment to helping businesses continue to employ hundreds of thousands—millions—of Australians, and that is precisely what has happened during this pandemic. Quite frankly, we have done so in the face of fierce opposition from the Labour Party, who purport to represent workers but take every opportunity to slow the process of this parliament or the decisions of this government in rescuing and saving those jobs. So to have the member for Watson come in here today and to be speaking so passionately for the conditions of workers—it is hollow. Because the member for Watson and the Labor Party have taken an approach which would ultimately have led to fewer Australians being in work.

The dedication and commitment of the Morrison government throughout the pandemic has been: what can we do to support all Australian businesses—small, medium and large businesses—to continue to employ their workforces in the face of a once-in-100-years pandemic? It's about how we can support those businesses to continue to invest and, now that we're in the recovery phase, how we can encourage those businesses—with their capital reserves and with the resources that they have now been able to build up in the midst of a recovery—to have the confidence that they need to make further decisions to employ even more Australians.

We've seen that it's working. We've seen that, since September, 347,000 Australians have got back into work. Contrary to what the member for Watson says, if you look at the unemployment data and the employment statistics in recent years, even during the pandemic, the vast majority of new jobs created have been full-time jobs, which do have the protections that he speaks about. But you don't hear that from the Labor Party. You don't hear the Labor Party congratulating the government on critical decisions that we took during the pandemic with JobKeeper and HomeBuilder. You don't see the Labor Party congratulating the government on putting more money in the pockets of workers through our tax cuts.

We've seen that, since the 2018-19 income year, an Australian worker on a salary of $60,000 a year has been $6½ thousand better off due to the tax cuts and the personal income tax reductions put in place by our government. The Labor Party might not think that $6½ thousand means much to those people, but we in the Morrison government know that it does. We know that in the end, Australians look at their pay packet and what they get after tax. That's ultimately what is in their pockets and what they are able to use to provide for their families.

Does anyone seriously think that the Labor Party, as the Morrison government has done, would put in place tax policies that will see 95 per cent of Australians not paying a higher marginal tax rate than 30c in the dollar? Of course not. Before the last election, the Labor Party took a litany, a succession, of new taxes to the election, which would've hit the exact people that the member for Watson purports to care about today in his MPI. Whether it was taxes on superannuation, taxes on retirees, taxes on housing or higher personal income taxes—you name it—it would've hit millions and millions of Australians.

Does anyone seriously think that the Labor Party, since the 2019 election, have had a major conversion of their views on higher taxes? Does anyone really believe that the member for Rankin, who said he was very proud of their tax plans before the 2019 election, has suddenly had a major conversion on these topics? No. What we see from the Labor Party is not that they have had some massive change of heart. All we're seeing from the Labor Party is that they're going to hide their true intentions on one side of an election and do something different on the other side. That's the only thing that's changed.

I criticise the member for Maribyrnong for many things, and he deserves criticism for many things, but at least he was honest before the last election. At least he was honest that he had a plan for $387 billion of higher taxes. They were so proud of it that they set up very nice photographs with their economic team in the lead-up to the election. How proud they were of those higher taxes. Give him credit—at least he was honest about it. What we now see from the Labor Party is blatant dishonesty, hiding those things on one side of an election. Does anyone seriously think that they've had a major conversion since the 2019 election? Does anyone seriously think that those taxes that they were very proud of are all of a sudden taxes that they repudiate?

To go to wages: the latest ABS data has shown that private sector wages are up 2.4 per cent over the year. This is the highest it's been through the year since December 2014. In March or April last year—when the pandemic was hitting, lockdowns were first being put in place and businesses were being forcibly closed in response to health orders—if anybody had said then that unemployment now would be 5.2 per cent and that private sector wages for the year would be up 2.4 per cent, every right-thinking member of this House would've said, 'We would take that in a heartbeat.'

The member for Rankin, to his credit, set a test. He said the government's economic approach would be borne out by the unemployment figures. It was an interesting test. It's not a test that he has continued to speak about, but it was a marker of success that he himself put in place. Now we see unemployment at 5.2 per cent—lower than when we came to government and lower than the rising unemployment we saw under the former Labor government, of which the member for Rankin was a very important member, being Wayne Swan's brain. He thinks that's a compliment. If he thinks that's a compliment, good luck to him. We now see unemployment at 5.2 per cent, and, as the RBA have said, there's an expectation that with the economic recovery we're seeing now it could even be significantly lower than that. That's the true test. The true test of our economic response to this pandemic is borne out by those figures.

Who would have thought—again, thinking back to March or April last year—that one of the major complaints we would hear from the Australian business community would be the massive labour constraints that are now being felt. That is difficult for those businesses but it's a far superior problem to have than the alternative, which is higher unemployment, putting even less pressure on wages, which would consequently mean lower wages growth—not the 2.4 per cent that we've seen through the year, in the middle of a pandemic, which compares favourably to almost any jurisdiction in the world.

In discussing and thinking about the Labor Party's approach to these things, their response to one of the most successful programs put in place by the Morrison government last year, the HomeBuilder program, tells the story. The HomeBuilder program, which we put in place in June last year, provides grants to help predominantly first-time buyers purchase a new home and to support the one million people who work in the residential construction industry—the tradies, the plumbers, the carpenters, the concreters, the architects, the designers, the landscapers, the roofers. It helps a million Australians who work in the residential construction industry, yet the Labor Party criticised and opposed the policy. The Leader of the Opposition, to his great shame, said these grants would just be providing 'gold taps and pearl baths' to HomeBuilder grant recipients. There are 135,000 HomeBuilder projects, through which we've seen new construction of detached housing up by nearly 35 per cent—higher than prepandemic levels. Every single tradie in this country is busy, is gainfully employed, is working hard with the support of that program. The Labor Party opposed it. The Labor Party criticised it. That is emblematic of everything they have done during this pandemic. The Morrison government supports jobs and wages growth.

Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This government is a dumpster fire of dishonesty, disunity and desperation. We know this because, at a time when the cost of living—petrol, rent and all the rest of it—is going through the roof, real wages are going backwards. On the day that we learn Australia's downturn in the September quarter was the worst in the developed world and at a time when we've lost 200,000 jobs in two months, when we've got two million Australians unemployed or underemployed at the same time as we've got skills shortages—at the same time as there's all of this economic carnage—those opposite just want to talk about the Labor Party. After a decade in office, a wasted decade of missed opportunities, the best they can do in question time and now, in this matter of public importance discussion, is to bang on and on about Labor—about a photo that was taken three years ago, about the last election, about 10 years ago and all the rest of it. That just shows how bereft they are of empathy and compassion for people who are doing it tough. The working families of this country, right around middle Australia, are finding it harder and harder to keep up with the skyrocketing costs of living, because their real wages are going backwards.

There is no empathy or compassion for the small businesses or for the people who lost their jobs because those opposite couldn't get around to ordering vaccines in time and they couldn't build purpose-built quarantine.

After a wasted decade of missed opportunities, they get question after question on the economy, about all these important issues, and all they can do is recite the same old focus group reports and the same old tired lines about the Labor Party. That's just one of the many reasons why it's time to put this government out to pasture. They have had almost a decade now to deal with these issues—the issues in skills, the issues in the labour market, the issues with the cost of living, the issues in the last couple of years with the pandemic—and, at the end of all of that, what do we have? We have the third worst contraction in the economy in the history of the national accounts, the worst-performing economy out of the 28 OECD countries that have reported already for the September quarter.

This is the downturn that we didn't have to have. It didn't need to be this way. We're getting into this position because of the mistakes made by those opposites. Their mismanagement of the pandemic has become mismanagement of the economy as well. It's a downturn which comes courtesy of the Prime Minister and the Treasurer, but the bill is being picked up by the small businesses and working families of this country.

With all of this going on and such a terrible set of numbers released by the ABS today, you would think those opposite would show a little bit of contrition. But this is a government which is temperamentally incapable of taking responsibility for anything. This is a government that takes all of the credit when things are going well but none of the responsibility when times are tough and things are difficult. Given that these lockdowns and this downturn were caused by the government and their failures on vaccines and quarantine and economic support, you would think there would be a little bit of responsibility taken. But, again, there is all of this talk about Labor, all of this claiming credit for a recovery which we hope materialises but hasn't yet, at the same time as they don't take responsibility for the downturn itself. You can't have it both ways. You can't take credit for the recovery without taking responsibility for the downturn that we've learned all about in the course of today.

The economy under this government has three defining features. First of all, we have the world's worst downturn in the September quarter, and I've covered that. Secondly, there are the issues in the labour market, with 200,000 jobs lost in two months and two million Australians unemployed or underemployed at the same time as we have all of these skills shortages. That is the second defining feature of this economy. Thirdly, there are the cost-of-living pressures that people are confronting because their real wages are going backwards.

All of this means that we confront the uncertainty of the new strain of the virus from a position of weakness—certainly weaker than we would be had the Prime Minister and the Treasurer done their job—and that's why we can't be complacent about this recovery. Every single person on this side of the House wants the economy to recover strongly. But we have to decide, in this building, whether we want that recovery to be back to how things were before, with all the insecure work and wage stagnation which has defined their decade in office, or whether we can do better, whether we can have a strong and broad and inclusive and sustainable recovery where working families can actually get ahead and aren't left behind. The thing those opposite don't understand is that it's not an economic recovery if people don't share in the benefits.

Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The government welcomes a debate about the economy and certainly about wages and the economic recovery that the government is invested in providing for all Australians. Listening to members of the opposition, the Labor Party is the political party that is supposed to represent the worker. Former heads of the trade union movement come into this parliament regularly and try and dumb down and provide the most simple commentary about industrial relations that you could provide in this country. We heard that from the shadow minister and member for Watson, who tried to maintain that in Australia people are paid $3 an hour, somehow. If someone is paid $3 an hour in this country, that's unlawful and that needs to be reported immediately. And it's wrong to maintain that people have insecure work because they work in a new economy or in new companies that have been advanced in the new economy that we represent. He named a couple of them—Amazon, for example. Amazon, worldwide, employs 1.3 million people, who aren't in insecure work. That's a lot of people for any one enterprise to employ around the world. Uber in Australia employs 86,000 people, who find the pay acceptable and choose to work for Uber because they can choose their hours; they can control their hours.

The members opposite laugh, but that's why this company is successful. They're innovating. This is the new economy. That's not insecure. They're paid Australian wages and they work voluntarily for that company. This is not the Middle Ages. This is not serfdom. The No. 1 reason a person volunteers to work for Uber—this is proven in surveys—is that they can control their working hours. It suits them. They can choose when to work and when not to work. That's the truth of a company like Uber and their employment. Yet the Labor Party rail against it. They say Uber was good in 2012 when it was small but, because it has become successful and big, it's now bad.

Somehow the member for Watson tries to make a link to $3 an hour where there is no link to $3 an hour. In fact, the national minimum wage in Australia, which the member for Watson should know, is $20.33, or $772.60 per week. That's the national minimum wage. As members opposite should know, there are many awards and agreements where the minimum wage is higher than that—in fact, it's the highest minimum wage in the world. It is unlawful to not pay the right wages and awards in Australia. Members opposite try to create a problem that they know is not correct all the time in these discussions. It is wrong to do so.

When I walk around this economy at the moment, what I hear from every business in Australia is that they are critically short of workers. Members all around Australia need more workers. They are offering more money. Without naming them, I have had Labor state ministers in Labor jurisdictions tell me that they are paying well above award wages, sometimes double in various sectors and industries, because they are so critically short, because they need those workers.

What is this government doing about it? That's why we've got more apprentices than we've had for a long time. That's why we're trying to get Australians into jobs first before, in my own portfolio, we bring people from overseas. Our labour market is running red hot. It is a time where we will see, as we have seen, 2.4 per cent higher wages over the year, the strongest growth since 2014. Of course we're going to see higher wages as we continue to go forward, because every employer is desperately short of labour. You can go to almost every sector anywhere in the country and they are demanding labour. We already have the world's highest minimum wages. But people are offering more than our minimum wage in many sectors. This is great news for employees. It is fantastic.

We have the strongest industrial relations and legal framework in the world as well. The Fair Work system the Labor Party likes to rail against was set up by the Labor Party. It was set up by Prime Minister Gillard. The piece rate, which the member for Watson is actually referring to but didn't name, was established by Julia Gillard. The commissioners were all appointed by Labor. You do wonder about the honesty of people coming into this place and suggesting that people are being paid $3 dollars an hour in Australia. It simply isn't true. I think that is a demeaning thing for this country to hear when, actually, we have one of the highest minimum wages in the world, a strong economy, thousands of jobs available right now in almost every single part of this country for anybody who would like to get a job, and employers are looking at paying higher wages as well. We've seen 2.4 per cent increases, the strongest in seven years. Instead of saying, 'That is great news for Australians and we want to see that wages growth continue,' Labor say we've got a terrible system and we have troubles.

The reality is that wages growth will continue to be strong while there is high demand for labour. There will be high demand for labour in the coming years. It is our job as a parliament and as a government to keep the momentum going of getting people job ready, supporting them back into work in those jobs in our regions, suburbs and businesses.

Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If there were an example of a government in denial, that last speech was it. I've sat in this parliament and watched minister after minister refuse to get to the dispatch box when questioned and refuse to back in a minimum hourly rate for Australian workers. They have gone time and time again refusing to back in a minimum hourly rate. So to hear the previous speaker come up here and say everyone gets paid the minimum rate here in Australia—guarantee it. Back it in and guarantee it. Legislate it, and then we might believe you.

Of course, there are a lot of things that keep increasing under this Morrison-Joyce government. It's certainly not wages. It is dishonest statements, scandals, rorts, marketing slogans, glossy brochures and, of course, desperation. These are all things increasing under the Morrison government, but it is certainly not wages.

But there's also something else of critical importance to the Australian people and Australian families that is increasing—that is, the cost of living. When you listen to those on the other side, you would think—and they're coming pretty close to saying 'Australian families have never been better off.' That is the type of denial this government is in: 'There's nothing to see here. Everyone's happy. Everyone's got a job. Everyone's getting paid the most they've ever been paid.' Well, it's simply not true. They need to go back to their electorates and actually spend some time listening to the struggles of Australian families.

I can give them a tip on where to start: they can start by listening to families with young children and their struggle when it comes to child care. Families using early learning and care are feeling cost-of-living pressures every day. The latest data shows that childcare fees rose by 2.4 per cent over the 12 months to March 2021—that's 2.4 per cent, despite fees having been frozen for six months in 2020 due to the pandemic. That is more than double inflation. It means the value of the childcare subsidy keeps being eroded. The subsidy is tied to inflation, so parents are paying more and more out of pocket every single time these fees go up. What does this mean for people's back pockets? This is an extra $390 in fees, just like last year. At the same time real wages have fallen by $700. Childcare fees have now gone up more than 39 per cent under the coalition. It has been a massive hit to families' budgets.

Rather than confront this issue, rather than acknowledge this issue, we hear the minister get up and explain it as a childcare hourly rate. He is trying to convince Australian families that child care is cheap by using the hourly rates, whether it's $5 an hour or something else. But what he doesn't realise—or maybe he does, and he's just trying to pull the wool over people's eyes—is that parents don't use one or two hours of child care; they often need between 30 and 50 hours a week, because that is what they need to work to make ends meet. At times the minister thinks he has been very clever. It's obviously in the talking points: 'If we talk about the hourly rate, it doesn't sound so bad.' But it all adds up.

Out-of-pocket costs have gone up more than 12.5 per cent since the introduction of this government's new childcare system. They are the highest they have ever been in this country—and that is out-of-pocket costs, not overall fees. The average Australian family pays 19 per cent of the average wage in out-of-pocket costs. Instead, the response we get from this government is to make the system more complex and tinker around the edges—but no real plan to rein in out-of-control fees or make the system more easy to navigate. Indeed, they won't do a thing about raising the subsidy for 75 per cent of families using the system because, according to this government, those families don't deserve any extra help. Well, Labor thinks 97 per cent of families using the childcare system need extra help. That's what the election of a Labor government will do; we'll provide cheaper child care right across this country to 97 per cent of families using the system. For real change at the next election, vote Labor.

John Alexander (Bennelong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Not likely! Thank you to those opposite for bringing this matter forward. The cost of living is critically important to everyone across Australia, and we're delighted to be talking about it. Unfortunately, this motion lacks context. It's a broader problem with MPIs; the need to keep things pithy and one sentence provides little space for exposition. But, in this, as in everything, context is key. The last few years have been tough—very tough. While the pandemic started as a health crisis, it has rapidly spread to be an economic one. Economies have been hit either way, and movement restrictions, initially, had the same detrimental effect on spending, which led to chaos in the countries who let this virus rip. But the last two years have also shown us that, by taking the pandemic seriously, locking down our borders and using public health initiatives from mask mandates to lockdowns, we have kept disruption to a minimum.

Each time we come out of lockdown, we spend like sailors on shore leave. A quick look at the economic data shows that, for every dip during a lockdown, there is huge growth that follows. That is the story of today's national account figures: there is certainly a dip, but the strong expectation is that the next quarter will see large amounts of growth. As the Treasurer reminded us today, the economy is recovering strongly, and this is particularly clear to see in the labour markets. Those who were working at the end of the last century will remember the high levels of unemployment during the last recessions, in the eighties and the nineties. These have been avoided this time thanks to a huge amount of investment and support from the federal government. Our payments—JobSaver, JobSeeker and more—have kept our unemployment low and supported thousands of Australians when they have needed their government to step up. Since the start of September, 350,000 jobs have come back, and job ads are more than 30 per cent higher than they were at the start of the pandemic. The RBA is forecasting the unemployment rate to fall below five per cent and to be sustainably in the fours, for only the second time in more than 50 years. When unemployment falls, wages rise.

The other function of real wages is inflation. In the June quarter last year, we saw the largest fall in inflation since the 1960s as a result of our COVID-19 response. This saw real wages growth of 2.1 per cent over the year to the June quarter of 2020, which is the highest in over a decade. Inflation has now rebounded from the record fall in CPI inflation in the June quarter of 2020. Once this has flowed through, real wages are forecast to increase.

Today, real wages are in line with pre-pandemic levels. We have faced the greatest economic shock since the Great Depression and come away with optimism, low unemployment and big spending. Real wage levels demonstrate that we have been able to recoup the losses of the pandemic, and on these foundations we will now grow. In the Statement on Monetary Policy released on 4 November 2021, the RBA upgraded their forecast for wages growth, reflecting the upgrade to labour market forecasts. The RBA expects wages growth to pick up to above two per cent by the end of 2021 before accelerating to around three per cent by the end of 2023, the fastest pace in almost a decade. The RBA governor said on 16 November:

Wages growth is expected to pick up … In terms of the specifics, our central forecast is for the Wage Price Index to increase by 2½ per cent over 2022 and 3 per cent over 2023 …

No-one is pretending that the economy has been stellar over the past two years. Of course it hasn't. The pandemic has ensured this in Australia and globally. But I am certain that Australia will see new growth as we leave this pandemic behind, and this growth has been driven by decisions on this side of the House. Our economic stewardship has kept Australia in work and supported, and with these foundations our future looks bright.

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The worst of COVID is hopefully now behind us, but what it's left in its wake is another crisis: a housing crisis. It's harder to buy a house today than ever before. The cost of buying a house has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. It is up 20 per cent right across the country. It's the same story with rent. It's harder to rent today in many parts of the country than ever before. The big jump in the cost of petrol has already been mentioned in this debate. Petrol is now costing the average family 900 bucks a year more than it did last year. That's a massive jump, but it pales in comparison with what's happening with rent.

Just think about this for a minute: in Cairns, up in Queensland, the average rent is 2,000 bucks more this year than it was last year.

In Burnie, down in Tasmania, the average rent is now $2½ thousand more than it was this time last year. In North Nowra—not far from here, on the coast—it's gone up by $2,800 a year. In Launceston, back in Tasmania, it's three grand more than it was this time last year. On the Central Coast of New South Wales the average rent is $3,600 more this year than it was last year. Not far from here, in Yass, it's 4½ grand more, and up in Darwin it's now 6½ grand more than it was last year.

It's the people living in places like this who will determine who sits in the Prime Minister's chair after the next election. But it's not just them. This is happening almost everywhere, right across the country. This is the biggest bill that millions of Aussies pay every week, and it's going through the roof.

When rent goes up but wages don't there are real-life consequences. Here's just one example, Mr Deputy Speaker. This is a photograph from the Cairns Post, from a story from a couple of months ago. What it shows is a mum, a dad, a 13-year-old daughter and their dog sitting in the boot of their car on the edge of the Captain Cook Highway with a sign that says:

WANTED

2 BED

RENTAL

SML FAM

+ DOG

Then it has their mobile phone number. That shows you just how desperate and dire things are. These aren't backpackers looking to hitchhike up and down the coast. This is a family trying to find an affordable place to rent.

Here's another story, from Lake Macquarie, about a bloke who hired a car to sleep in. How in the hell does that happen? He hired a car to sleep in because he couldn't find an affordable place to rent. Here's another story from the Newcastle Herald about a young woman named Chloe. She's 24. She's a nurse at a local hospital. She's sleeping in her car as well. Up the Pacific Highway, in Coffs Harbour, I heard a story about a place that was up for rent where 50 people turned up to have a look. The person who eventually got the property had to pay the rent 12 months in advance, but that's not the worst part—she took out a personal loan just to do it.

Further up the highway, at Byron Bay, there's not even a women's and children's refuge. I was told in Byron Bay that the local police commander reckons there are 400 women and kids sleeping in cars around the town. The charities in these places tell me that they're now seeing as many as three times the number of people coming in for help that they saw this time last year.

When we ask questions about this in parliament, the Prime Minister tells us that there isn't a problem. How out of touch is this Prime Minister! He needs to get out of the Lodge and get into the real world. He needs to visit his own electorate, where rents are, on average, up by $3,800 a year.

On top of that, we've got a homelessness minister, who's at the table at the moment, who's been the minister now for almost a year—for 344 days, to be exact—and has only even said the word 'homelessness' on eight of those days. He's spent more days running away from 60 Minutes cameras than he has even saying the word 'homelessness'. We need action here, and we need it now.

Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On the last speaker's notes: all of those stories are horrendous. They're well and truly noted, but there is nothing that this government has done, in relation to its policies, that has driven any one of those people out of their accommodation and forced them to live in their cars.

The concept of housing that is now seeing prices go through the roof is, purely and simply, a matter of the cost of money in Australia, which has never been this cheap. Australians everywhere are taking advantage of it and trying to get into the market. The market is heated beyond belief. However, this is not because of government policy; it is simply the fact that, through these last two years, we have had record-low interest rates. Money is at its cheapest rate ever, and therefore people are taking this incredible opportunity and they're putting themselves in incredible debt.

A throwback of that is that there is a very diminishing pool of rental houses available.

To throw that into this area here, where that somehow or other this is because of government policy—it's just not true. What this government has done is really give Australians an opportunity to make sure that they can secure the job they want. That's what our policies are doing—driving the private sector, which employs 90 per cent of all Australians. If we as a government can get the private sector to grow, we'll continue to create the pool and the demand for workers, for labour, that we've currently been able to achieve—a 5.2 per cent unemployment rate. We've got to be proud of that.

In my electorate—and I'm sure it's happening in everyone else's electorate—workers are harder to get. Job vacancies are everywhere. Workers are hard to get. Workers now hold the upper hand. Every cafe, every hospitality area, is hiring. Jobs are available. In agriculture jobs are on the land. In mechanics, diesel mechanics, jobs are available. The work that we are doing to try and encourage apprentices into apprenticeships has been incredibly successful. But we've got a lot to do, because at the moment there are so many trades that are finding it very difficult to find apprentices that want to come in. Australians, for whatever reason, do not really want to take on many of the jobs which previously we've been very proud to take.

For painters and decorators there are huge vacancies, as well as in plastering, tiling, roof tiling and plumbing. You look at a whole raft of trades about which you'd normally be incredibly proud to say, 'That is what I do as a profession,' and right at the moment there's a genuine shortage. At the moment, it's looking like the only opportunity we have to fill those shortages so that our Australian businesses can continue to work in a profitable manner, to work in a productive manner, to meet the demands they have with their contracts, is to look at overseas workers. We need to be able to do this. Stopping overseas workers coming in to pick up some of these trades and some of these jobs will penalise the Australian businesses that need them. We wish there was an Australian pool that we could call on to come and do these jobs. We wish there was a whole range of apprentices knocking down the doors of these trades, wanting to get a job, but the reality is they're just not there.

What we're doing is trying to invest in the TAFE systems, trying to encourage a greater relationship between the TAFE colleges and industry so that they're offering the courses that are most relevant in each of the respective areas. This is something that we are very cognisant of—that our TAFEs need a great relationship with industry so that they're offering the most pertinent courses.

But right now we understand it's the private sector that creates jobs for our people. More vacancies create high demand for our workers. As that demand for our workers goes up, wages go up. That is something that we're very aware of. We understand that, if we can keep that unemployment rate down, we will be pushing the wages rates up. (Time expired)

Meryl Swanson (Paterson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mark it down: Wednesday 1 December 2021 is the day that the dream of homeownership died under the member for Nicholls's way of thinking. The member for Nicholls has just said that money has never been cheaper. It's never been easier to get a loan. Well, let me tell you, if you're a casual worker in Australia, it is nigh impossible not only to get a loan, to get a mortgage, but also to get a rental property. That's aside from the fact that the market is hot. We've just heard today from the shadow minister for homelessness about newspaper articles on real people here in Australia, in 2021, sitting in the boot of their car. We heard about a family looking for a home and a nurse who had to live in her car.

This is not the stuff of fiction; these are real Australians today, trying to find a home in Australia.

Then the member for Nicholls says the apprentices aren't there! Ha! After eight years of absolutely hacking into vocational education and training and letting all of the rorts and rip-offs happen, no wonder the apprentices aren't there. This economy has been honeycombed, absolutely hollowed out, by a stale, tired government that quite frankly doesn't want to be here. They're a do-nothing government. This government proclaim that they want to get out of people's way, but they knife each other day in, day out to get to this place, and then when they're here they rort and they re-route the public purse for their own disposal. So no wonder Australians think that they are on the nose.

This government has failed to increase real wages and the price of living, and the cost of living has gone up. Mince today is $13 per kilo. That's not for your lean, heart-smart mince. No, that'll set you back between $18 and $23 a kilo! That's regular mince. An iceberg lettuce costs somewhere between $2.50 and $5. These are the real things that people buy every day. That's the real cost of living.

The price of a mortgage, the price of paying rent—these are some of the biggest investments in someone's pay packet, and they are going up while real wages are going down, and across the country we have seen this like never before during this pandemic. Those opposite try and use the pandemic as a life raft to try and avoid the sinking ship that has been nearly a decade of this stagnant coalition government, now led by this leader. Many people when they talk to me in the shops—when they are buying their mince and their lettuce—say, 'Gee, Meryl, I think this is all on the nose.' Well, it well and truly it is.

Let me tell you, after eight long years, those opposite have lost the answer. In my electorate, the people of Paterson are fed up. They've watched this government fail to increase wages, watched this government fail to back in penalty rates, watched them fail to invest in trades training and training for professionals we so desperately need.

The rising cost of living is leaving a generation of first-home buyers out in the cold. The Australian dream of home ownership is well and truly dead. And in my electorate I have people waiting three to six months to be able to secure a rental property. Even then, the rents are so outlandishly high that the household budget is shredded by it.

I have been very vocal in this place about Labor's plan to ensure same job, same pay, and I was so proud to be able to second Anthony Albanese's bill for that same measure: same job, same pay.

I want to say to you that this government has failed. People of the Hunter: you have been ripped off by your government. You have been rightly confused when Senator Malcolm Roberts, who parades around the Hunter and says he backs workers in, votes with this government at every given opportunity. Let me tell you, One Nation might make a decent cartoon, but they run roughshod over the people of Paterson, hand in glove with this government. So do not believe them when they tell you they stick up for you as well. They do not stick up for you. Labor stands for same job, same pay, and we will do that every day for you as a hardworking Australian. This government has abandoned the hardworking Australians.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia, undoubtedly, in the face of a tough couple of years, has one of the most outstanding economies in the world, which is currently just 0.2 per cent smaller than it was in December 2019, in the prepandemic stage. And, of the advanced economies of the world, we are bettered only by the US and France in that growth rate. I might point out at this stage that the reason that the going has been tough has been the COVID virus. In the US they've had 800,000 deaths, and in France they've had 119,000.

In Australia, we've had 2,000. I'm quite content to sit at number 3 on that growth rate if that's what it means.

This has been an economic miracle built on the foundations of our performance in combating COVID-19, and we have one of the highest rates of vaccination in the world, currently at about 87 per cent fully vaccinated. I might point out that over 99 per cent of the over-60s in Australia are now fully vaccinated. That is a remarkable achievement, and it's been achieved despite the political attacks on the government and, lamentably, on the quality of the vaccines throughout the vaccination program. Remember the Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, virtually barring Vaxzevria—that is, the AstraZeneca vaccine—from Queensland, throwing red meat to the anti-vaxxers and seeking to destroy public confidence in a perfectly good vaccine that has saved millions of lives worldwide. By Labor's assessment, the national vaccine program was late, it was bungled, it was botched et cetera. Guess what? It was delivered on time. The Prime Minister nominated the end of October, back in December 2020, as the time that the vaccination program would be complete. Here we are today on 1 December, and we, by any calculation, are at the complete stage. We may have missed it by a couple of weeks, but it's been delivered on time, and the management of the pandemic, compared with the OECD average, has saved 30,000 lives in Australia. Compared ourselves with the US and the UK, it's estimated, we've saved 45,000 lives.

So today's result on the national accounts for the September quarter, showing a 1.8 per cent reduction in GDP, is hardly a surprise as it came from the time when our two major states—over half the population of Australia—were in lockdown because of the delta outbreak. The Australian economy is not a basket case. It is a miracle, and we should all be proud of it because, while wages growth is important, having a job, keeping a job and being able to get a job are far more important. In Grey, I can tell you we have vacancies from one end of the electorate to the other. We are screaming out for workers, so if anyone's out there wanting a job I suggest they come and visit us. As sure as night follows day, where you have tightness in the labour market it will lead to higher wages.

Unemployment is currently at 5.2 per cent in Australia, which is slightly up, by 0.6 per cent, from the previous assessment, but it is on the back of those lockdowns. We already know that this lift in unemployment and the drop-off in the GDP is a blip, as all the economic indicators are already pointing up. It was a mistake of the Labor Rudd-Gillard years—and they made plenty of mistakes, I might point out—that they were so focused on 'short-termism', and here they are again responding to every ripple in the road, if you like, and trying to generate a headline a day about the short-term response, when they really ought to be focused on the long term. That's how you get policies like pink batts and cash for clunkers, for instance. How do we know this is a blip? Because we already have the information that tells us it is a blip, that 350,000 jobs have already been created since September, that we've seen a 4.9 per cent lift in retail spending and that $100 million has been invested in the non-mining sector, with accelerated tax write-offs and whatever has generated that investment.

So, after the predictions of the member for Rankin, for instance, when JobKeeper was going to finish and he said hundreds of thousands were going to be thrown out of work, what we found out was no-one was thrown out of work and the jobless rate continues to decline. As it does, wages will increase.

Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allotted for this discussion has concluded.