Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I knew that would be the reaction. But these are the facts of what is actually occurring in Australia. The gender pay gap is getting worse, not better. Family-work-life balance is getting worse. That is what the research is showing. HREOC has released a report. Relationships Forum Australia have released a report, entitled An unexpected tragedy, which looks at the link between long and unpredictable hours. More than 20 per cent of Australian employees work more than 50 hours per week, 30 per cent regularly work on weekends and 27 per cent work unpredictable hours. Australia has the second highest percentage of casual employees in the OECD. Relationships Forum Australia say that is having an impact on work-family balance. They say there is a link between long and unpredictable working hours and the breakdown of family life. They have been looking at that and the consequent impact on children. Their report noted that the long and unpredictable hours worked by many are making employees unhealthy, putting relationships under extreme stress, creating angry and inconsistent parents and reducing the wellbeing of children. The report concludes:

The cold statistics hide immense human tragedy.

The HREOC report, released only a couple of days before that, looked at the issue of balancing paid work with family and carer responsibilities. A common theme is that, in these times of economic prosperity, many Australians struggle to balance work and family life. Furthermore, HREOC heard from many Australians that they are not able to exercise real choice in their working lives. That is the point. This is ‘Work No Choices’. AWAs are not specifically individualised; they are basically done en masse. Particularly in many of the lower paid fields, you do not get to negotiate to pick up your children at three o’clock. I would like to hear from a wide variety of the Australian community on whether they can negotiate AWAs that would allow them to leave work at three o’clock to pick up their children. That is very, very unlikely, particularly as penalty and award rates have been removed.

Twenty-two per cent of AWAs do not provide for a wage increase in the life of the agreement, which can go up to five years. Compared to the rate of inflation, the total average earnings of full-time adult workers have dropped by 0.6 per cent over the 12 months since the new IR laws came in. For full-time workers in the private sector, average total earnings have dropped by 1.1 per cent. The drop in average earnings for women workers in the private sector is 1.8 per cent. This is not to the benefit of workers; it is directly to the advantage of the employers—the bosses. That is what this law is about. It is not about protecting the work-life-family balance. It is about making things harder for workers.

The two reports from Relationships Forum Australia and HREOC come on top of the report by Barbara Pocock, a well-known academic in the area of labour markets. She has written a well-known book, entitled The Labour Market Ate My Babies, in which she looks at how the modern labour force is having a detrimental impact on children, on youth and on our capacity to care. It talks about the impact of long hours, uncertain work, the intensity of work, the quality of work and how work and caring preferences match up. This is what is having an impact on families. The issue is not whether parents work but the state they are in when they come home from work. Parents are getting more stressed, they are working longer and unpredictable hours and they cannot make plans. Someone told me the other day that they are unable to make plans to go out with their children. They are not told when they will have regular work, so they cannot make arrangements to go out with their children, their friends or their partners. All this has an impact on people’s wellbeing. Work Choices is not delivering. It needs to be repealed. (Time expired)