Joe Bullock (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In my comments yesterday, in taking note of answers to questions regarding the governments unfair and ill-considered budget, I focused on the government's vain hope of instituting an income-tax-led recovery and how, in its attempt to support its higher spending, higher debt and higher deficit, the government was seeking to give the misleading impression of a budget improvement, simply through higher tax receipts achieved through bracket creep.

I highlighted how the principal burden of these higher taxes would fall disproportionately on low-income earners as a greater share of their incomes crept above the tax free threshold, which was commendably raised by the Labor government. This burden will be further increased on the 1.3 million workers whose incomes sit between $30,000 and $37,000 per annum as wage increases resulted in their marginal tax rate jumping by 14 per cent.

I shone a light on the government's plan to thrust their hands deeper into workers' pockets by increasing income tax receipts by seven per cent per annum between now and 2018-19 while workers' wages were forecast to rise by between 2½ per cent and three per cent per annum. These higher taxes will reduce the disposable income of workers already struggling to make ends meet, undermine consumer demand and damage the economy.

These concerns are very real to me after 37 years of representing shop assistants—young workers trying to stand on their own two feet and part-time workers struggling to balance work and family commitments and hoping for those few extra hours of work to put them in the $30,000 to $37,000 range, which would, unfortunately, make them subject to the government's tax grab. And a tax grab is what it is. It is not a considered, fair plan to return to surplus, but a naked tax grab from workers who can least afford it.

Today, I want to turn to another issue which will affect the overwhelmingly female membership of my union, the SDA—parental leave. The SDA negotiates tirelessly and effectively to improve the working lives of our members. The principal focus of these negotiations is, of course, wages, because workers need a fair rate of pay to support themselves and their families with dignity.

Shop assistants around the world tend to have wage rates that fall towards the lower end of the spectrum but it is a matter of some pride in the SDA that Australia's retail wage rates are among the highest in the world. Unlike some other unions, however, when the SDA negotiates agreements we often submit over 100 separate claims approved by meetings of delegates for every shop within a business addressing every aspect of working life and addressing the key issue of work/life balance. Many of the claims will go towards rostering: reasonable maximum and minimum shifts; breaks between shifts; rest breaks; access to safe transport home; variation of roster provisions; consecutive days off; and the requirement to have regard for an employee's family and study commitments in establishing and varying rosters. Leave claims will address illness, compassionate leave, natural disaster leave, emergency services leave, carer's leave and, of course, parental leave.

Reflecting the concerns of our members, family provisions in our agreements rank very high on our list of claims. The SDA's success in being the first union to achieve breakthroughs with family-friendly claims has led to the union being heavily relied upon when the ACTU seeks to advance the interests of Australian workers as a whole in these areas. Of course, money and conditions claims need to be balanced; there is no use in achieving the world's best conditions at the cost of having wage rates insufficient to maintain a reasonable living standard. For this reason, in the interests of promoting the family, the union has traditionally seen the government as having a key role in providing universal paid parental leave for all mothers.

Nevertheless, the union has encouraged employers to contribute to the wellbeing of their employees' families through the provision of paid maternity leave as well as paternity leave and adoption leave. These discussions have resulted in some success. Woolworths—including Big W, Dan Murphy and Woolworths petrol—offer six weeks paid leave, including adoption leave for the primary care giver and in cases of stillbirths after 20 weeks. Aldi provides 14 weeks leave at half-pay. Bunnings offers four weeks maternity leave and one week of paid paternity leave. Coles supermarkets, liquor and petrol offer four weeks paid leave. Costco offers 16 weeks leave at half-pay. Dulux offers 12 weeks paid leave for maternity or, for adoption, to the primary care giver and three days paid paternity leave. Freedom tops up government payments for four weeks for maternity and offers five days paid paternity leave. Sanity offers two to six weeks paid maternity leave depending on length of service and two to five days paid paternity leave. Super Retail offers four weeks paid paternity leave. Target provides 12 weeks leave at half-pay to the primary care giver.

These payments to SDA members are highly valued and an important contribution towards families meeting the cost and time commitments required by a growing family. In some cases, benefits provided by companies are included in certified enterprise agreements and, as a result, are legally enforceable employee entitlements for the term of those agreements. In some cases, however, the union has been able only to achieve the entitlements to these benefits through their inclusion in company policies. The union has always regarded such entitlements as second-class entitlements because the company is capable of unilaterally withdrawing them simply by changing its policies. The reason most commonly given by companies for insisting on addressing issues such as this by means of policy rather than an agreement enforceable for a term is that they are in areas covered by legislation which is likely to be subject to change and such changes are more easily accommodated through changes to policy rather than changes to agreements.

While the union accepts that, where community standards are changing, arrangements need to be sufficiently flexible to facilitate improvements, the changes to parental leave payment arrangements proposed in the budget are such that employers are likely to take the first opportunity to change their employees' agreed company funded entitlements for the worse. By deducting any benefit provided by employers from the benefit payable by the government, the government is providing an absolute and undeniable incentive to employers to cut back the benefits they afford to their employees and pass those costs onto the taxpayer. The safest bet in industrial relations is that employers who provide paid parental leave benefits as a consequence of company policy provisions will move to change their company policies and companies which provide those benefits as a consequence of agreement provisions will seek to renegotiate those agreements as soon as they expire.

And why wouldn't they—the money taken out of employer funded schemes will be made up by the government. How crazy is that! Surely a government looking to limit its expenditure should be turning its mind to how it can encourage employers to pick up a bigger share of the costs for employees meeting their family responsibilities. Instead of this, they are telling good employers like the ones I mentioned earlier to pull back, to save the money they had been contributing to their employees' family welfare and transfer it straight to their bottom line while the taxpayer picks up the tab. The Prime Minister has been attempting to woo the vote of Australia's women through his plans for paid parental leave since before the 2010 election. All that has happened since is that his proposal has been cut back further and further; and when the issue is addressed in this budget the government achieves nothing other than a perverse incentive to employers to wind back the parental leave arrangements to which they had already agreed.

Another significant budget measure affecting SDA members is the proposal with respect to child care. Child care is an important service for working families. While I do not personally believe—as the government apparently does—that lifting the workforce participation rate is the highest goal to which to aspire, or that the only work of value performed by a mother is in the paid workforce, I nevertheless applaud measures to improve the availability of child care. Many SDA members cannot afford formal childcare arrangements and rely on the support of family and friends. What they cannot afford to be without, however, is family tax benefit B. This benefit is critical to a large number of families struggling to get by where mum is a second income earner with a part-time job in retail. Linking the provision of additional childcare funding to cuts to family tax benefit B is an extraordinarily callous move by the government which shows an utter disregard for families who place a priority on one parent spending as much time as possible at home with the children. I, for one, will stand up for the unpaid work of mothers. I will stand up for working women struggling to balance family commitments with part-time work. Higher taxes for low-income workers, incentives for employers to cut paid parental leave schemes and cuts to the family tax benefit show this big-spending, high-taxing government for what it is: a government with no regard for ordinary workers or for Australian families.