Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to express my disagreement with the perspectives expressed during this address-in-reply debate around the purpose of the recall of this parliament. The couple of days of sitting so far have been a farce, with today seeing absolutely no legislation placed on the Notice Paper from the government for debate in this chamber. What was the rationale for recalling people? The logic provided to the Governor-General was that industrial relations on construction sites is an issue of national importance because, amongst other things, construction is a large part of the Australian economy, so productivity on construction sites is important. I think that is the essence of their argument. Let's take a look at that piece by piece.

It is true that construction is significant, but it is by no means the largest industry in our economy. If the government were truly concerned about significant areas of the Australian economy, it would do well to look a little more closely at the finance sector. It is certainly much bigger than the construction sector and it is certainly more systemically important than the construction sector. It was not industrial relations in the construction sector that jeopardised the entire global economy just eight years ago. Hundreds of thousands of Australians did not lose on their retirement savings because of misconduct on building sites. And, despite the very best efforts of the Minister for Employment at every question time for the last 12 months, it has not been scandals in construction firms that have decorated the front page of our newspapers. The scandals that have been on the front page, the scandals we do hear about, go to the culture inside our major retail banks and our investment banks. Those scandals speak to a culture of risk-taking that, in the very recent past, has led banks to make investment decisions that pose systemic risks to the whole Australian economy. It is for that reason that the Australian Labor Party has proposed that a royal commission be undertaken into the practices of our banks, to make sure that it is in the best possible shape to serve the Australian economy in the way that we understand is so important.

What is the second limb of the government's argument? It is that a lack of workplace productivity in the construction sector is holding us back. The statistics tell another story, because in fact labour productivity across the economy has grown, not fallen, over the past decade. In fact, the Productivity Commission reported a few years ago that slow or negative multifactor productivity growth in manufacturing and finance and the insurance services in recent years has been a major drag on the economy-wide result. It is not actually making comment about the construction sector and it is not the case that labour productivity is really the problem that we are facing. Even if it were, the next part of the government's argument, I think, is that the reintroduction of the ABCC might do something to lift productivity. It did not last time. What did the Productivity Commission say in May 2014? It said:

The evidence that the ABCC stimulated material improvements in aggregate productivity or achieved cost reductions is weak.

The Productivity Commission, not a particularly left-wing body, said that the evidence for improvement in productivity as a consequence of the ABCC is weak. The evidence is not there, and yet this is the argument relied upon by the government to establish the basis for the economy-wide effect of introducing one new regulator. It is ridiculous. It is a fabrication and it just does not stand up when you look at it closely.

Let's take it to the next part of their argument. Even if the government were right about the impact of productivity on construction sites, we do not need the ABCC to improve that. We have existing bodies that can and do investigate corruption and misconduct by union officials. The Minister for Employment as good as admitted that yesterday. Yesterday during question time—and I will observe that it is not for the first time; this has become a rather predictable aspect of question time, in fact—once again the Minister for Employment was reading examples of what she claimed was union misconduct into the Hansard. Where did those examples come from? She was quoting from court judgements. Senator Back, in his contribution—Mr Acting Deputy President Back, there you are now in the chair—did exactly the same thing: he read from court judgements. These are court judgements that have only come about as a result of police or Fair Work taking action, doing the job that they were set up to do: investigating misconduct in not just in this industry but in industry. The system works. We do not need a new body that has coercive powers that fly in the face of 600 years of English legal tradition. I can confirm my views. I do think that the police and the courts ought to be allowed to get on with the job that they have been tasked with. We do not need a special body with extraordinary powers to deal with what are quite straightforward issues in workplaces.

The fact that the government believe that industrial relations on construction sites is the biggest challenge facing the Australian economy should tell us something about their vision. It is a vision that lacks imagination and it is a vision that is extremely limited. The coalition, unhappily, has a simplistic view of the Australian economy. Out of one eye they see their corporate donors, whose interests they will support no matter what. Out of the other eye they see unions, which they will attack no matter what. That is not really the way we ought to treat economic management. The coalition's blindness to the economy as a whole is irresponsible. It endangers the nation's economic future and it should disqualify them from government.

There is nothing on the Notice Paper today in this House. We hear that the Senate may not be sitting after today, despite a promise of three weeks of extra sitting. It is a sign of a government with no ideas and no plans and offering no hope to Australia's people. With an extra three weeks here in the Senate and perhaps in the House of Representatives we could have debated same-sex marriage—something we know most Australians would like us to act on. We could have talked about a proper solution to climate change—something to address a very real and scientifically validated challenge that poses real threats to the nation's economy. But, of course, we do not see any legislation or any plans brought forward into the chamber today. Maybe, closer to the static concerns of the coalition, we could have discussed a comprehensive plan to lift the nation's productivity.

What would that look like? Let's start with No. 1. It might be that we would seek to remove distortions from the nation's tax system. It might be that, as Labor has proposed, we start to look at the overly generous superannuation tax breaks that are provided for very high-income earners—people who earn more than $300,000 a year who are, nonetheless, subject to very generous tax breaks on contributions that they make to their superannuation, allowing them to accrue balances in those super accounts that go well beyond what could reasonably be imagined as a comfortable standard necessary for retirement.

Perhaps in the time available we could have gone after multinational tax cheats and had a look at who pays their taxes and what we might do to make sure that everyone in this economy pulls their weight, not just the pay-as-you-go earners—the ordinary mums and dads—but the multinationals who benefit from our educated workforce and infrastructure. We could make sure that they paid their tax and made their contribution to the Australian economy. Maybe we could have had a talk about negative gearing and capital gains tax, because the current tax breaks, which previous speakers to the debate have referred to, support investors to buy their sixth home. They do not support couples who are buying their first home; in fact, they place those young couples who go to an auction at a positive disadvantage to the person who is standing there, buying their sixth home and seeking to enhance their investment portfolio. The consequence of this distorting tax framework for housing is that it pushes people into the outer suburbs of our cities, where there is not proper infrastructure—and that does create a drag on productivity. It creates a drag on the economy as a whole.

We have really good analysis about Sydney, in my home state, from the Grattan Institute. In some suburbs in Sydney, only 14 per cent of the total jobs available can be accessed by a 45-minute car trip. Think about that. You set out and you might drive in any direction for 45 minutes. What percentage of the available jobs do you think you can access? The answer for many people in Sydney's suburbs is just 14 per cent of all of the jobs. It does not help people find work and it does not help them find work that will advance their careers and allow them to contribute to the nation's economy. The situation is even worse if you are on public transport. In many outer suburbs of Sydney, you can access fewer than one in 10 of the city's jobs within an hour on public transport. Just 10 per cent of the city's jobs are available to you, even if you are willing to travel for an hour on public transport.

It is a national disgrace that people are living in this way, and it has important impacts, interestingly, on women. Women's workforce participation falls massively in Sydney's outer suburbs. Men and women in the eastern suburbs and the inner west participate in the workforce at relatively similar levels, but, in parts of Sydney's outer west and the south-west, women's workforce participation falls to more than 20 per cent below that of men. One of the reasons is that those women understand that, if they have to travel for an hour on public transport or 45 minutes in their vehicle to access a very small number of low-paid jobs, that is not a realistic way of combining work and family. So we have real productivity challenges that this parliament should be addressing but is not.

It brings me to my second point, which is the significance of our nation's infrastructure. The Prime Minister has promised to focus on cities, but his Minister for Cities and the Built Environment lost his way sometime—he lost his focus in a bar. By 2025 we will have an extra 4.5 million people living in our cities, and we need to provide infrastructure for those people in a non-partisan way. The approach we would take in government is to put Infrastructure Australia at the centre of capital investment, to bring some rigour, some transparency and some authority to the process of infrastructure planning, to make sure that this process is not politicised and to make sure that there is always a business case when Commonwealth money is spent on public infrastructure in any of our cities.

What else might we do? A Labor approach to the economy might see us actually focus in a serious way on improving women's workforce participation. Australia as a whole is, supposedly, committed to lifting female workforce participation. We signed on to a G20 process to lift it, in fact, by 25 per cent by 2025. The Grattan Institute has calculated that, if Australia lifted its workforce participation just to match Canada's, we could add $25 billion annually to GDP. But the only way that we can realistically do this is by having mothers come back to work earlier. We need to think carefully about what it is that is preventing women from returning to work—and the answer is very clear. It is childcare costs, it is the failure to provide for career paths to develop the skills of these women and it is how our tax and transfer systems interact to create serious disincentives for women returning to work. That is something I might have put on the agenda if I wanted to have a serious debate about Australia's economic prosperity, instead of the narrowness that we have witnessed in recent days in this chamber.

Item 4—I have a long list—is that maybe we ought to think about education. Maybe we can think about properly funding higher education. This government has had an ideas boom in how we might strip funding out of universities. It has had an ideas boom in innovative ways to undermine one of our most profitable export sectors. But it certainly has not demonstrated any interest whatsoever in genuinely improving the educational capital that is held by the vast bulk of the Australian workforce, and it is a very great shame that that was not listed for debate in the Senate sittings that were proposed for this week.

Item 5 is a high-tech workforce. Maybe that would be part of a productivity agenda for Australia. Two out of five science and maths teachers for years 7 to 10 do not have degrees in that subject. Twenty thousand teachers in science, maths and IT did not actually study those subjects at universities. We have put forward, in recent months, a very clear plan to start addressing this problem, because it is critical that we start to train our young people in science and technology. We need to encourage more women to enter the field and we need to boost the skills of existing teachers. The truth is, unless we can build a workforce full of young men and young women who are capable of participating in the technology jobs of the future, we will struggle to maintain the lifestyle and the standard of living that have made Australia such a wonderful place to live in recent decades.

I put all those things on the table because I think that they do draw a stark contrast with the narrowness of the vision expressed by coalition senators in recent days and the narrowness of the vision expressed by Prime Minister Turnbull. It defies belief that we would reduce the performance of the entire Australian economy to a handful of issues in one sector of the economy. It defies belief that we would recall a parliament to debate only that issue for three weeks, at enormous expense to the Australian taxpayer.

I would say to anyone listening: Australia really deserves to have a government that actually has a plan. The coalition seems absolutely determined to squander the chance it has been given—a golden chance—to improve the lives of ordinary Australians. Instead, its priority is satisfying its myopic obsession with trade unions. Given the infighting we have witnessed since Christmas, it may be that this focus on unions is because it is the only thing that members in the coalition party room can actually agree on. They certainly cannot agree on the approach to tax reform. They certainly cannot agree on how they should approach anti-bullying programs in schools. They certainly cannot agree on how they might approach same-sex marriage. They do not seem to be able to agree on whether or not they agree with the National Water Initiative and the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.