Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Obviously, quite a few hours have now passed since question time, where we kicked off by asking questions about the very sad announcement by Telstra overnight that it would be cutting 8,000 jobs from its Australian workforce. This is yet another absolute tragedy of massive job losses that we're seeing in Australia under the stewardship of the Turnbull government. What's probably even more tragic is that, as the day has unfolded and various ministers have been asked about this in question time, in press conferences and elsewhere, consistently we've heard from Turnbull government ministers classic laissez faire, hands-off responses: 'This is a commercial decision,' or, 'It's a matter for Telstra,' or, most tragically of all, from Minister Paul Fletcher, 'Things happen.' As I say, it is another classic example of how this government approaches managing the economy and ensuring that Australians have good, secure, well-paid jobs.

None of us can forget the approach that the government took in the previous term in relation to the car industry, when not only were they quite happy to stand on the sidelines and watch the car industry in this country be closed down, at the cost of tens of thousands of jobs, but they actively cheered it on. They actively encouraged and dared some of the biggest car-makers in the world to shut down the industry, and—what do you know?—they did. We kissed goodbye to tens of thousands of good, well-paid, secure jobs that in many cases had been held in certain families for generations. And it's happening again today with the loss of these 8,000 jobs in Telstra.

It wasn't until this announcement was made that I found out that funding for the very thing these Telstra workers, and the car industry workers before them, need most from government—labour market support to assist them to find new work, retrain and move into new occupations—was actually cut in this year's federal budget. In this year's budget, the federal government, the Turnbull government, has taken money out of its labour market support programs, which are used as structural adjustment packages to assist workers in industries experiencing large numbers of retrenchments, just like these today. Not only do we have a government that's prepared to just wash its hands of any responsibility and say, 'This is just a commercial decision; things happen; nothing we can do,' just like it did with the car industry; it's actually making it harder for these workers to find new jobs by taking money out of its own labour market support programs. It's another classic example of this government's approach to jobs and the lack of concern it has for working people.

Telstra are now under an immediate obligation to start consulting with their workforce and unions about managing this change for as many employees as possible. We've seen this in other industries, and I'm thinking particularly of banking. Some of the big banks announced massive job losses recently, and what has become clear to me, particularly through a Senate inquiry I'm involved in, is that some of the banks are not consulting their workforces or unions at all about what other opportunities there might be within these large organisations to move people into different roles. I wouldn't be at all surprised if, at the same time as cutting these 8,000 jobs, Telstra were actually looking at creating other jobs in other parts of its business. It may well be that some of these 8,000 people can simply be retrained and redeployed into existing roles rather than being thrown out on the scrap heap, which is what Telstra seems to be planning to do.

The government spend a lot of time crowing about jobs growth, but they never want to own up and they never want to front up when big companies are doing the wrong thing by their workforce, like what we are seeing from Telstra today. The government never talk about the fact that there are well over a million people in Australia who are underemployed, who are not able to find the amount of work which they are looking for. They don't want to talk about the rising level of insecure work that is hurting so many Australians right around the country. They never want to acknowledge research from groups like the Centre for Future Work, which was able to show recently that, for the first time in Australian history, now we have less than half of Australians who are employed working in permanent, full-time positions with paid entitlements like sick leave and annual leave. The government constantly want to deny that we have a crisis of insecure work, when the facts show that more and more people are surviving on casual work and part-time work when they want more and are finding it difficult to feed their families. The government have to do more. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.