Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] On the legislation before us, the Economic Recovery Package (JobMaker Hiring Credit) Amendment Bill 2020, let's step back a little bit to the beginning of the conversation and explore what people, particularly young people as a generation, are experiencing right now, what this bill does, the problems with it and what needs to be done instead of it. We know that right now in our community people are really struggling. We're struggling with three things, primarily. There are the impacts of the health crisis and the continuing impacts of coronavirus in terms of our opportunities, whether they be in education or the employment space. We know that we're also struggling with a broader climate crisis at the moment, and many young people are staring down the barrel right now at a future that will be dominated by the backdrop of a rapidly escalating climate crisis that the major parties don't seem willing to address. Finally, we're dealing with the crisis of mental health in our community, particularly for young people. We know that levels of mental ill health, of anxiety, have never been higher than they are right now, and that many of us as young people struggle to access mental health care supports where and when we need them.

In the context of these triple crises that are facing us as a generation, we have a bill come before the Senate tonight that is casually known as the 'JobMaker bill'. It is a bit of a strange title. On the surface it doesn't really explain much of where it fits in a broader context, but you hear the word 'JobMaker' and you are inclined to think that it is designed to make jobs. It's a funny old thing; we have a Prime Minister with a marketing background and tonight is a night when you certainly see it, because if you pop the lid on this particular piece of legislation you discover a very small piece of legislation that doesn't really have much to do with making jobs. There is not much evidence to suggest that it will create many jobs at all. Ultimately, it doesn't address many of the long-term challenges that we as young people have been experiencing in the employment space, even before COVID began.

Let's go a bit deeper and look at what this bill does in simple terms. It basically enables large corporations to claim a wage subsidy, an amount of money, as a result of employing a young person, within a certain age range, to engage in a job for no fewer than 20 hours a week. This wage subsidy scheme has a very basic structure, and that has a couple of potential flow-ons that there are legitimate concerns about and a couple of flaws as well. Firstly, because of the way that the legislation has been worded, unfortunately it will be possible for an employer to take a full-time position, for which they are not receiving a wage subsidy, and split that position into, say, two or three 20-hour a week casualised positions. The employer will then receive the wage subsidies, increase its budget bottom line and, at the end of the 12-month period, sack the three people it hired and go on its merry way.

It's another example of how, when you dig into the government's response packages to COVID, you find that, while they look reasonable on the surface, there are structures by which public funds are disproportionately redistributed to large corporations that make sizeable donations to the Liberal Party at the state and federal level. That's part of the reason that if we look at the corporate profit trajectories over the last year or so we see that, despite the economic impacts of COVID-19, the share prices of some of our largest companies have shot through the roof. The profits have been outstanding, because so much money has been passed from the public purse into the corporate bottom line.

One of the nastier effects of this legislation will be to pit older workers, particularly older women, against younger workers. We know that it is very difficult for a young person to get a job right now. We also know that if you are over the age of 50 or 55 there's a lot of age based discrimination at the other end of the age spectrum. This will result in a lot of discrimination in the workplace, but one of the great concerns about this particular piece of legislation is that it will incentivise the hiring, on short-term, insecure contracts, of younger people at the expense of older workers, particularly women. This is a cohort, a group of people, that we already understand to be really disadvantaged when it comes to employment outcomes as well as retirement savings. The superannuation of older women in the workforce is disgracefully lower than that of men of the same age, because of a lot of wage based discrimination related to gender and different roles in the workplace.

Finally, I think it's important to look at the moral that sits behind this legislation. This might be a controversial observation, but I ask you to stick with me in consideration of the central question that you discover when you back up the truck a bit from this legislation and look at what we might call the fundamental premise. The fundamental premise of this legislation is that, regardless of the type of work—regardless of the amount of time, regardless of, in some ways, the conditions, the wage, the way that job insecurity might impact on your mental health—any job is better than no job, no matter how poor that job might be. This idea comes to us after decades, really—in some ways century on century—of a building idea that human value is inextricably connected to a human being's engagement in the workforce, what we sometimes hear spoken of as the inherent dignity of work. On its surface, this idea seems quite normal, quite uncontroversial and not particularly damaging. However, we need to look a bit deeper and ask ourselves the question: what does this mean for groups of people who are structurally inhibited from entering the economy, like young people or disabled people?

Many of us are locked out of the workforce. But many of us are also placed into jobs in so-called disability enterprises that pay 30c an hour, and those practices are justified because it is suggested that there is an inherent dignity in work regardless of what you are paid or the conditions of that payment.

It's one of these strange old ideas that have grown out of a misinterpretation, in my belief, of the foundational tenets of workplace activism and unionism. The reality of the history of the union movement here in Australia and around the world is that it grew out of an understanding of the inherent dignity of the worker; the inherent dignity and right of all people when they're on the job, when they're at work and when they're in the workplace to be safe and fairly paid. These rights and high ideals have over time been taken and twisted into a space now where there is a belief that the engagement in the job itself is the wellspring of the dignity. It is an idea that I think we need to push back on as young people and legislators because it ultimately sets up so many in our community to fail, to feel a sense of indignity and shame because of an inability to gain work. The reality is that human dignity is inherent to human beings, regardless of whether we might be able to sell our labour for an hourly rate in a market place that is high enough for us to be able to eat or drink water or have a secure roof over our head. It's an idea we need to bin and replace with an idea of inherent human dignity for all people in all places. This bill doesn't address that; this bill makes it worse, at a time when we as young people, as I said, are battling against a history of insecure work that stretches back far, far before COVID.

The latest figures that I've been able to find for WA show us that even before the pandemic we were struggling as young people with a 30 per cent insecure work rate, in some parts of our state, between 25 and 30 per cent. For many of us, insecure work is some of the only work that we have ever known. The practical function of this bill is to come in on the back of that to supercharge it, if you like, to make it a hell of a lot worse, to pit us against people in their 50s, people trying to make their way, and to pay McDonald's a fat packet for the privilege of doing so. It is a con job; it's a marketing exercise. It's a glossy pamphlet with nothing under the hood. One of the most pernicious parts of it, in many ways, is that there's nothing under the hood because it delegates a huge amount of power to ministers in the executive branch of the government to basically make it up as they go along. This bill is the emptiest of scaffolds that will then be given to the Morrison government to design nearly any and all programs that they can, in any way, link back to improving people's opportunity of gaining work, which is a real shift in where the legislative accountability should be.

I could go on for a lot longer on these issues if there were more to read in the bill, but the reality of this piece of legislation is that there isn't much there. There are no details as to how the program will work, because it grants the minister the power to make it up as they go along in a way that is quite unacceptable to us in the Greens. Senator Faruqi will be putting forward a number of amendments and suggested changes to this legislation, through the course of the debate, in order to attempt to improve it and make it better. But the bill that sits before us right now, unamended as it is, is not something that the Australian Greens will be supporting and not something that the community supports.

People in our community, be we young people or older people, want meaningful opportunities to expend our time, build our lives and define purpose on our terms. Some of us may come to the conclusion that paid employment right out of school is what we want to do. Some of us may decide that we want to study at university or go to TAFE or do something in between. The goal of us here as a legislature should be not only to provide the opportunities, the abilities and the support mechanisms that are needed for people to explore that life path, to define and discover for themselves what constitutes for them a good life, but also to find new and innovative ways to reduce the overall amount of time that we as people have to expend in workplaces that might not be the most enjoyable thing, away from our friends and family.

There was a point in history where, at least for an admittedly very narrowly defined group of people, Australia was defined as a worker's paradise. It struck a balance between work, leisure and rest. However, in 2020, we discovered that we are an economy that is driving people more and more to spend time away from their friends and family to make wages that are stagnating, giving their lives to work, living to work rather than working to live, which is ultimately the goal people want to achieve. If you talk to anybody in Europe, particularly in countries such as France or Italy, they take a look at the Australian work-life balance and they laugh and laugh. We have to be addressing those underlying issues. This bill doesn't go anywhere near doing that, and that is why we in the Greens will be opposing it as it stands.