Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

It is outrageous, Senator Polley. It's another example of what I was talking about earlier, which is that we're not seeing an even bargain between working people in this country and high-flying executives on their high high-flying salaries. Again, we've seen Qantas say today that they'll outsource 2,000 more jobs—particularly amongst ground staff and baggage handlers. That of course comes on top of the thousands of redundancies that Qantas has already announced.

No-one is denying that Qantas, along with other aviation companies and anyone exposed to the tourism industry, is doing it tough right now. But why is it always working people who have to pay the price of this? Qantas's motives can be seen quite clearly in the statements they've made today, which indicate that the reason they've made this decision to outsource 2,000 more jobs is to cut costs, which can only mean that those workers end up being paid less. Again, we have this government standing by and allowing corporate Australia to take these kinds of actions at the expense of working people, and this is going to make the recession worse. Just as the government's own decisions to exclude over a million workers from receiving the JobKeeper payment made the recession worse, and just as the government's decision to reduce the JobKeeper payments and to reduce the JobSeeker payments are making this recession worse by taking money out of the economy at the wrong time—at too early a time—just as those decisions by the government are going to make this recession worse, the government's inaction when we continue to see big corporate players in this country lay off thousands of workers or come up with tricky contracting arrangements which will cut people's pay, will make the recession worse. The reason is that if these workers from Qantas are outsourced—and it does appear that that's going to occur—then they'll be paid less. They'll have less money in their pockets to spend in local businesses, which means that those businesses will themselves have to lay off more people. Again, that's going to make things worse. Obviously, it's going to be bad for those individual workers now, but it will actually mean less money flowing through the economy and more people losing their jobs.

I don't know how often we have to raise these issues with the government before they're prepared to take action and before they're prepared to stop withdrawing financial support in the form of cutting JobKeeper, cutting JobSeeker and letting corporate Australia lay off thousands of people, or cut their pay, because these things are going to make things worse. We've seen over the course of today various ministers, from the Treasurer down, starting to crow about what they think the national accounts figures might have in store for the country this week. You can see them already preparing to tell us that everything has turned the corner and that everything is getting back on its feet. Well, if that's not a sign of how out of touch this government is then I don't know what is. If you talk to any Australian, they'll tell you that they're in fear of losing their job, if they haven't lost it already, and that they're in fear of being unable to meet their mortgage payments. Only last week I was at my kids' sport, talking with parents there who have been stood down for months and who are very worried about what this government has in store come March in the form of JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments. So if we see any attempt from this government this week to crow about the economy turning the corner because of some data that we might get from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, that will be another sign that this government has completely lost touch with ordinary Australians who are doing it really tough right now because of the decisions that this government is making.

The most recent unemployment data shows us that there are seven per cent unemployed—