Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business Energy (Senator Cash) to a question without notice asked by Senator Sheldon today relating to Qantas.

Yesterday's national account figures are nothing to crow about. Our GDP is nowhere close to where it was a year ago. Investment is down, consumption is still down, wages are still stagnant, the labour share of income has fallen to record lows and there are still 2.4 million Australians either unemployed or underemployed. The Morrison government are out there congratulating themselves while millions of Australians are still hurting and the jobless queues are growing. Nothing has been done about the challenges of insecure work and underemployment. It is clear for many Australians that what looks like a recovery on paper will still look like a recession for them.

Just ask the 2,000 newly outsourced workers at Qantas; 2,000 Australian men and women, with families right across Australia, now without work because of the heartless decisions of the Qantas board under the government's watch and the government's subsidies. Only a few hours ago, I stood with Qantas workers like Sean. Sean works for Qantas as ground crew at Canberra Airport, and he has a wife and three young daughters. He said, 'How am I to tell my three girls that you can work hard but you can be replaced by a company that will pay people less?' This is happening on the government's watch and with Australian taxpayers' money—no accountability, no control and no responsibility of these companies and the actions that they are taking. You, the government, are abandoning hardworking Australians.

Is this the economy that we want in Australia? These are jobs that will go to the lowest common denominator, to companies that pay the lowest wages. Jobs will go to companies with lower conditions. The workers at Qantas will have to beg for their old jobs at lower rates and lower conditions. Why? Because of the CEO Alan Joyce's corporate bastardry. He doesn't care about the workers that made the company the 'spirit of Australia'. This is quite obviously not the Australian way.

If losing your job at an outsourced company isn't enough of a kick in the teeth, Alan Joyce and the board of Qantas have done this plan with the implicit backing of the government. Qantas has received more than $800 million in government support, tax relief and JobKeeper payments—all of it taxpayer money, much of it from the taxes of many thousands of Qantas workers—to keep the airline alive, to keep it flying and to keep these jobs secure. Instead, when Alan Joyce and the board chose to abandon these workers they did so taking Morrison's money and running for it. They did it with the Prime Minister not saying a word. The Prime Minister and the government have abandoned these workers to lower pay and lower conditions, all the while patting themselves on the back that we are technically out of a recession. The government is crowing about comeback. These Qantas workers want a comeback too. They want to come back to their jobs at the same rates and conditions they worked hard to earn.

The road to a better economy and to recovery is getting longer and longer every day that the Morrison government ignores the catastrophe in the aviation industry. First they let Virgin fail, leaving thousands of workers without jobs and the corporate raiders to pick through the scraps. Then they abandoned the workers at dnata, retrospectively denying them JobKeeper with the cruel stroke of a pen—a mistake that the Treasurer could fix this afternoon with just another stroke of that pen. And now the workers at Qantas, more than 2000 everyday, hardworking Australians, have been abandoned by this government. Only a few weeks ago, this chamber passed a motion calling on Alan Joyce and Qantas to stop this madness. Did they listen or did they care? No. Is this the future economy in Australia, one where businesses take from the public purse with one hand and, with the other, sign away thousands of jobs without a thought of the cost to their workforce and fellow Australians? And the government turns a blind eye to blatant acts of corporate bastardry.