Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too would like to make a contribution in this debate on the Australian economy. It's always interesting to follow Senator Bragg, because he usually gives you enough ammunition or material for a couple of contributions. But I don't want to get sidetracked into his ramble about rent-seekers and bloodsuckers, because those sorts of people are mainly on his side.

We are 12 months into this pandemic. I think all Australians need to take a bow and say: 'We've done the best we possibly could as Australian citizens.' We've been led by a government that, despite having its flaws, has made some very impressive moves, and JobKeeper is amongst them. But then you look at JobKeeper and do the analysis over 12 months.

The airline industry has had people unload and load planes since around 1959. In 1976 I was one of those people. Here we are in 2021, where a company like Qantas got JobKeeper. It sustained employment. Then it got done in the Federal Court for not quite following the rules, so to speak. Then they went to appeal, and it's now in the High Court. There's an old adage: business and Liberal governments will never waste a crisis. What has Qantas done? Qantas has abolished those jobs. They no longer exist as direct hire of the airlines. I worked for TAA, Australian Airlines and Qantas, but that job now no longer exists. There is a crisis, and they saw an opportunity to spend their ground-handling functions. They will come back at vastly lower, inferior rates—that's how it will work.

Today Senator Sheldon asked a question about Virgin. They're getting JobKeeper, but they're already planning to get rid of 2,000 jobs. They're planning to get rid of those jobs because they know they're jobs that are hard to crack. They know they're full of unionists who have agreements, who have willpower, strength and the ability to organise, and who will resist attacks upon them. With the IR bill that's coming our way after 12 months of the pandemic, we can see very clearly what's going to happen into the future.

There's another tranche of change in superannuation. That tranche of change in superannuation is going to impact most significantly—I think this is a point that needs to be stressed every day in this chamber—on working women. They work fewer hours to get less money, they live longer in retirement and their superannuation balances are lower. Any diminution in their ability to get decent superannuation prior to retirement condemns them to eking out an existence in retirement on the pension and struggling.

The impact is not felt by highly organised union members; they just go and belt it out of the employer. There are plenty of transport employers now paying more than 12 per cent because it's been negotiated in agreements. As always, these changes impact on those who are least able to defend themselves, those who are least able to be organised and those who are more frequently out of the workforce and who, more often than not, get lower outcomes in respect of wages. These are the people that these changes will impact on. When Senator Bragg rails against that monster of superannuation, he's actually railing against the 50 per cent of the Australian community who are going to struggle to even get close to a respectable retirement income—and that is the women working in Australia.

I'd like to have a look, and I might even ask in estimates if there's any assessment of how many women took money out of their superannuation accounts. How many women availed themselves of the $20,000 and potentially put themselves well down the path to poverty in retirement? That's what this government facilitated. It all sounded very good: 'Take 20 grand out and look after yourself.' But you really took your future away. It will always impact on those least able to defend themselves: migrant workers, unorganised workers and women workers.

If we go into the IR changes, Senator Bragg says we have to get taxes down and make it easier for people to employ in Australia. Well, it's easy to employ in Australia; there's thousands and millions of hardworking Australians who will give you 120 per cent a day. All they ask for is the legal outcome with respect to an award or an enterprise agreement. But it's been falling away for decades now. I spoke to a young woman the other day. She is at university, had three months off, got a job and was getting quite respectable pay. Her complaint was twofold. One is that she never got paid on the same day of the week at any time. If Monday was payday, it came on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Her other complaint was that her superannuation appeared on her payslip but it didn't appear in her account. This is going on every day of the week. No-one is policing this stuff.

We had a company fold in Adelaide the other day despite the enormous injection of capital works into Adelaide. There has been an enormous injection of capital works into steel fabrication, concrete road building and the like. A company fell over with $200 million worth of debt, leaving a parade of small businesses in its wake and leaving hundreds of workers unpaid. One of the telling things that I noticed was that one of the workers said, 'I knew the company was in trouble when my super stopped going into my account 12 months ago.' It came on his payslip but it wasn't going into his account.

There is enormous avoidance of legal responsibilities right now, but Senator Bragg's position is: 'We need to make it easier. It's all too complex. Superannuation—what's that? 12 per cent? What's that?' It's simple: it's a part of the employment agreement. It's a legislated component of the laws of Australia. It's not tough. It's not hard to understand, and neither is wages. People who have 42,000 items in their grocery stores and who, with an algorithm, can check out their profitability in an eye blink claim that IR and wages are too expensive or too hard to understand. It's not too hard to understand. It's simple to understand. There are laws in Australia that need to be maintained, safeguarded and policed, and they're not at the moment. The solution is not to dumb them down. The solution is not to give people a bigger and wider avenue to rort and take money off workers, because, at the end of the day, that's going to make the economy smaller, and we need to make the economy bigger.

Those with position, power and privilege—which the Liberals are well versed in dealing with—don't need a hand. The Commonwealth Bank doesn't need a hand. They're working out how big a dividend they want to pay. They don't need a hand on commercial lending or weakening of standards. One in two Australians are with the Commonwealth Bank. Why would you give the bank a hand? They should be in there getting competition enforced upon them. The regulations should be saying, 'Make sure you're doing the right thing here.' That's what the royal commission found.

Senator Bragg has a jihad against the superannuation industry, but there's no evidence that the $3 trillion superannuation industry hasn't contributed to Australia's continued economic growth. We have one of the largest saving pools of any country in the world. The other day I heard Senator Hume say '$30 billion worth of fees--more than the electricity spend in the country'. If it's $3 trillion and $30 billion, is that one per cent? My maths is not really good, but it's probably around one per cent, which in terms of investment fee outcomes is not all that high. I accept there can always be efficiencies. As a superannuation participant in industry super, I look at those fees quite often, but I don't find any reason to be calling people rent seekers and blood suckers, like Senator Bragg does.

Here we are, 12 months into the pandemic, and now crunch time is coming. I think parts of the economy are going really well. The housing industry is overheating. I look at some of the prices paid in suburbs around me and wonder. I bought a house 15 years ago for probably 20 per cent of what they're selling for now. The housing economy is overheating. I've just built a house. I've just completed a house. There was a bit of delay because people were very busy. We went very quickly from an era where builders were going broke to now, where builders can't get the work done on time. There is a bubble going on and it will come off the boil. We want to make sure that we don't collapse in a heap in certain segments of the economy in the next six to 12 months.

I think, importantly, we need to provide ongoing, secure, well-paid, permanent jobs. We can't exist on this plethora of: 'Okay, I have a job as a security guard. I'm now going to go and work for Ola, Uber, Menulog and someone else to try and cobble together 45 hours a week.' We can't exist on that basis forever. I accept that there will always be people who will do two jobs, and even three jobs, and that's fine. They're hardworking people and they're entitled to do that. If we can get back to a bit more permanent employment, a bit more ongoing employment and a bit more certainty, it will steady and underpin a recovery in the economy.

I want to finish on some of the ideology. You can bring this industrial legislation into the parliament and you can pass it. I have spent most of my working life in the industrial relations environment. You will target Mr John Setka, or Mr Transport Worker, or Mr Building Worker, or Mr Meat Worker, or whatever, but the actual effect of what will happen is you will punish the most vulnerable in the community. You will punish the least organised, the least educated and the lowest paid. If your plan is to have an Australia where you push down people who need a hand up, you're not going to be successful.

There is the history of the 12 years of the Howard government. I was a union secretary in all of those 12 years. I got smarter every day. I got sharper every day. Our finances got better every day. We survived those 12 years and came out much stronger. We didn't lose wages and conditions. We bargained hard with employers and got deals. You can change the laws, but the effect of those laws changes. They won't change where you think they're going to change. They will change and decimate people least able to defend themselves—those who have done nothing to you: women in the workforce, cleaners in the workforce, low-paid migrant workers in the workforce.

If the employer has the ability to say, 'I'm going to do this agreement and you lot are all going to vote for it,' and they say, 'Okay; yes, Boss,' that's what will happen. It won't happen in an organised workplace. It won't happen in many transport yards—it'll happen in some. I think the old adage is to never waste a crisis—you're going to be able to point to a mountain of debt and say, 'If we don't do this, you are going to get that.' I've got to tell you: organised labour will defend itself. Organised labour has always defended itself. The effect will primarily be felt by the women in the workforce, particularly with respect to superannuation—I think that is an empirical fact—lower wages, fewer hours, less time in the workforce, reduction in super entitlements, longer in retirement, lower return. They live longer. So it's really one-way traffic there. And, if we look at the industrial relations effect, it will be predominantly amongst unorganised migrant workers who are least able to understand the system. They're not organised and they're going to suffer exponentially.

I'm sure that there are those in the Liberal Party who have a penchant for attacking on the industrial relations front, and I'm sure that there are plenty of other people on that side who have a bit more compassion and understanding of how this system works. Let's hope that Australia doesn't go into this period of creating a mass underclass of underprivileged, underpaid, poorly researched and underfunded-in-retirement workers. I really do hope those opposite take some notice, particularly in respect of women and the outcomes for women in super and in attacking IR.