Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Foreign Affairs (Senator Payne) to questions without notice asked by Senator Farrell today relating to insecure work.

What we've seen over the last 12 months is extraordinary service, extraordinary sacrifice and extraordinary dedication by the essential workers in our country and a dawning realisation that essential workers are not only those who put out fires, rescue us in natural disasters and provide police, emergency and health services but also hospital staff, cleaners, security workers, workers all through the supply chain striving to keep essential goods available, workers in our ports and airports and public servants in Centrelink, Health and Tax. ACTU secretary Sally McManus pretty much summed it up when she said, 'The economy, local businesses will not be able to recover if workers are facing pay cuts.' She was of course talking about the plans of this government to cut the wages and conditions of workers in this country under IR laws. She went on to say: 'Families need the confidence to spend. You can't heal the economy by hurting working people.'

Prime Minister Morrison, summoning his best sincere face, announced, 'We're all in this together,' in April last year. 'We've got to put down our weapons,' he declared. Well, it's quite clear now that the Morrison government has picked up those weapons and is armed to the teeth. Its plan is a pathway for employers to cut pay due to the impact of COVID-19 on their businesses, to wipe out back-pay claims for misclassified casuals and to have so-called flexibility for part-time workers to pick up shifts without overtime rates.

The Minister for Defence, in her answer, talked about the BOOT, the better off overall test. The government wants to suspend rules that prevent enterprise agreements from undercutting minimum award standards. Just to put this change into perspective: it wasn't even discussed—it wasn't even on the agenda—at the government's 'We're all in this together' IR meetings last year. We know that suspending the BOOT will result in cuts to take-home pay for one in four workers that are covered by enterprise agreements. Weaker BOOT protections will spur a wave of new enterprise agreements, allowing employers further opportunity to suppress labour costs, which are already tracking at their slowest pace in postwar history.

We know that the government's proposal would also allow part-time employees covered by the 12 awards in the retail, food and accommodation industries to work extra shifts at ordinary rates, without the overtime loading. This has been referred to as 'part-time flexibility', but in truth we all know that it's casual employment by another name. Allowing extra work without overtime will cut take-home pay. This will allow employers to effectively use part-time workers as yet another form of casual labour. This government believes that any job can be casual so long as workers are desperate enough to accept it. There can be no doubt that this will feed the further spread of insecure employment without paid leave entitlements.

In the news today we see that the proposal by the government on the bill has been labelled as an immediate threat to public health by a significant group of public health experts from the Australian National University. Casual workers, who have no sick leave, have already borne the brunt of this pandemic, and now the government is brazenly attempting to legislate to have as many casual workers as possible. In reality, the changes to both part-time and casual employment rules will discourage new hiring. If existing employees can't be costly flexed in line with employer needs, why would you hire anyone else?

This bill has been spruiked by two 'hollow men'—marketing man Prime Minister Morrison and Attorney-General Mr Christian Porter—and it's a scam. The changes that it will introduce will be marketed by these hollow men as a trigger for post-pandemic job creation. But, again, that claim is hollow. It's a hollow claim made by hollow men. The statement that they made back in 2020 that 'we're all in this together' was very short lived. These are hollow men and they should leave IR alone. (Time expired)