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

Let's look at what's been happening with wages in this country, prepandemic and postpandemic. Prepandemic we had wage stagnation under this government—eight years of this government being in power and we've seen year after year of wage stagnation. Now, post-COVID, it's very clear, when we look at reports from economists and the Reserve Bank, that we're facing not only wage stagnation but wage decline. So over eight years wages have stagnated, and over the coming years wages will decline. But don't worry, because not everyone's wages have been suppressed. Reports today are that in the past 12 months the incomes of billionaires have gone up by 56 per cent! So to everybody else out there: your wages have declined but, under this government's watch, billionaires are making more and more money.

Actually, I don't begrudge them that. What I begrudge is the fact that government doesn't understand how trickle-down doesn't work. You actually have to give working people—people in the communities, small businesses that negotiate with those billionaires and quite large businesses that negotiate with those billionaires—power to get a share of the wealth, not leave it to the small clique which they support. The system that they support and they've generated says that billionaires are okay and the rest of us aren't.

Then you go to what the government is doing in the latest drive for a pay cut—scrutiny of enterprise agreements. Well, let's get rid of that! Let's make sure that enterprise agreements don't meet standards; let's make sure that the commission is rushed and required to look at and review agreements before it's had an appropriate time to properly review them, because that's what the government have proposed. But they've actually gone a step further. They've said that appropriate parties, such as unions, can't make applications, as they previously have done, to criticise or highlight those dodgy deals. What happens when those dodgy deals go through? Not only are workers abused; it also destabilises markets. It means that those companies who are doing the right thing are destabilised by the people who are getting away with theft. That's legalised theft. The government have done nothing effective about wage theft, and the latest proposals are a small shadow of what's needed.

What they want to do is actually legalise it. They want to put bad employees in the front seat and put good employees down on the ground. They want to make sure that there is a disproportionate and destabilising effect in the labour market. Because what are they about? Wage decline. Wage decline year after year, and their record proves it.

Now they also want to have non-monetary benefits. They want to expand the non-monetary benefits, which were originally put in acts so that people had protections at the Industrial Relations Commission for benefits they received in negotiated agreements and elsewhere. It wasn't below the NES. But what they propose now is that McDonald's application—rather than paying you wage increases, you can have wage cuts based on getting a packet of fries! What do they say when you go into McDonald's? In this case, it's: 'Here are your pay cuts, and do you want fries with that?' This government is now making it legal for the company store to operate. That was something that was thrown out in the early 1900s in this country and progressively abolished effectively throughout the 1900s and even further. But this government wants to go back to it. They want to go back to it, because they just can't help themselves. They have to say: 'Here's a pandemic; here's a crisis. Who do we really need to do over?' It's those people who have the chance, the opportunity and the desire to express their voice collectively.

I'll have to finish on the gig economy. Bijoy Paul and four others were killed as a result of being in the gig economy. There are tens of thousands of people in the gig economy, and what does this government do? There are no regulations to support them, protect them or give them rights. In fact, if you look at a number of the government's people on the backbench, they're fully supporting those people being exploited.