Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Everything that this Liberal government do and have done since they came to office in 2013 is to weaken unions and drive wages down. That is the reality of it. No matter what other senators from that side come into this chamber and say, that's exactly what they do. When they took away penalty rates of people in hospitality and retail and promised they would create job after job after job, how many jobs were created? None. None at all. That is actually driving down wages.

Don't come into this chamber and try and rewrite history. We know that it's in the government's DNA. Those opposite want to weaken unions, don't want workers to have representation and have no interest in ensuring wages growth. We have seen stagnant wages year after year under the government's watch. We know there are some 13 million Australians who rely on good government and good working conditions. What we also know in this country is the attack that those opposite are now applying and trying to get through this place will only disadvantage some of the lowest paid workers in this country. If you look at aged care, we know they are some of the most underpaid employees in this country. They don't have the respect they deserve, working to look after the most vulnerable people in this community. We know, with these changes, aged-care workers will lose $12,000 per year. That's what the agenda of those opposite is. That is so wrong.

We on this side will, year after year, day after day, week after week, defend workers' rights and we will do everything that we can to ensure that their pay and conditions are preserved. We don't want to see penalty rates taken away. We don't want to see changes to part-time workers. Because if you do not have a full-time job or a job that has legitimacy so that you can go and apply for a bank loan, you're not helping the economy. The government is stifling people's opportunities to buy their own home.

The day-to-day stress that's placed on so many workers in this country with the casualisation and the underemployment in this country is abuse of these workers. That's not doing anything to actually build our economy. If you want to come out of this COVID-19 pandemic and you want to rebuild the economy and get people back working, that's certainly not the way to go about it. But what we've seen, time and time again, is an attack on the most vulnerable workers. We know, whether you're talking about hospitality, retail, aged care or disability, the majority of those workers are women. So you're hitting women again and again and again.

You don't want to increase superannuation for Australian workers. Once again, who are those in our community that are going to be hardest hit? And you want to change and lower the wages for those sectors that I've outlined already, which means women are again going to be the most disadvantaged, not only in their take-home pay and the amount of hours that they're going to have to work; just as importantly, you're attacking superannuation. We already know the majority of women in this country do not have enough money to retire on. That's your legacy. That's the Liberals' legacy. That's the DNA of the Liberal government, the Liberal coalition. That's what they are about.

If you want to build a strong economy and you want to build a strong, highly skilled workforce, then don't attack workers and try and take money away from them. You should be investing in TAFE, for instance, so we can skill up Australian workers so people can go and retrain when there are changes in their work environment. But what we see, time and time again, is rhetoric by those opposite coming in here. They want to drag up and vilify unions, when in fact every Australian worker needs to be a member of a union, and there's no more important time than right now, because you need their protection.