Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On this day last year Australia had recorded its 100th confirmed case of COVID-19. There were recorded coronavirus cases in every state and territory. There'd been COVID-19 deaths in New South Wales and in Western Australia. The first, ultimately inadequate, stimulus package had been announced and the first public health restrictions were coming into effect. Australia's case numbers were rising in line with comparable countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. Our trend followed that of Italy, who'd just entered their lockdown.

When the isolation measures were announced, millions of Australian workers lost their jobs—700,000 in the first week of April. Those who could do so prepared to work from home. And still millions of Australian workers went to work. They were the essential workers, the ones we could not function without. Every morning, many of them went into a dangerous and uncertain world. Health workers, doctors, nurses, paramedics, receptionists, porters and cleaners risked exposure to the virus to treat those who were already infected. It was dangerous and important work, and it still is. In January, the International Council of Nurses announced that globally 2,262 nurses died from coronavirus in 2020, yet nurses went to work. Some of them came out of retirement in order to staff hospitals. We saw that same courage in so many types of workers in those early months—teachers, supermarket transport and warehouse workers, aged-care workers, cleaners and food-manufacturing workers. Those were food-manufacturing workers like the ones on strike at McCormick today, who haven't had a pay rise for five years. The company's opportunistically using these current bargaining laws to strip away their rights, entitlements and conditions.

A promise was made by the Parliament of Australia in that moment of fear and uncertainty that as a nation we would rebuild in a way which would look after those workers who have looked after us. This bill is a repudiation of that promise. It is a broken promise for Australian workers. It is especially a broken promise to all of those workers, mostly women, who stood by us during the pandemic. If it's passed, it will make workers' jobs less secure. If it's passed, it will mean many workers are subject to pay cuts and less secure work. It will casualise some permanent workers' jobs and create new loopholes for employers to exploit and put competitive pressure on those good employers in a race to the bottom in Australian workplaces to drive their own wages and conditions down. It will further entrench a bargaining system that is sclerotic and failing and that denies workers the right to be effectively represented and to win the pay and conditions they deserve.

Minister Porter, the architect of this piece of legislation, is conspicuously absent this week. He's availed himself to the paid leave that this bill would deny to many millions of Australian workers. In his speech commending this bill to the other chamber the minister concluded:

This bill removes barriers that stifle the job growth of today and limits the job creation of tomorrow …

To the Morrison government, measures to give workers a fair say in their conditions of work are an impediment. To the Morrison government, measures to ensure job security and protections for fair collective bargaining are a problem for employers. The underlying assumption of this bill is that the recovery will be built on an increasingly insecure labour market, low wages and less secure jobs. That's not a plan to rebuild the Australian economy. That is a plan to entrench the problems that were already present in our labour market, that were driving higher levels of casualisation and that were producing more bad jobs in the economy instead of producing good jobs.

For one thing, Australia's bad experiences during the coronavirus pandemic were in no small part driven by problems in our labour market. There were leaks from quarantine facilities that had come from insecure workers forced to take multiple jobs just to make ends meet and, particularly in Melbourne, spread by casual workers who were forced into an impossible choice between their own family's financial security and taking appropriate public health measures in the public interest. It was that combination of insecure work and working multiple jobs that brought the virus into our nursing homes, yet the government's plan does nothing to deal with insecure work.

The problems of insecure work are well documented. It's not as if we don't know what they are. Casual workers can't make long-term financial decisions. Many of them can't buy a house. It expands the gender pay gap. Women workers are more likely to be casual workers. It means that businesses fail to invest in skills, and the long-term real productivity gains that this country needs are not made. Real economic recovery doesn't come from cutting wages and it doesn't come from holding back real wage growth. A real plan for recovery would come from investing in Australian workers. A real plan for recovery would understand that job security is a critical component of all of our long-term prosperity.

A bargaining system should encourage employers to negotiate fairly. It should ensure that workers' interests are properly represented. It should ensure that workers solve these problems in partnership with their employers, on an equal footing. It should allow labour market institutions to deal with the real productivity problems that plague our economy. It should deliver real, tangible economic benefits for everybody. It's not just about fairness and ensuring that Australian workers have the democratic rights that they deserve and should be their birthright in this country; it's about building a better type of economy, about lifting productivity and about creating more good jobs. This plan does nothing to achieve any of those objectives.

Last month Anthony Albanese offered a very different vision of work and dealing with insecure work in the economy: job security explicitly inserted into the Fair Work Act; rights for gig economy workers through the Fair Work Commission—and five food delivery workers have died in Sydney over the last six months; there's no plan from the government to deal with that question—portable entitlements for workers in insecure industries; 'casual' work properly defined; a crackdown on cowboy labour hire firms that plague in particular the mining industry—and Senator Canavan and some of these other characters put the Maybelline on, pretend they are mining workers, wander around in high-viz and confect interest in the jobs of mining industry workers, but when it counts they're on the side of the worst kind of labour hire operations that discriminate against ordinary workers and put them in a very tough position indeed—a cap on back-to-back contracts for the same role; more secure public sector jobs; government contracts to companies and organisations that offer secure work; and, on top of that, a real plan to deal with the gender pay gap.

We have a very different vision of the economy. What has been shown this week is that there are two very divergent visions for the future of the Australian economy and Australian jobs: firstly, Scott Morrison and Mr Porter's sclerotic, narrow, pea-hearted vision of a race to the bottom on wages and conditions on a low-wage, low-road future for Australian workers and, secondly, Anthony Albanese and Labor's vision of lifting everybody up, of producing more good jobs, of having a real strategy to lift wages and conditions and to improve productivity in Australian workplaces—a vision that keeps its promise to those essential workers who stood by us during the pandemic and delivers fairness and prosperity to everybody.

There have been critical failures of leadership by this government when it comes to the economy and the public health response. This government had to be dragged to measures to stop mass redundancies. This government left it to the states to run quarantine, blamed them when it went wrong and undermined it. I remember seeing senators from here, from Western Australia and Queensland, bellowing about opening the borders. It was Mr Morrison, the Prime Minister, who teamed up with Clive Palmer, so he can indeed take credit for the Western Australian election result. He should take credit for the Western Australian election result, because it was his decision to team up with that plutocratic, absolutely in the interests of Clive Palmer and Mr Morrison, to undermine the public health response in Western Australia. If they had succeeded—and every Western Australia knows this—the Western Australian economy would have been decimated, as well as the public health response. The truth is that there's no economic recovery without a public health recovery. The states got it right and Mr Morrison got it wrong at every juncture last year.

At the end of March two important events will occur. One is that the JobKeeper program ends and the second is that we will get to see whether Mr Morrison's promise to the people of Australia that four million vaccines will be delivered will really come to fruition. We'll see whether the four million vaccines that Mr Morrison promised have been delivered around the country. Why on earth are we cutting the JobKeeper program when we know that it will cost at least 110,000 jobs? Why on earth are we cutting that program if Mr Morrison can't deliver on his promise to Australian workers and the Australian people?

And why on earth would Senators Hansen and Roberts, and anybody on the crossbench, vote for this rotten piece of legislation, which will make workers' jobs less secure, not more secure? We should be legislating in this place to make people's lives better, to make people's lives safer and to lift people's wages and conditions. Instead, the miserable vision that this government has is a bit of tinkering to create a few more loopholes to make it easier for bad employers to work their way through the system and undermine wages and conditions. It puts pressure on good employers to do the wrong thing in order to compete and survive.

Instead of doing what we should be doing, Mr Morrison is breaking the promise that he made to those workers who got us through the recovery. The strongest symbol of that, of course, is the fact that the Minister for Industrial Relations is not here to push this package through the parliament and make the arguments for it. The Prime Minister wants this chamber to pass significant changes to our industrial relations system while there are serious questions about whether the Minister for Industrial Relations is indeed fit to hold his own job. The Prime Minister wants this chamber to pass a bill condemning more workers to insecure work and which erodes their right to negotiate better wages and conditions while the relevant minister is on paid leave. The Prime Minister wants this chamber to pass a bill that will likely extend the gender pay gap in a week when thousands of Australian women have been marching for equality.

One of the demands, indeed, of those marchers—one of the things that has been squarely on the government over the course of the last 12 months—is that if they were really interested in people's rights in Australian workplaces they would deal with the Respect@work report, which was launched more than 12 months ago. Three out of 55 recommendations in that have been partially dealt with. If that's a measure of the commitment of this government, and if this bill is a measure of the commitment of this government to better jobs, no wonder our labour market performance is deteriorating so badly.