Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

Here we are today, debating a bill, the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia’s Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021, in the middle of an economic crisis. The government needs to be supporting economic recovery. Instead, we have a bill that makes it easier for employers to cut wages and conditions, which is contrary to our national interest; it's contrary to recovery. On this side of the chamber, in the Labor Party, we stand with working families. We oppose the government's bill that will allow workers to have their pay and conditions cut, leaving them worse off and, indeed, stymieing our national economic recovery. We have a bill that takes rights from workers, and we need a parliament that supports workers and that does not strip them of hard-won rights, pay and conditions.

Through COVID, we've seen how important it is for us to stand together as a nation to support each other. However, making workers more vulnerable by allowing employers to cut their pay and conditions, which this bill facilitates, is the opposite of that. Our Prime Minister paints himself ostensibly as 'the fair-go PM', yet this bill undermines that fairness. It entrenches insecurity, inequality and a very unfair go for Australian workers. Why does the government want to do this? It won't help economic recovery. It will not help working families. But who does it help? Is it big businesses that claimed JobKeeper while giving executive bonuses, sacking staff and enjoying increased profits? Yes, it certainly helps them.

The government need to be on the side of workers, not their mates, which makes it easier for them to rip them off. A good example is that, in Qantas, $267 million worth of JobKeeper subsidies retained its workforce. Now it plans to axe 2,000 jobs. These jobs still exist—Qantas still needs baggage handlers—yet Qantas is outsourcing its work and is therefore able to pay workers less, owe them less in entitlements and create more insecure jobs. This bill does nothing to address this. It's unbalanced. It favours employer interests in the name of flexibility.

This bill weakens fundamental safeguards in our industrial system. It does this on the basis of a theory that employers will create jobs only if labour is cheaper. This ignores fundamental economic theory and, indeed, the lived reality in our nation, as economic commentators have shown, that, frankly, labour demand is derived by market demand for goods and services. Lower labour costs do not create jobs and they do not drive productivity; they simply add to profits. Increasing demand and increasing employment require local consumption—consumption that's heavily influenced by confidence. Insecure work and low wages are dampeners on consumer confidence. Again, this bill pushes in the opposite direction. It does nothing to address the problem of insecure work and low wages growth.

I draw the attention of this place to the evidence of Ms Sheree Clarke, an aged-care worker whose evidence to the committee was very moving. She said:

Because most of my work is so insecure, I can only plan to live on my minimum contracted hours, and a contract of 16 hours per fortnight is not enough to live on. This impacts all aspects of my lifestyle, including health. My budget does not allow me to choose healthy options and I often miss meals. Paying my car registration or visiting my dentist is a day-to-day decision for me.

She expressed her distress that she could not afford to assist her own elderly parents or even afford her own housing. She said she can't secure a long-term rental lease because she doesn't have an income. She lives in a caravan park. She said:

As a low-income worker, I'm not alone here.

We have in the legislation before us a how-to guide for corporate lawyers who want to construct employment contracts that casualise not just the existing casual jobs but any job in this nation. Far from being a pathway for conversion to permanency, the impact of this bill—on any analysis of the detail—is the opposite. It's there to manipulate the system and contrive employment offers that lock people into casual employment.

I note that the government did drop one hurtful amendment to the BOOT, but I have to say that this is not a win. The government dropped that disastrous amendment knowing that they would never receive support and creating a facade of compromise, but there has been no compromise. What we have is a bill that's designed to cut workers' pay and conditions and keep going the long-term trend of weakening wage growth in our nation.

I ask this place to think about the frontline workers who risked their safety to serve their communities through the pandemic, who ensured Australians still had food on the supermarket shelves, hospitals that had been cleaned and a public transport system that kept running. While some Australians were fortunate to work from home, many workers were not. Frontline and casual workers put their families' safety at risk to support our communities. Because casual workers can't earn a living wage, they work in multiple locations, including at multiple quarantine hotels during the pandemic. There are the aged-care transport workers. Many Australians put themselves on the line for low incomes to ensure that Australians are being looked after. How does this government thank them? By cutting their pay and conditions.

This pandemic has reminded us that our actions affect those around us, that we have a responsibility to keep our fellow Australians safe and looked after. This government is not only ignoring this by allowing workers' pay and conditions to be cut, leaving families worse off and the economy worse off in its recovery, but also thanking frontline workers, who have so courageously served our communities, by cutting their pay and conditions. This bill allows wage cuts to be made and also makes it easier for wages to be stolen. The government has placed much weight on its rhetoric in here about increased penalties et cetera, but the detail in this bill means that the recovery of stolen wages is less likely, not more likely.

I also note a submission signed by nine public health experts from the Australian National University. They have called this bill a threat to public health. The submission notes that Australia currently has one of the highest rates of individuals without leave entitlements in the OECD. Is the new OECD chief, Mathias Cormann, going to fix this? This bill increases the casualisation of work, the growing number of workers without paid sick leave. These experts state that casual workers' lack of sick leave is a threat to Australia's public health, because, whether they have the flu, COVID or whatever, they can't afford to take a day off.

Some 62 per cent of all jobs created between May and November 2020 were casual. The majority of jobs were casual. Casuals have fewer rights, fewer entitlements and less security. Casualisation is already an incredibly difficult and great issue in Australia. This bill doesn't fix it. This bill makes the problem worse.

The bill is entitled the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill, yet it is very clear that the jobs it is supporting are jobs that are casual, insecure and make life more difficult for workers and our economic recovery. Our recovery is slow and will be inequitable with these changes. Some 23 labour law experts across Australia signed a submission warning that this bill leaves workers worse off. They contradict very clearly the government's claim that it will not facilitate pay cuts. Once again, this government has ignored academic experts. I don't have time today to go through all of the important detail in this bill, all of the examples, but the detail is there in the submissions from working people, academics, health experts, unions, the ACTU, migrant workers and a great many others.

In closing, I want to highlight an important issue in relation to greenfields agreements. The ETU's submission detailed the story of a worker, Robert, an electrical fitter mechanic and instrumentation technician. He worked on the Gorgon project on Barrow Island, a $53 billion project. He worked 29 days on, nine days off. It was tough, and he saw depression run wild through his workmates. At one point there was a run of suicides. One worker tried to take his own life on a flight home. The roster was the root of these issues, but it was locked in by the greenfields agreement which covered the job.

We know that the Gorgon project took a long time, but here we see an eight-year time line for greenfields projects. Mental health issues are rife, and it is morally wrong to have greenfields agreements with a lack of flexibility for up to eight years. Suicide clusters happen. Fourteen suicides were reported in connection with the INPEX project alone. I implore this place: the greenfields regime must be flexible enough to adapt to the evolving needs of a site. The amendments proposed in the bill do the exact opposite, locking in life-of-project agreements that in all likelihood, I believe, have the capacity to kill people.

We on this side strongly oppose this bill. The Labor Party is the party of working people. It always has been and it always will be. We will stand up to ensure that workers in our nation receive fair pay and conditions for the work that they do. We are the party of award safety nets, leave entitlements and secure work. The coalition is the party of cutting penalty rates, delaying rises to super and entrenching insecure work. The coalition is the party of Work Choices, union-busting bills and ensuring Australian workers do not get a fair go. This bill is just the latest attempt by this government to hurt working families. It will ensure that recovery from the pandemic is slow and inequitable. It's a story we've heard before: the coalition wanting to hurt workers, under the guise of economic improvement. The bill should not be passed in its current form. There are too many fundamental problems and all the risks fall one way: into the laps of working people. The coalition says that this bill will create confidence for employers to employ, but the risks all fall into the laps of working people. Here in this place we are defending workers from having their pay and conditions cut once again. The Labor Party will continue to fight to make sure that workers are treated fairly and that this bill does not pass.