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

This is amazing, an MPI—it's been said before but it's worth saying again—where we've had now two weeks of 'leading with your chin'. This is a government now in opposition that, when they were in power, turned around and saw the standard of living for hardworking Australians collapse. We saw, for the first time in the history of this country, the middle class shrink under these people. That's what happened. Working people, wages, declined under their watch. And, as they see quite clearly, that was part of their inherent strategy, on how they would move forward, in making sure the economy was more successful. But for who? For hardworking Australians? No, of course not.

Quite clearly, the cost-of-living crunch—we had nine years of the Liberal government that were the worst period for wages growth in Australia's history. When the Liberals left office, real wages were lower than they were when they entered office in 2013. And they want to stand here and give everyone else a lesson—a lesson about how to do it wrong. That's the consequence of what the opposition did when they were in government.

Just today, I heard from Toby Priest who was a casual academic at Flinders University and a member of the National Tertiary Education Union. Toby made headlines a few months ago when he was a test case for the previous government's failed casual conversion clause. Why do they want people to be casuals? Why don't they want them converted? Because that's how you keep wages suppressed. That's how you stop wages increasing.

Toby had worked at Flinders University for 16 years as a casual. Sixteen years! He wanted a conversion to a permanent part-time position. He said, 'There's constant uncertainty. I'm a father of three teenage kids and I work really hard and have pride in my job. I just want to be permanent.' But the university refused to give it to him. So he went to the Fair Work Commission. Here is what the Fair Work Commission ruled in May. I'll read from the media coverage at the time:

… the industrial umpire upheld the university's stance that higher pay and a professional pathway was too much to ask of his employer.

That's how weak the former government laws are, in an area and an industry where we need to have people encouraged—platforms and programs and arrangements to make sure that they're encouraged to work in these vital industries. You can keep people in insecure work for decades at a time because you don't want to pay them fairly, under the previous government. That's their program. That was their intention.

You wonder why we had record low wages under the former government. Toby called today and said that Flinders University has now reclassified its classes, with the effect that he will now only be paid two-thirds of what he earned before, for the exact same work, because that's the environment they encouraged under their watch. That was the opposition's plan for the future. That was the opposition's plan for the last nine years. And it hasn't changed. A third of his pay gone—just months after he was locked into casual work forever by the last government. That sums up the problem we have in this economy.

And I have a message for Flinders University: under Liberals, you're allowed to cut wages and keep people forever on casual contracts. In fact, the Liberals encouraged it, as we've seen. But this is a new government and we expect better from our universities. You are funded through federal funding, and we will be looking very closely at the way federally funded entities behave towards their workers. That's essential.

Let's move to another area of high exploitation under this former government's watch, where they did nothing—the gig economy. We know the Select Committee on Job Security heard that gig workers earned as little as $6.67 an hour—no workers comp, no sick leave, no annual leave and providing all their own tools of trade, with no compensation. Former Attorney-General, Christian Porter, said it was too complicated to provide those workers with minimum standards. Surprise, surprise, surprise! It was another recipe for driving wages down. But the real kicker was when former Senator Stoker went even further, saying, if people only earned $6.67 an hour, then that was okay because that's what they'd signed up for. Let's go back to the 1800s! Let's just take this whole thing and stop pretending, because that's what the previous government was trying to do under the gig economy.

Even Uber and DoorDash have said that we need minimum standards, signing agreements with the Transport Workers Union, supporting Labor policy. A food delivery worker, Esteban Salazar, told the job security inquiry:

I didn't have a minimum wage for an hour, which meant that, at the end of the day, I had earnt $15 after six hours of standing outside in the cold and the rain.

Let's look at some areas, feminised industries, like the care industry. Ninety per cent of aged-care workers are on casual or part-time contracts with little or no guaranteed hours. Worse still, gig platforms, like Mable, are infiltrating aged care and the NDIS, paying below the minimum award wage. The previous government turned around and funded Mable to have their exploitative model further enhanced through the NDIS and the aged-care system.

Just today I spoke to two aged-care workers with the United Workers Union who shared their stories about the horrid conditions of work they endure. Grace Gavley, a 24-year-old care worker, said to me: 'I get paid so little working in aged care that I also have to work in the retail sector. I earn more for working in retail than aged care, but what keeps me in aged care is my heart. That's all. It's demanding emotionally and pays less. It's also clear,' she went on to say, 'that management just doesn't care, and the aged-care system is broken. I don't know that this is sustainable for me. I get very emotional even talking about it.' Glenda Jenson, another aged-care worker, told me earlier today: 'Most people I know are stuck doing low minimum hour contracts but then they constantly work excessively long days, day after day after day to make up the shortfall in numbers. Because less and less people want to work in aged care, you end up having to perform a range of roles outside your main job of being a carer. It's all just piles up. It's too much.'

The experience of these workers in aged care, in higher education, in the gig economy, are examples of the problems faced by workers across the economy. Like Renee McBride, a TAFE nursing teacher I met with earlier today as well. She told me: 'I worked for 8½ years as a casual teacher. I won a scholarship'—this is a real clanger! 'I won a scholarship from the New South Wales Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, for the quality of my work, and yet I had all of my hours taken away from me when I finished my arrangements for that scholarship. We are in the sector,' she said, 'where 70 per cent of the workforce is casual. That means people can't get mortgages, can't get home loans. I've recently got permanent work, but now I have to spend hours each day driving to get to my job. I'm a single parent with two kids. It's exhausting.'

It's exhausting because the previous government allowed the culture of the bottom is the best, wages suppressed, casual jobs, no job security, can't get home loans, can't look after your family, can't look after yourself. It was all part of the model that they encouraged in this economy. One thing is very clear: we're going to make a change to that.

Now, in some areas money is rolling. And it's literally rolling in the casino in Canberra. Bryan Kidman said to me earlier today, 'I was disciplined for raising concerns about workers rights at the casino in a newspaper interview. I was speaking as a union delegate during a prospective sale of the casino, and I should not have been targeted the way I was. I went of the Human Rights Commission and the civil Administrative Appeals Tribunal, which found in my favour, but it was a terrible thing to go through.' He later told me that the company in the negotiations for an enterprise bargaining agreement— (Time expired)