Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Hansard source

To be honest, I've been consistent in wanting the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill 2022 to be debated next year. It's not a surprise. I've said I have issues with it—mostly around the multi-employer bargaining, because we just don't know how this will impact small and medium businesses. We haven't had time to complete our due diligence and consult, listen and understand the real-world impacts. It's all well here in Canberra to debate and make changes, but even with the changes, we don't know how it will actually work.

How are we supposed to get across all of this? We've been getting amendment after amendment after amendment—we got some just a few hours ago. I'm not convinced anyone can really predict how the changes in this bill will impact productivity and result in pay rises. I tell you one thing, though: no-one is getting a pay rise before Christmas. Let's make sure that's quite clear. At the beginning of the week, this bill was still subject to further Senate inquiry because we're all trying to get across the details. This bill is 250 pages long. The bill was only introduced on 27 October 2022, and just a month later it's being rammed through the Senate.

Yes, I get the Labor Party is dead keen to get wages moving after wage stagnation for close to a decade. Aussies know and understand and voted on reducing the wage gap, stopping wage theft and getting better wages. They didn't vote at the election to support single-interest multi-employer bargaining. It's a surprise. Just how it will bite in the real world is terribly unclear. Businesses are concerned it may lead to more strikes, but, of course, we don't know, and Labor can't guarantee that either. What is a single interest? Location, the rules of the industry or the type of work? The fact we still need to ask this question shows how rushed this process has been.

The amendments agreed between Senator Pocock and Labor still don't solve the issue; they just further exemptions to who is caught. However, here we are at the eleventh hour. The deal was done, apparently, on Saturday night, and we still don't have the amendments. Where are the amendments? If you are a small business of 15 to 20 employees, you're not caught. For businesses with fewer than 50 employees, the union has to justify why that business should be included in multi-employer bargaining—I'm not feeling comfortable—provided you are reasonably comparable. I mean, seriously. What does that mean? What does 'comparable' mean? No wonder your amendments are taking so long.

These last-minute changes haven't allowed any of us the time needed to raise awareness with business and work out how this amended bill will impact them. It is unclear how it will address the wage crisis and even how quickly pay rises—if they happen—will reach the pockets of hardworking Aussies. The costs of living continue to increase. It seems everything gets more expensive every day. Since May 2022, there have been seven interest rate rises in a row. This means the average home loan of $500,000 has now gone up by $760 a month. You'll get a new interest rate just before Christmas. That's what you can expect. It's all well and good for Mr Lowe, the RBA Governor, to apologise to Aussie homeowners after he said interest rates were unlikely to rise before 2024. God help all our children out there, who did the right thing, thinking they were investing in their first house, with maintaining and holding it if interest rates keep going up. I see a massive crisis coming on their. A fat lot of good that's going to do to help all those struggling with meeting their mortgage repayments. It's not just homeowners who are feeling it. Renters also are having to tighten their belts, because if you raise interest rates it means higher mortgages, and common sense says it means higher rents.

To add to that, Mr Lowe then said that higher wages will mean higher inflation. That means higher gas, petrol and food prices. The high gas prices are a result of bad Liberal government policy and its absolute failure to give Australians fair access to a product they already own. There's no way that Australians should be paying the sky-high gas prices we are, and it's all because the Liberal government and Labor failed to protect the Australian market, letting greedy companies export most of our gas so they could fill their pockets with huge profits and then profit even more by making Australians pay inflated spot-market prices for their own gas. I tell you, this country is in a world of hurt, and it's only just the beginning.

Even if wages do rise, pay cheques won't increase until next year, and no-one can say by how much. Even after this bill passes, wages are unlikely to increase enough to cover all these hikes in the cost of living so that Aussies are really better off and are getting ahead. I support higher wages. Most people in Australia do. Why wouldn't they? But they have to be paid for by business, so they matter here as well. You can't help if your shop is shut and no-one is getting a wage at all. They're really worried about this bill as well, and so they should be. I want to get wages moving for nurses, aged-care workers and childcare workers. The government could have done that the day they got into power. That's what they should have been hitting. That's what they should have been doing. They could do it today, but they didn't and they won't.

The government are being sneaky and dishonest. They said they needed this bill to do that, but they didn't. They held back the wages of low-paid workers, and they did it on purpose. They're doing a whole lot of things with this bill that they haven't properly explained to us, and that's why I've circulated amendments to take those parts out. The government can bring these parts of the bill back next year, once we have had time to consider the impacts properly. I'm not going to wear the responsibility of making mistakes with this one. The government of the day can do that. God help you if, this time next year, people are in absolute crisis, they're not getting their pay rises and there are union strikes all over the country, because I say this to you: that will leave you about a year and a half out from an election, and I don't see that cleaning up very quickly.

I don't believe you've got this right. I believe there is a lot of union power in this. It's all about political donations, making sure they keep feeding the piggy bank of the union party—or, should I say, the Labor Party. That is where we're at. I look forward to standing here next year, holding this Senate back day after day and absolutely pummelling you people over there about the destruction that you have done to this country. That is where we are heading. By the way, we still have amendments we have not seen. There are still more to come. We are rushing through this. It's going to have a huge impact on this country. I can tell you now, the way we're all looking at it, most people out there that have some common sense know exactly where we're going. We're heading down the gurgler. You've got problems here. The first one is gas and energy prices. You've got home loans going through the roof, and our younger kids who thought they were doing the right thing are going to go under. That's where we're at. If you think an extra seven or eight bucks a week, if you get that far by next year, is going to assist, you are living in denial—you're living on another planet.

The way that you have rushed this through just blows me away. I thought you were going to be a different government to the last one. Seriously, we're six months in and, I tell you, we're nearly back to the good old days of the last nine years. Good luck to you. I look forward to standing up here this time next year and watching you on the government side all sit there as you try to explain yourselves, because that is what is going to happen.

Anyway, I look forward to the committee stage. I have quite a lot of questions because, once again, we had limited time to ask them before. I look forward to what the government of the day is going to say to the questions that never got answered because we didn't have enough time to get them answered. Four days and two hours for an inquiry—seriously! That's what we got on this bill. I cannot believe that you haven't learned from the past what happens when you rush through bills; we watched it for nine years. This is where we're sitting today, and you're following exactly the same example. Seriously! You've actually learned nothing. If you can't see the future of where this is all going—and anybody with common sense can see where we're going to be next year—then you seriously should not be the government.