Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to talk about inequality, employment and other key indicators of quality of life in Western Australia. I have talked previously in this place about reports from the BankWest Curtin Economic Centre. I raised the issues around its reports about sharing the benefits of the boom when it was at its height in Western Australia and raised the fact that inequality increased in Western Australia. In fact the philosophy of the 'rising tide floats all boats' is a flawed approach and not all the benefits of the boom at the time were shared equally by all people in Western Australia. People with more wealth and higher incomes tended to get a bigger share of the benefits hence the increasing inequality. This issue also came up during a Senate inquiry into inequality in Australia, which I chaired, and we noted then the increasing inequality in Australia. However, to get back to the focus of my discussion tonight in more specific detail, I want to talk about report that was released by the BankWest Curtin Economic Centre late last year—Back to the Future: Western Australia's economic future after the boom.

The BankWest Curtin Economic Centre is an independent economic and social research organisation located at the Curtin Business School at Curtin University with a focus on examining the key economic and social policy issues that contribute to the sustainability of Western Australia and to the wellbeing of households both nationally and in Western Australia. Using the latest data available, this report looked at recent changes in the state's economic trends in light of the trailing off of the resource boom. The report contains some very interesting facts about changes experienced by Western Australian households including changes in employment and wealth and income inequality.

The report found that there are no strong signs that we are moving to a more egalitarian society and while some indicators for income inequality have dropped, wealth inequality has not. The richest 20 per cent of Western Australian households hold at least 64.7 per cent of the state's aggregate household net worth. I think people will agree that is a significant amount of wealth held by a relatively small percentage of the people. The report also found that there is an evident gender gap of some 33 per cent in median gross incomes between men and women. I would say it is simply not good enough for my home state of Western Australia to have that appalling difference in gross income between men and women.

The report found there have been significant shifts in Western Australia's labour market over the last few years. It shows that workforce casualisation is on the rise. Between 2008 and 2014 the share of casual employees in Western Australia rose from 20.5 per cent to 22.5 per cent. Running alongside an increase in the casualisation of the workforce, there has also been a downward trend in full-time employment and a rise in part-time employment. This shift undermines the belief that most Western Australians will secure and maintain long-term full-time employment for his or her working life. By these figures, it confirms that employment increasingly will be insecure and that people may be required to hold multiple jobs at the same time to make up their preferred working hours. If this was a reflection of someone's individual choice, that they wanted more flexible working hours or wanted fewer working hours, that would be one thing. However, the report points out that some of the growth in part-time employment has been largely involuntary in nature. In other words, people are not choosing the casualisation and part-time employment approach but are being forced into it. The report also found that at both a state and national level, the growth in new employees has been negative in recent years and there is a clear decline in the number of new traineeships being offered.

The report found that the contribution of health care and social assistance to the state's employment has grown from 9.5 per cent to 12 per cent between 2010 and 2015. It is clear that the health care and social assistance sectors are growing as the population ages. However, the report notes that this sector also faces challenges related to high costs and low pay. The report says that if the state is to capitalise on the growth in this sector then issues related to sectoral wages and working conditions will need to be addressed. They say there is:

… the need for efficient, creative and imaginative policy settings to take full advantage of new opportunities for economic growth and future industrial development. This responsibility extends to the imperative for new, secure employment opportunities for the state's workforce. In doing so, it is surely also worth reflecting on the fact that the labour market of the future—flexible, multi-faceted, portfolio-based—may well be substantially different from the labour market of the past.

It is obvious from the work of this report that some significant changes need to be made to avoid an increase in inequality in Western Australia and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of a small percentage of Western Australians.

This was not hard to predict. I had a report done in the mid-noughties, and there were others, that showed that the benefits of the boom were not being shared equally across the population. If you were working directly in the mining industry on high wages, you were getting the benefits, but people working in the public sector, our police, our emergency service responders and those that worked in retail and hospitality were not sharing the benefits of the boom. I think that has contributed to the increase in income and wealth inequality that was occurring, where wealth became more and more concentrated in a small percentage of Western Australians. It was clear at the time that the Barnett government did not make the appropriate policy decisions to invest the benefits of the boom wisely.

As we come out of the boom, we see that employment is becoming less secure and more part time, that we have this appalling disparity between men's and women's pay and that, where we are seeing an increase in wealth inequality, we need policy approaches that are different to the same old, same old. I am not at all confident in the Barnett government, given that they did not ensure the sharing of the benefits of the boom. There are some serious issues that need to be addressed in the tailing-off of the boom, and the Barnett government has failed to address those, nor has there been leadership from the federal government, who also are failing to address the issues of growing inequality. They have refused to address the issues of the concentration of wealth in the rich; in fact, they want to give tax cuts to the wealthy and to take money off the most vulnerable members of our community, as can been seen from the 15 clauses in the omnibus bill. The coalition, at both federal and state level, has mismanaged the benefits of the boom and has increased inequality. (Time expired)

Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This evening I rise to talk about what is on the minds of my fellow Western Australians as they contemplate their vote and the arrogant and out-of-touch Barnett Liberal government that they are currently confronted with and governed by. With an election just around the corner, it is obvious to more and more Western Australians, upon reflection, what a disappointment the last eight years of the Barnett government have been. They have had eight years of wasted opportunities. They have squandered the mining boom, and our economy is suffering.

When I say they have squandered the mining boom, what they did was stand idly by while competition for labour in the mining sector hollowed out the rest of the economy, which means now that the mining boom has gone, many of those other jobs that Western Australians traditionally worked in have declined. We are talking about services, higher education, manufacturing and more. Our WA economy is suffering. What should have been the good times has very much turned into very difficult times because of the mismanagement of the Barnett government. Instead of investing in jobs, education and health, the Barnett government invested in vanity projects like we have seen at Elizabeth Quay and the new sports stadium. It is a government with the wrong priorities. It has its priorities all wrong.

Tonight, I want to outline to the Senate some of the key concerns that I and my Labor colleagues in WA are hearing from WA voters who are sick of Colin Barnett's arrogance and of this tired old Liberal government. Firstly, Western Australians are, most importantly, worried about jobs, and for good reason. Our unemployment rate is above six per cent, one of the highest rates in the country. In some parts of WA, it is more than double the national average. It is even worse for young Western Australians—up near 15 per cent in some areas. All over the state, people are feeling this economic pressure. Again, I highlight that it is because the Barnett government squandered the mining boom because they had no alternative plan in place to generate jobs in our state.

But I can tell you that Mark McGowan and WA Labor do. Earlier this month we saw our own Labor leader Bill Shorten and state leader Mark McGowan announcing their job plan for WA. It highlights that we believe that every young person deserves an opportunity to go to university or TAFE and that they should be able to be confident that they will have a job at the end. The WA Liberal government has been focused on making sure WA jobs go offshore. Each year they send a list here to Canberra promoting overseas workers into Western Australia in traditional trades where we already have large numbers of unemployed people back home. While the Liberals are continuing to send jobs overseas, what we have from WA Labor is a plan to make local jobs, training and apprenticeships at the heart of everything that government does. A Mark McGowan Labor government will make it law that government departments are required to provide more apprenticeships for local people. They will put in place Western Australian participation plans that require WA content in bidding processes for construction work across government and a consideration for apprenticeships and traineeships for local Western Australians. We need this focus on local jobs and local manufacturing to ensure that we have an economy that survives the boom-bust cycle that we have had. Labor's Metronet plan has a key focus on jobs also, creating more than 10,000 jobs for Western Australians. It will involve the manufacturing of our rail cars in WA, increasing our local manufacturing to 50 per cent, up from the current two per cent. With that will come really important apprenticeships.

While Colin Barnett, Liza Harvey and their mates here in Canberra in the Turnbull government are sitting back and doing nothing about congestion in Western Australia, Mark McGowan and WA Labor have a real alternative plan. Metronet is about connecting the suburbs of Perth to fix our congestion problem. We want a circle line around the state, revolutionising Perth's rail system, providing our state's very first east-west rail link so that commuters are not having to travel into the CBD and back out again when there is a more direct route. This means the Forrestfield line to Ellenbrook; a line to Yanchep, the North and Byford to the east; as well as a new train station in Karnup in the south. We know that Metronet is smart, affordable and achievable and it will bring Perth in line with some of the best cities in the world when it comes to public transport, and I firmly believe that is what Western Australians deserve.

We have also a stark contrast between Mark McGowan and Colin Barnett in the privatisation of Western Power. Colin Barnett and Liza Harvey are making such a mess on this issue. They have made such a mess of the state budget. Their solution is to privatise Western Power to make a quick buck, despite One Nation's opposition to its privatisation. But we know that a vote for One Nation is in fact a vote to privatise Western Power. After recklessly squandering the revenue from the mining boom, the Liberal government has a plan to privatise Western Power to fix their budget problems. It is a short-term solution that is actually going to leave our state worse off, because we will forgo the $500 million worth of revenue that Western Power brings in every year. It will see rising power prices and it is a cost that people who are under the financial pressures that they are already under simply cannot afford.

We know that people in WA want Western Power to stay in public hands, which is why a Labor government would not sell Western Power. We outlined just this week a comprehensive plan to reduce state debt—a plan that would keep Western Power in state hands. It is a plan that invests in education. We know that education is a key priority for families across the state. It is certainly a key priority for my own. We want to see more than 1,300 local jobs created by investing in new school infrastructure across the state—10 new primary schools in the outer suburban growth areas, secondary schools with major upgrades and $30 million to be invested in regional schools, which is reversing eight years of neglect by the Liberal-Nationals government. We want to see investments in science and coding in primary schools to prepare our kids for the jobs of the future. We want to put education assistants back into public schools. They were ripped out, leaving many of our state's most vulnerable children neglected in the classroom. We want to allow school communities the option of hosting quality childcare providers on-site to make life easier for busy families like my own. These are just a small highlight of some of the plans WA Labor has to ensure that we have quality education for our children in our state.

We also know that health care is an issue that many voters are talking to us about. Our approach is to put patients first. It is about doctors and nurses working on the front line to provide world-class health care to patients. It is about investing in an upgrade at the Joondalup hospital, with $160 million worth of resources there. It is a campus for a very large and growing urban community that is currently travelling a long way to the city to get basic hospital services.

We want to build medi-hotels at major hospitals to free up hospital beds, reduce waiting times for surgery and allow patients a chance to recuperate. We know that many hospital beds are taken up because people do not have reliable care at home. They may not live with anyone who can look after them, but if there is a medi-hotel they are only a phone call away from the hospital, and we think that is a really important initiative. We also want to see urgent care clinics to ensure that people are able to get after-hours care, reducing pressure and waiting times at our overstressed hospitals.

These are just some of the issues we are taking into this election. I want to highlight that Mark McGowan and WA Labor are very much ready to govern in WA. They are bringing fresh ideas to the state, and I am really proud to support our excellent candidates there. I know that only Mark McGowan has a plan for WA—a plan that invests in schools, public transport, Metronet, public hospitals and patients and will keep our Western Power in public hands. With just 25 days to go, I am really looking forward to getting out and talking to voters about a much brighter future for our state.