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

Tomorrow, the Albanese government will introduce a bill to address the greatest challenge Australia faces: the decade of systematic wage decline that the Liberal-National governments have inflicted upon Australian workers. The real wages of Australian workers are lower today than they were when the coalition took government in 2013. It is unprecedented in Australian history that any government has overseen such a sustained period of wage decline. It means that the Australian middle class is shrinking. It means that we are in danger of leaving less to our children than was left to us by our parents.

The worst part of it is that it wasn't by accident or even incompetence. The decade of wage decline was intentional. Former finance minister Mathias Cormann said it himself when he went on television and said that low wage growth was a deliberate feature of the Liberals' economic strategy. The Liberals and Nationals haven't changed. Earlier this year, they opposed a pay rise of $1 an hour for the lowest-paid workers in Australia, a pay rise that Labor and the trade union movement fought for and won. As we speak, the Liberal and National opposition have announced they will oppose the bill that will be introduced tomorrow. They're opposing Labor's bill to grow wages and boost job security before they've even seen it. The mere notion that Labor wants to grow wages is enough for Mr Dutton to say he can't support it.

Opposing wages, opposing job security, and opposing workers' rights is in their blood. There are many members and senators from the Liberal and National parties who are from a different background to the vast majority of Australians. I won't say everyone on the benches opposite falls into that category, but there are a lot that do. Too many come from a background and life experience of privilege and have no idea about the real pressures working people face. They don't know what it's like to be living pay cheque to pay cheque. They don't know what it's like to not know when your next shift will come. They don't know what it's like to be bullied by your boss, to be told you can't join your union or to be told that if you agitate for a pay rise you'll lose your job. That's why they're so comfortable opposing any reforms that will grow wages. That's why they are so comfortable having a deliberate low-wage agenda that inflicts so much pain and hardship on working families. It's because they don't value the importance of secure work or the value of a decent and consistent wage.

That is what the government bill is addressing. The bill that will be introduced tomorrow is about raising wages. It's about ending the decade of decline and living standards. It's about ensuring that people live and work with dignity and are treated with respect. It's about making real improvements to gender equity in Australia. It's about ending the thuggish and bullying intimidation of union officials by politicising discredited regulators.

It's true that the government cannot just snap its fingers and give everyone a pay rise and a secure job. But what we can do is give people the power to bargain fairly for those basic rights. Our bargaining system is broken. It's designed to fail. You don't need to take my word for it, of course; the decade of wage decline speaks for itself. The rapid rise of insecure work speaks for itself. For too long, Australian workers have been powerless to stand up for their own rights. For too long, our laws have divided workers and prevented them from having a collective say over their wages and conditions.

Australia is an outlier among developed nations in that workers with a shared interest cannot bargain together if they are split across different employers. In many comparable countries, workers can bargain together through multi-employer bargaining—in Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Austria, just to give a few examples. In those countries, multi-employer bargaining has helped their workers avoid the sustained declines that Australian workers have suffered. Indeed, for many years in Australia, multi-employer bargaining ensured decent wage increases and an ever increasing standard of living for Australian workers and their families.

Under our highly restrictive and current bargaining laws, we are going backwards. By banning multi-employer bargaining, we're in the company of countries like China, Russia and Iran—countries that do not respect the basic right of workers to have a collective voice at work. To continue on with the status quo would be to continue on with the previous government's policy of deliberate, low wages growth. We cannot continue as we have done for the past decade. Australian workers are at a breaking point. I heard time and time again during the job security inquiry just last year workers across every corner of the Australian economy coming forward to share their stories. These stories were representative of millions of Australian workers.

We heard from Sheree, an aged-care worker who said she couldn't accompany her mother to her cancer appointments because she had to be constantly on call for her next shift. We heard from Nicholas, an academic stuck working as a casual for 20 years despite working the same shifts week in and week out. We heard from Rob, a mine worker who was told he would be transferred from his employer to a labour hire company with a 50 per cent pay cut while still doing the same job. We heard from Peter, a Qantas worker of 31 years who was illegally sacked while he was on sick leave receiving chemotherapy for stage 5 prostate cancer. The Australian government has a duty—we all here have a duty—to give Sheree, Nicholas, Rob and Peter the power to stand up for themselves and their mates at work. That's what this legislation will do.

Over the coming weeks, we're going to face a fully funded and highly coordinated scare campaign against these reforms. The interests of a small few, the richest and most powerful in our society, will be promoted ad nauseam in the media and in the chamber by those opposite, because these people have never once in their lives supported reforms that would improve the pay and conditions of working Australians, whether it was the introduction of Medicare, superannuation, the 40-hour week or paid leave entitlement. Conservatives and some in the employer groups have always told Australian workers that these reforms will somehow make their lives worse. They have always said it will cost jobs, kill innovation or hurt productivity. They've always said that we can't afford to pay workers a decent wage.

Even now, when the share of income going to profits hits a record high and the share going to wages is at a record low, these sham arguments have never stood up to scrutiny. In the last few days alone we have seen Alan Joyce, the highest-paid CEO in Australia, who is best known for illegally stacking 2,000 people, in the media telling people they should be scared of multi-employer bargaining—ironic, when he has dozens upon dozens of his own companies bargaining for lower wages. Why would anybody listen to him on workers' rights?

After a decade of wage decline and job security decline, Australia voted for a government that will stand up for their rights at work, a government that will stand up for secure jobs and fair pay, a government that will ensure that no-one is left behind. These reforms can deliver on those commitments. The Australian people deserve better than an opposition that opposes the reforms before they've even seen them.