Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about the interim report of the Work and Care Select Committee. On a day when the Labor governments has introduced one of the cornerstones of its election promises to reform the workplace relations system, the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill, I want to talk about how this bill must address the crisis in our work and care system.

The world has changed. The census tells us that five million Australians are dealing with putting together their job with care for someone else: their child, someone with a disability or an aged parent. Carers are under stress. They feel guilty about whether they're a good enough worker or a good enough parent or carer. The Australian work and care system, as it stands, has let them down: it's broken. The architecture of work and care needs to change to address our current and emerging challenges. We're an ageing population; we have more and more women at work and we need more men to step up and take their share of care responsibilities.

The Select Committee on Work and Care handed down its interim report on 18 October. We're halfway through our inquiry. We have had over 100 submissions and we've heard about the lives of thousands of Australians. We're heading shortly to Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia, and we're seeing a very consistent picture. The evidence is clear: there are several things we could do right now in our workplace relations system that could make a difference.

The interim report recognised the need to lift wages across the care sector, in disability, child care and aged care. We need to ensure wages are lifted fairly and comparatively across all forms of care. We also need to introduce multi-employer bargaining to allow care workers, often powerless in small workplaces, to bargain effectively. Women are the backbone of the care economy, yet they're leaving in droves because of their low wages and poor conditions. The interim report recommended improving roster justice for workers, who, too often, are forced to compete in a kind of rostering Hunger Games to secure the hours they rely on. Workers need stability, predictability and the right to negotiate their rosters ahead of time with their employers. Roster justice particularly affects women, who are forced to juggle unpredictable shifts and care for their families.

Workers also need an enforceable right to request flexibility. For some this is easy, but for many it is not. Too many workers don't feel comfortable asking for flexibility, because they know they'll either never get another shift or be sacked or otherwise disadvantaged in their jobs. As a researcher who analysed these issues for decades, I know that the right to request flexibility introduced in 2009 made no difference to the number of workers who requested flexibility or to the flexibility they got, because they knew they didn't have meaningful protections in place to support them when they asked for it.

We also need a right to disconnect from technology, which pulls work into our homes and which many people, while they like working at home, struggle to turn off or stop using outside their contracted hours of work. The changing ways of work in recent years, with the advancement of technology, have created what we can call an 'availability creep', where employees feel they need to be available all the time, to answer the emails and calls, and to simply deal with their workload. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Victoria Police have a clause in their enterprise bargaining agreement containing a right to disconnect, which means that, once their paid hours are done, the employer can only contact them outside their hours in an emergency or for a welfare check. We need this kind of protection for all workers.

Of course, looking beyond workplace relations, we need a lot more than just changes in the law, important as they are. We need to improve the availability and the quality of child care and preschool and to extend paid parental leave to 52 weeks, in line with international standards—including superannuation—and lift it closer to the pay rates that parents actually receive. We also need to look to the tax system, which imposes very high levels of marginal rates of tax on working carers and makes it simply uneconomic for many of them to work once they've paid their childcare bills.

I'm really looking forward to working with the Labor government on their workplace relations reform. We've got a lot to do to secure the kinds of changes I've talked about. They are decades overdue. We've had governments which for decades have ignored the shift in our workforce, with the increasing participation of women and their need for support as they work in their jobs while also caring for those they love. This legislation matters to the quality of work for millions of working Australians—I mentioned five million today—who put together their own jobs and their care for others. But it goes beyond that. It matters to the quality of life for our kids. It matters to our productivity. It matters to those we love, and it matters to the participation rate of women in our economy.

There's a lot to do, and I'll be back here in February to tell you more about the select committee's report and what we've learned. In closing, I want to thank the senators who have worked so hard alongside me and the many people who have brought their stories to the parliament through this select committee. Your stories are not wasted. We have heard them. We will act on them.

Debate adjourned.