Andrew Giles (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As we debate the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment Bill 2014 [No. 2], Australia is becoming less equal. Research that ACOSS distributed at the start of this week painted a stark and disturbing picture. Australia's rich are getting richer and, while inequality here has not reached the extreme levels of countries like the United States, we are heading in that direction. Australians earning in the top 20 per cent of incomes now receive five times as much as those in the bottom 20 per cent. This gap is widening. We are heading towards a society much like the United States.

This is, of course, driven by the policy agenda of this government, in particular the cruel austerity of last year's budget and this year's budget. This is a government committed to attacking our social compact and also the social wage. But it is also a government that is committed to attacking unionism. When we look at income inequality, which is at the heart of this drive to us becoming a less equal society, we think about the work of such bodies as the IMF. The IMF has characterised this as the defining challenge of our time. Combatting it, the IMF says, is critical to sustainable economic growth, something I think all of us in this House should be committed to and working towards. It is undermined by this government's policy agenda more generally and specifically by this government's blind ideological attitude to the world of work, particularly this reflexive hatred of trade unionism.

When I think about our progress towards Americanisation, towards a society that is even more unequal—a society like that of the United States—I think about the recent contribution of the Noble Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz when he was asked last year about why Australia had resisted the tide of inequality relatively well. He was asked what Australia had that the US did not. He replied initially with just one word: 'Unions'. He said:

You have been able to maintain stronger trade unions than the United States. The absence of any protection for workers, any bargaining power, has had adverse effects in the United States.

Unions are a critical baulk against inequality—inequality in the workplace and inequality across our entire society. The role that they play is not only absolutely fundamental to giving individuals dignity and fairness at work but also a critical aspect of maintaining our path towards sustainable economic growth.

The pattern around income inequality is also exacerbated by what we are seeing in terms of wages growth. We are seeing wages growth stagnant and very, very uneven. We have the lowest wages growth on record. This is strange because when this government came into power the justification for a range of pieces of legislation introduced to attack trade unions and trade unionism was, of course, a wages explosion. The wages explosion was entirely in the imagination of government members. This reveals much more about their ideological world view and their complete determination to reshape how the labour market operates than any sense of reality or any sense of empathy with Australian workers or Australian families and their struggles to deal with cost-of-living pressures.

I referred to the IMF earlier and I want to make it very clear that, in agreeing with Joseph Stiglitz in his bold defence of the Australian union movement, I also agree with the IMF. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to income inequality, but we do have to look at supporting the role of trade unions if we are serious about supporting people's rights at work and supporting sustainable economic growth. This is the context within which we debate this bill, and this is why I am very proud, in opposing the bill, to speak in support of the amendments moved by the shadow minister, the member for Gorton.

This is the third time this bill, or a bill in very similar form, has been before the House. Its introduction might charitably be described as a triumph of hope over experience on the part of the minister. It is also one of 10 bills this government has introduced dealing with deregulation of workplaces. There have been 10 such bills from a government that seemed, before the election, determined to put as much distance as possible between it and any attempt to remake workplace relations. We do know something about this Prime Minister, the former minister for Work Choices: that, whatever he says, he is absolutely committed to returning to the core elements of Work Choices, as many of the previous bills debated in this place pushed towards.

In this debate, we have seen a consistency with this approach—a triumph of ideology over any reasoned approach to what is happening in the world of work and the priorities for workplace regulation. It was telling in the contribution of the member for Bass that he had nothing to say about the bill which is before us. In fairness, he probably had nothing to say about the bill because there is nothing to be said.

This is a bill which serves no purpose other than for tedious repetition from government members which has allowed them to go on wide-ranging frolics of character assassination rather than deal with the important business of understanding the challenges we face in the world of work, such as boosting productivity and reducing exploitation, as the member for Bendigo highlighted very effectively in her contribution to this bill. Instead, we have just had endless ranting and tedious repetition.

There was another telling element in the contribution of the member for Bass. He made it very clear, contrary to suggestions from the Prime Minister, that he does not accept that the architecture of the Fair Work Act is broadly appropriate. His contribution seemed to be very close to a direct call for a return to Work Choices. I say again: so much for Work Choices being 'dead, buried and cremated'. Of course, we have seen so many signs that this will not be the case already. Very recently, we have seen the callous attitude this government has shown to the cleaners who work so hard in this building. There was an attack this week on early childhood workers, and the union—

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