Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

All Australians want is a government that can create good secure jobs, jobs that they can count on. That is all Australian workers want. That is all Australian grandparents want—for their grandchildren to have good secure jobs that they can count on. All parents want is for their children to have access to the same employment opportunities that they themselves had when they were younger. Yet what we have seen from this government is no plan. What we have seen from this government is attack after attack on workers.

Let us talk about the miners in Central Queensland and this government's failure to stand up for the directly employed Anglo American mine workers who, right this minute, are facing forced redundancies. Their employer has said that they are going to make 80 to 90 of them redundant. At the same time, their employer has advertised for labour-hire workers to replace the directly employed workers. Where has the Deputy Prime Minister been speaking out and calling out this employer on that disgraceful act? Where is the member for Dawson? Where are the Central Queensland members standing up and calling on this company to keep the directly employed people working at that mine?

This is not just happening in mining. This is happening across the sector. And the government is letting corporate Australia get away with it. There are 100,000 full-time jobs that have been lost since the beginning of the year and they have been replaced by insecure labour-hire casual jobs. Underemployment is spiking in this country. Full-time employment is crashing, yet all the government can do is champion business for creating insecure work. All the government can do is champion the productivity gains. This government does not care about full-time jobs, it does not care about Australian workers wanting full-time jobs and it does not care about families relying on decent full-time jobs to secure their futures.

This government killed off the car industry. They like to pretend it was not them, but it was. They are also stalling and failing to properly create industry to replace those jobs being lost in the car industry, particularly in states like South Australia and Victoria. All we have seen this week is crocodile tears from the government about what is going on in Hazelwood. Where are the tears for the Holden workers? Where are the tears for the component suppliers of the car industry, people in regional Victoria, people in the south and the north of Melbourne? Where is the government's plan to help those workers into decent full-time jobs?

This government has also attacked its own workforce. It has sacked thousands of hardworking public servants. It has put pressure on our public system, making queues for Centrelink longer, making problems within our immigration department and within our education department. This government is antiworker by the way it treats its own workforce. Let's take our cleaners here at Parliament House. One of the first things this government did back when it was elected in 2013 was cut the Clean Start guidelines. To this day, whilst every member of the House has received a pay rise, the cleaners who clean our offices have not received a pay rise. That is how much this government cares about low-paid workers. The cleaners who keep this building clean to this day have still not received a pay rise under this government's watch.

We have seen this government try to cut paid parental leave for 80,000 new mums. It is going to affect people who are pregnant right now and are making plans about how they will afford their mortgages and how they will work as a family unit. This government is saying to them, 'We are going to cut your paid parental leave entitlements.' This government has scrapped the low-income super contribution, hitting the retirement, again, of low-paid workers.

And then we get to what this government is doing in terms of temporary workers. We have seen a 5.6 per cent increase of temporary visa workers in our labour market, and that is putting pressure on local jobs. For all of their crocodile tears about the backpacker tax, what members of the government are not talking about is how they are going to clean up the exploitation. The Fair Work Ombudsman report exposed that one-third of backpackers are being ripped off, yet there is no plan from this government to clean this up, and that is putting direct pressure on the labour market. What Australian people want is a secure job that they can count on. What they are not getting from this government is a plan on how the government is going to create these secure jobs.

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