Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to support this motion and I thank the member for Scullin for moving it, because it highlights a very important issue that is getting worse in an Australian society: the issue of income inequality. When I worked for Unions NSW, it was my role every year to prepare the state wage case. This was a case before the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission by which basic award rates—the minimum wage—were adjusted in New South Wales each year. Each year we would submit to the commission evidence from low-paid workers.

Over the years, I determined that there were certain characteristics of low-paid workers in Australia. Unfortunately, they are predominantly women. They predominantly work in part-time and casual occupations. These are people that can never afford to have a holiday. They very rarely go out to the movies or have a night out for a meal with their families. When the car breaks down, they often cannot afford to fix it and do all that they can just to keep it roadworthy and registered. Their children never have the luxury of visiting a dentist or anything like that and often miss out on going to school excursions, because the family simply cannot afford it. These are the working poor, the people that rely on a strong award system to be able to participate in society.

Each year when we made an application to adjust the minimum wage so that these people could afford a living wage, it was opposed by the employer associations. You could write their submission every year. It was the same one every year: that by increasing the minimum wage we would harm employment prospects and reduce growth in our economy. This argument was always shot down by the Industrial Relations Commission for one simple reason: the employer associations could never present any credible economic evidence to back that assertion. The commission would always ask: 'Where is your evidence? Get us an expert economist that is willing to go on the record here at the commission and give evidence.' They could never do that.

Australia is becoming, unfortunately, more unequal in income distribution. The top 20 per cent now receive half of Australia's income; the bottom 20 per cent receive just four per cent. Life is getting harder for those people that are in the bottom 20 per cent. It has been made harder and more difficult by the Turnbull government through cuts to family payments, cuts to pensions, attacking Medicare, cutting paid parental leave, cutting funding for schools, deregulating universities and putting university beyond the reach of working-class kids, and cutting company taxes. All of these policies have increased the gap between the haves and the have-nots in Australia and made income inequality greater.

Labor in government attempted to arrest and attempted to reduce the growing income inequality in this country, and we were quite successful because we put in place the proper economic and social policies that did so. They included, firstly, a strong social safety net. Access to universal health care is fundamental to a strong safety net, and Medicare is something that Labor will always defend. They included a fair pension and fair levels of family payments; a fair industrial relations system with a livable minimum wage, with work value cases so that people—predominantly women, unfortunately—who have traditionally worked in low-income occupations like nursing and child care have the opportunity to demonstrate to an independent umpire the value of their work and have that work revalued in the marketplace as a minimum; and access to a fair unfair-dismissal regime and collective bargaining. These are all the fundamentals of reducing income inequality in our society. Access to education and education funding based on needs is principally important for reducing inequality. A higher education system promotes skill development so people who may come from disadvantaged backgrounds have an opportunity to get an education, to improve their skills and to improve their employability and their worth in the marketplace. A progressive taxation system encourages the poor to save for their retirement and encourages fair distribution of income.

We also took a number of measures to reduce outlandish executive remuneration. I have to say that they have worked. One of those was greater accountability on executive and director remuneration, requiring boards to stand for re-election where they do not adequately respond to shareholder concerns regarding remuneration. We also introduced tax transparency so that private companies were forced to report their earnings and the tax that they were paying. All of these were solid Labor measures that were aimed at reducing income inequality in our country.

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