Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Infrastructure) Share this | Hansard source

On Friday, I had the pleasure, if that is the way to describe it, to stand outside the HMAS Albatross base on the outskirts of Nowra to draw the public's attention to the fact that under the Liberal-National Party, 70 jobs were set to be stripped from that naval base in regional Australia—70 well-paid permanent jobs in a town which struggles with unemployment. In some categories and in some suburbs it is double the national average. At a time when the Liberal and National parties have been running around the country talking about the importance of decentralising jobs out of Canberra, you saw an example where the same government and the same parties are removing jobs from regional Australia and sending them back to Canberra.

Of course, the member for Gilmore denied this was occurring, but we have very credible evidence that these jobs are indeed slated for removal from Nowra, and that there could be more jobs in the firing line from that base. This comes after figures released by the Australian Public Service Commission revealed that since 2014 over 890 ongoing jobs have been ripped out of regional Australia. That includes 760 roles in New South Wales, 180 roles in Queensland and 320 roles in regional Western Australia. You'd think that against this background the priority for any member representing a regional town and a regional electorate would be to come into this place, or go into their party room, and advocate for laws and policies which attract jobs to regional Australia and protect jobs in regional Australia.

Of course, the people who do that are so often not the political representatives of those constituencies but the people who represent those workers in those workplaces. They are the unions. In this case it was not the local member who assisted in this information coming to light about jobs being slashed in regional Australia but the union representing those workers. I am of course talking about the CPSU, a very good union representing government and public sector workers, often workers who sit in the advisers' box over there. If anybody needs a collective organisation representing their work and their job security, it is workers who work for the government, because they have nowhere else to go.

Strong unions are what we do about job cuts in regional Australia. And the single purpose of the legislation before the House today is to reduce the power and influence of unions and their capacity to organise and to protect the jobs and conditions of their members. In question time today we saw the peripatetic puppies on the other side frothing at the mouth, as they often do, when the subject of industrial relations comes up. They were citing examples which, if they were true—and we have no way of knowing whether they are true—would be condemned by every member of this place, regardless of their political stripe. We do not condemn the behaviour and the existence of every corporation and every director in this country because of the atrocious behaviour of a company like James Hardie, which acted atrociously and unconscionably and did things that no decent director would approve of and no company could conscionably do. It would be wrong of us to judge the behaviour of every company and every director in the country by the behaviour of that one company, or companies like it. Neither should we judge the behaviour of every decent unionist, every decent workplace representative, by behaviours that every normal, right-thinking person would condemn. Strong unions are what we do about regional job cuts, because strong unions fight for the existence and the conditions of the jobs in those regions. We need more of them, not less of them. If we're going to save the jobs of those 70 workers in Nowra and of many, many more workers that are also under threat, we'll need a strong union in the workplace advocating for their rights. The CPSU does a very good job, I know, of advocating for the rights of workers in regional areas, and we'll need that right around the country.

I want to talk about inequality, because we've had some more evidence confirming that the gap between the haves and the have-nots is growing in this country. In my own electorate, median total household income is around $1,300 a week. The rate of unemployment in regions like mine is much higher than it is in Malcolm Turnbull's electorate and much higher than the national average. Having a job in the Illawarra region is more than twice as difficult as it is in Malcolm Turnbull's electorate. So, when we see legislation like the bill we have before the House today, we cannot but draw the conclusion that the people conceiving of this legislation and the people voting for this legislation simply do not get what life is like for the rest of Australia. Those people are finding it more than two times harder to find a job in regional Australia than they would if they were searching for the same job in Malcolm Turnbull's own electorate or many of these other inner-city electorates that don't know how hard it is to struggle to find work. They understand that legislation like this is not legislation conceived of or drafted in their interest.

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