Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

If you don't pay your tax and you don't pay your tax for a while, you don't have the tax office coming to you saying, 'We'll give you a bit of an amnesty. It's alright. You probably made a bit of a mistake.' You get letters demanding that you pay. You often get told, 'You've got to pay this amount with interest.' And if the rules change around you, as many people will know, you can sometimes get a letter from the tax office saying, 'You didn't pay enough tax in previous years, so pay a bit more'—and you have to pay it. If a business doesn't pay its suppliers and doesn't do so for quite a few years, they don't get an amnesty and get told, 'No, that's alright. We didn't need you to pay us for a few years.' No, you very often get taken to court if you don't pay your bills and you don't pay your legal obligations when you're contracted with someone to pay something. But it seems, according to this Liberal government, to be something completely different when it comes to wages and when it comes to wages forgone in the form of superannuation. What this government is saying with this bill is that it is okay if employers have chosen not to pay money that will go towards people's retirement: 'We'll treat you completely differently from every other area of law; you don't even get a slap over the wrist. You get a free pass.'

We know increasingly, because of the work that's being done by unions and investigative reporters, that wage theft is becoming a massive problem in this country. There are various ways that employers do it. Sometimes it's dodgy bookkeeping where there are effectively two sets of accounts—and we saw this in the context of 7-Eleven, for example—where one set of books makes it looks like everyone is being paid properly, but the workers are being told separately, 'You've got to pay back some of that money; otherwise you'll lose your job.' In other places, we've seen many, many reports in the press of some big names withholding people's wages and other forms of income, like tips, that are meant to be going to people who are earning a very small amount of money. We know increasingly that wage theft is a problem. We know that there are many employers that try to get around even having to pay the legal minimum wage by calling their employees 'contractors' or through some other form of arrangement.

We know that's a big problem, but it's especially acute when it comes to superannuation because the payment doesn't get made directly to the employee; it gets made to a third party, to a superannuation fund. That means that an employee will often not know whether a payment has been made or not for quite some time. In my role before I came to this place, I spent quite a bit of time working on behalf of workers and unions when companies had gone under. Through no fault of the workers, a business gets placed into administration, and you're left scrambling around, trying to make sure that everyone gets their minimum entitlements. What we found, time and time again, was that, yes, a lot of people didn't get their wages, especially during those final couple of weeks of the business, but, when you delved into the superannuation, it was not uncommon at all to find that superannuation had gone unpaid for a very, very long period of time. People don't know about it, because not everyone spends their life checking their superannuation balance. If you've got young workers and people who don't speak English as their first language, as was the case for many of the people I was dealing with, they would find out for the first time when the company went under that superannuation hadn't been paid on their behalf.

We know that, not just for those insolvent companies but around the country more broadly, there's about $5.6 billion a year that is being be taken from workers in the form of unpaid superannuation. That's the scale of the theft, nationally, when it comes to superannuation—$5.6 billion. You would think that, faced with all of that, the government's response would be to say: 'How can we make the laws around paying wages and foregone wages in the form of superannuation as tough as the laws that apply to tax and as tough as the laws that apply to businesses who choose not to pay their suppliers? How about we start treating employment law as seriously as tax law and superannuation law as seriously as every other form of law where you get a penalty if you don't pay?' One way of doing that might be to start to address the cycles over which superannuation is required to be paid. Because it is being paid to a third party rather than directly to the employee, the employee is at a disadvantage when it comes to checking, so there should be an even greater obligation put on the employer to pay regularly.

There should be an examination of paying superannuation in alignment with pay cycles stipulated in workplace agreements, because if an employer were required to pay superannuation as regularly as they're required to pay wages then there would be a greater opportunity to have that checked, to have it checked on a regular basis and to minimise the amount of unpaid superannuation that is currently accruing. That just makes sense—it makes perfect sense. At the moment, where you can go for a long period of time before having to make your superannuation contributions on behalf of your employees, the size of the debt can balloon and the size of the theft can balloon, and that's what we've seen. That could have been something that the government looked at. But no. Instead, the answer is to give them a free pass.

We cannot allow the situation to continue where we treat underpayment of superannuation and underpayment of wages less importantly than breaches of other laws. It is time to beef up the enforcement of not underpaying, in all its forms, in this country. If we put as much attention into making sure that wage theft was stopped and that superannuation theft was stopped as the government puts into attacking unions, then we might have a lot of people who are better paid in this country. It seems there are hundreds of millions of dollars for a royal commission into unions that finds very little, but there are not hundreds of millions of dollars for a new enforcement unit to make sure that employers are paying the minimum amount of wages or the minimum amount of superannuation.

It seems that when it comes to wrongdoing in this country, if you've got a blue collar the government will throw the book at you, but if you have a white collar the government turns a blind eye. They had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to having a royal commission into the banks. The Greens were the first ones out of the blocks calling for that and, eventually, everyone else came on board. I'm pleased about that. But it seems much harder to get this government to take the question of wage theft and superannuation theft seriously. I think that everyone in this country would be much better off if, instead of having witch-hunts that cost hundreds of millions of dollars into unions, we put that money into making sure that employers just comply with existing law. Just comply with existing law—making sure everyone gets paid properly.

At the moment, if you are a worker who has not been paid superannuation or you are worried about it or you've not been paid your wages properly, it can be very difficult to go and have that enforced—and I speak from personal experience here. If you find that you've been underpaid, you've got, largely, no option other than expensive court proceedings. And it's even more difficult if you find that you haven't been paid your superannuation, because you're at a disadvantage when it comes to the information and then you have to go and take your employer to court to get them to pay money to a third party. Most people—most workers—do not have the capacity to do that. There's an imbalance.

It should be very, very quick, cheap and easy to enforce legal minimum standards in this country. But it's not. It's not, and that's why we're seeing billions of dollars a year in superannuation theft and in wage theft. The government should be bringing policies and legislation to this parliament that make it easier to enforce existing labour and superannuation laws and that give organisations the resources to do that. But, instead, we have proposals for amnesties. Wouldn't it be amazing if everyone in this country suddenly got an amnesty for any unpaid tax that they've got? I don't imagine that's going to happen. But it seems that if you don't pay your workers their superannuation you will be able to get off, even if it's been going on for many, many years.

Let's have some consistency. Let's have policies in this place that start to align the requirement to pay superannuation more closely, time-wise, with the requirement to pay wages. And let's have some decent enforcement of existing laws. I'm not even arguing or asking for existing laws in this situation to be improved—although we should lift the minimum wage and we should make sure our workplace relations system works much more for everyday people in Australia. Let's put that to one side. Let's just ask for the bare minimum. Let's ask for existing entitlements to be enforced. Let's have a situation where everyone who does work in this country feels confident that the government's got their back in making sure they'll get paid their legal minimum entitlements and superannuation.

At the moment, people do not feel like the government's got their back. They feel like the government's got the back of big corporations and that they'll give big corporations handout after handout after handout, and amnesty after amnesty. But when it comes to people having the basic guarantee that if you've worked you are going to get the payment for the work that you've done, you're going to get the wages in your bank account and you're going to get the superannuation in your superannuation account, people do not have that confidence at the moment and nothing the government is doing is going to give them that confidence; it's going to go the other way.

So before the government starts bringing laws here to say, 'Let's give people some get-out-of-jail-free cards,' let's have laws that make sure existing entitlements are guaranteed and everyone who goes to work can know that, at the end of that day, their wages are as good as in their bank account and their superannuation is put aside for them. Let's toughen the laws to make that happen rather than do what the government's proposing.

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