Emma McBride (Dobell, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020. I support the amendment moved by the member for Watson and endorse the comments of my colleagues. The bill represents the government's industrial relations reform package, and it is the outcome of months of consultations with employer groups, businesses and unions through a working-groups process. When announcing this process, back in May last year, the Minister for Industrial Relations claimed that the reform areas dealt with 'specific known problems in the system which all parties agree inhibit job growth or job creation or are causing issues in the system that prevent jobs being saved'. He went on to identify five areas for reform: casual and fixed-term employees, award simplification, enterprise agreement-making, compliance and enforcement, and greenfield agreements for new enterprises.

Labor's test for the bill from the outset—and we were clear—was: will it create secure jobs with decent pay? We were, as others have said, prepared to support measures reflecting what was agreed in the working groups. But, from the first meetings in June, the deliberations of the groups were highly secretive. All participants and third parties signed confidentiality agreements and were told they would be removed from the process should they breach these rules. It now appears that the working groups did not reach a great deal of consensus on any one issue and that the government is proceeding with its own reforms in the absence of consensus. The result of this approach by the government is a bill which makes workers less secure and cuts pay in the middle of a global pandemic. I'll quote from the ACTU:

The Bill fails the Government's own test: workers will be worse off.

…   …   …

The Government's changes will make jobs less secure; they will make it easier for employers to casualise permanent jobs and allow employers to pay workers less than the award safety net. This is the opposite of what the country needs.

Let's look at what the bill does, in particular to casuals. The government has ignored years of common law and overturned the recent Federal Court decision on what it means to be a casual. Under these laws, if a worker agrees to be employed as a casual at the start of their employment, they remain as a casual regardless of their actual work pattern, so long as the employer employs them on the basis that they make no firm advance commitment to continuing and indefinite work according to an agreed pattern of work. If a court finds later that they are in fact a permanent, any casual loading they receive will be offset against any permanent entitlements they are owed. Both the definition and the offset apply retrospectively. Under the government's own figures, this involves cancelling an estimated $18 billion to $39 billion in back pay that would otherwise be owed to casuals.

As part of the National Employment Standards, employers must make a written offer of conversion to permanent employment to casual employees after 12 months if there has been a regular pattern of work for the last six months. However, the employer does not have to make the offer if there are reasonable grounds not to. An example would be that the employer has reasonable grounds to think the job might not be there in 12 months. This reasonable-grounds defence has the capacity to undermine any path to permanent work. Employers cannot manipulate hours to prevent them from having to make the offer, although there is no civil penalty for a breach. There is no arbitration of disputes other than by agreement. If an employer does not make a casual conversion offer, there is a residual right for the employee to request conversion. Again, the employer can refuse if they have reasonable grounds. The Fair Work Ombudsman must prepare and publish a casual employment information statement which employers must provide to employees when they commence employment. Part-time workers will also face the prospect of job casualisation. Under the simplified additional hours measures, employers could reduce part-time work to a 16-hour weekly minimum, with future hours on a casual basis, risking the job security for employees on these contracts.

What particularly troubles me about this legislation, and it's what I'd like to turn to now, is the significant impact of this legislation that the government appears to have overlooked, brushed aside or ignored—the very real mental health impacts of insecure work. In the National Suicide Prevention Adviser's interim advice it was recommended that the government should:

Develop a Commonwealth process for reviewing new policies or initiatives to ensure they assess any impacts (positively or negatively) on suicidal risk or behaviour.

I wholeheartedly agree. A mental health lens should be cast over this legislation, which is being introduced at the very same time as the government is winding back COVID-19 support, like JobKeeper. The Prime Minister has consistently said—and I believe that he's genuine—that mental health is a priority of this government. But the government can't continue to ignore the impact of its actions in workplace relations, housing, education or social services on the mental health and wellbeing of all Australians. The link between insecure work, financial distress and mental health crisis is well established. As soon as the sector you work in is at risk, your mental health is at risk. As the demands of your work increase and the control you have over your circumstances falls, the risk only continues to grow. This was highlighted in Suicide Prevention Australia's Turning the Tide report in March last year. As I said earlier, the link between unemployment, financial distress and suicide is, sadly, well established. The report points to a global analysis of suicide population economic data which found that the rate of suicide for people who were unemployed was nine times that of the general population.

Australian studies, including a recent analysis of male suicide rates, have found periods of unemployment and underemployment, particularly in insecure forms of work, are strongly correlated with an increase in the suicide rate. So we know that, if you're unemployed, underemployed or in insecure work, there is a strong correlation with an increased risk of suicide. Over the past 12 months, we've seen hundreds of thousands of people find themselves out of work as businesses folded, companies collapsed and jobs have been shed. Many of those people are experiencing mental health problems for the first time. As the Black Dog Institute said at the very start of the pandemic:

Common consequences of disease outbreaks include anxiety and panic, depression, anger, confusion and uncertainty, and financial stress, with estimates of between 25% to 33% of the community experiencing high levels of worry and anxiety during similar pandemics.

What particularly troubles me about this legislation is the very real mental health consequences to people and to our economy. We know, because the Productivity Commission has estimated it, that mental ill health affects all Australians, directly or indirectly. Almost one in five Australians experience mental illness in any given year. Black Dog have estimated that 25 to 33 per cent of the community will have, or will be experiencing, high levels of worry and anxiety during this pandemic. We know, as I pointed out, that some Australians are more likely to experience mental health problems, including those who are underemployed and unemployed or who find themselves in insecure work.

Of course, this is a significant risk for individuals and families in our community. It is also a significant risk to our economy.

We know from the Productivity Commission final report into mental health that mental health is costing the Australian economy about $200 billion to $220 billion a year, which the report considered a conservative estimate of the cost. It's no surprise that mental ill health has been described by some as the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. My concern is that this legislation runs the risk of directly impacting the mental health of those who are caught up in this reform and at the same time increasing the cost of mental ill health to the Australian economy. It flies in the face of the recommendations of peak bodies, advocates and experts, including Suicide Prevention Australia, who have called for urgent action to provide gig workers with relief during a period when their livelihoods are at risk.

They recommended a two-pronged approach, and the first was to provide Australian gig workers and independent contractors with relief and ongoing support through the COVID-19 crisis. This is the exact opposite of what this legislation will do, and I'm very concerned about the real human consequences of this legislation. I urge the government, as the interim advice of the Suicide Prevention Adviser to the government has said, to consider the suicide and behavioural risk consequences of any action they take.

I'll turn now to what this means to my local community. I grew up in a regional coastal community just an hour and a half outside of Sydney, and there's always been stubbornly high unemployment, particularly for younger people. But at the height of the pandemic there were 36 jobseekers for every job vacancy on the Central Coast. While I'm relieved that this number has decreased and some sectors of the economy are recovering, some are still hurting, and they'll continue to hurt, like events companies.

I spoke earlier this week about Peter Rubin, who runs a mid-size events company in my electorate. He's really worried about what will happen when JobKeeper ends in March. We know that on the Central Coast at the height of the pandemic there were 4,902 businesses employing 18,734 people who were supported by the JobKeeper wage subsidy in my electorate. We know the government didn't want to introduce a wage subsidy and that it was Labor, the union and others that pressed for it. Then they were going to cut it off in September. They rolled it out for another six months to March; however, the Treasurer's been very blunt and he's ruled out the possibility of extending JobKeeper, stating, 'It was always a temporary measure.'

What I'm concerned about, as I've pointed out, is the known and clear risk between underemployment, insecure work, financial distress and mental health crisis, and the consequences of that. I was pleased to hear the Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe, when he was expressing his concern about job shedding after JobKeeper, talking about this as a moral obligation. Thousands of people in my electorate, as I've mentioned, have benefited from JobKeeper. It's protected their lives as much as their livelihoods. As we continue to have this patchy recovery, particularly in certain sectors of the economy, like the events industry, higher education and tourism, there are many people—hundreds of thousands of people—across Australia who are at risk.

At the same time, in my local community last Friday the Centrelink at Ettalong on the Central Coast closed for the last time. I was there with Senator Deborah O'Neill and the state member for Gosford, Liesl Tesch, on the day it closed. They're not just doing this on the Central Coast; they've done it in Newcastle in New South Wales and Newport and the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. At the same time as they're winding back COVID support, cutting JobKeeper and not giving any indication what they may do about the rate of JobSeeker, they're closing Centrelink shopfronts where people in communities like mine can go for help and support.

Before I came to this place, I was a chief pharmacist and a mental health worker. I worked in the adult acute mental health inpatient units in my local community for almost 10 years. I saw the very real risk when people came in in crisis—financial distress, relationship breakdown—where they had nowhere else to go but a public hospital mental health inpatient unit. They came because it was the only place where they could get a meal, a shower and a safe place to sleep. In a generous country like Australia, why is the government taking actions in workplace relations, housing and social welfare that leave vulnerable people stranded and at risk?

Labor would have a different approach, and our plan would include making job security an object of the Fair Work Act, so it becomes a core focus of the Fair Work Commission's decision. We would also extend the powers of the Fair Work Commission to include employee-like forms of work, allowing it to better protect people in new forms of work from exploitation and dangerous working conditions. We would legislate a fair and objective test to determine when a worker can be classified as a casual, so people have a clearer pathway to permanent work. There have been many statements in this House about people on the front line of COVID-19—those people who have put themselves in harm's way, working in aged care, in disability care and in hospitals—and some of those very same people will be caught up in this so-called reform. And, as the aged-care workers told me recently, the time for cupcakes and applause is over. What they really need to see is genuine support from this government and real action to improve their conditions, to make sure that they are safe and protected at work, and to make sure that they're not having to work across multiple workplaces, which, particularly in the time of COVID-19, presents a very real risk to them and the people they're trying to support.

We really need to see a different approach from this government. We need to see this government cast a lens on the mental health and wellbeing of all Australians in any actions they take. I urge the government to consider seriously the very real risk to the mental health and wellbeing of Australians when they're putting forward legislation like this that poses a very real risk to the most vulnerable people in our society.

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