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

This government wants to make insecure work worse. We already know that insecure work in this country is at crisis point. Insecure work makes it harder to plan your life, because you don't know whether you're going to be working on any particular day or not. It can make it harder to plan a family. We've heard from worker after worker in the inquiries in this place who say, 'I just didn't know whether I could start a family or get a house of my own, because I just wasn't guaranteed a job next year, next month or the day after next.' It makes it really hard to do basic things that many of us used to take for granted, like get a roof over our heads.

The cost of affording a house at the moment is through the roof. If you can find a place to rent near where you work, you're lucky. If you are looking for a place to buy, you know you'll be priced out of the market because the government keeps giving billions of dollars a year in subsidies to people who've already got two, three or four houses. But, if you are looking for a place to buy, and you go to the bank manager to try and get a mortgage, if you are on a form of insecure work, it makes it that much harder.

What is this government trying to do? Instead of outlawing insecure work and instead of saying, 'Insecure work is getting worse in this country, and we've got to tackle it', they've brought a bill to this place that would help spread insecure work like wildfire. How would it do that? The bill that we're being asked to agree to hear would basically give the employer the right to determine whether you're a casual or not and decide it even if you're not. In other words, you could be someone who's actually a part time worker or even potentially a full-time worker, but, if the employer decides it's in their interest to call you a casual, your opportunity to appeal against that is taken away. In other words, this is going to put a legal stamp on some widespread forms of insecure work and exploitation that exists in this country.

The government, under pressure from the Greens, Labor—almost all of the Senate—and unions, was forced to gut some of the other terrible provisions from this bill. Those provisions would have allowed, for example, full-time workers and even part-time workers to be put on a new form of contract that we might as well effectively call permanent casual. Under the new form of contract that the government wanted to get through but was forced to back down on in this bill, you'd have been guaranteed maybe only a minimum of 16 hours a week and your employer would have been able to move you up or down, so you would have had next to no certainty over your working lives and it would have been the end of full-time, secure, ongoing employment as we know it. It would have introduced a new kind of contract into the Australian industrial relations system. Working together, working with the community, people across the political spectrum managed to get the government to ditch that, but this government is so petulant that they also said, 'If we can't have all the nasty things that we've been trying for years to get through and we're now going to use the pandemic as an excuse to pursue, then we're going to take even the good things, like cracking down on wage theft, out of the bill as well.' So what are we left with in this bill? After the government dummy spits, we're left with only a provision that will entrench insecure work in this country by allowing employers to say that you're a casual, even if you're not. If you want to go to court and complain about it, bad luck. If you want to go to the Fair Work Commission and complain about it, bad luck. This comes after we have seen, year after year after year, people come to this place saying, 'My life is getting harder, because insecure work is getting worse in this country.' We have an obligation in this place to stand up for decent work and decent conditions.

The amendments being moved by the opposition are good amendments and will put back in some of the good bits that the government has taken out, but the provision that the government is asking us to sign up to is one that does nothing more than entrench insecure work in this country. We want to outlaw insecure work, so that's why the government's approach must be opposed.

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