Anne Stanley (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Monash is right: there are consequences for every decision a government makes. Australia has always been an egalitarian society, a society where we are at our best when we all work together. Australia has a strong history of workers fighting for fair pay and safe working conditions. Their efforts are what created our weekends, our public holidays, our sick leave, and most importantly the safety regulations that mean that people who go to work in the morning come home at night. Those opposite are saying that the movements that brought about the economic prosperity of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s—which their government benefited from—were brought about without workers and that now the workers should be undermined and crushed.

The Albanese Labor government seeks to listen to all sectors of our community while we develop our policies. You saw that in our policy for climate change: the new government received approval from the Business Council, from small business, from the union movement, from educators and from universities—all the people that make a difference in our society. The Jobs and Skills Summit last week brought all sections of the Australian people together to find ways to improve the economy and the lives of all of us—small business, large business, families and pensioners. Yet the Leader of the Opposition chose not to join that. While we commend the Leader of the Nationals for being part of that debate, everybody needs to be there. Everybody needs to get together and find the things that make a difference.

Union members come from all parts of our society. They are our aged-care workers, they're our nurses, they're our police and they're our teachers. In 2020, in fact, the industries with the highest membership were in education, public administration, health care, electricity and transport. The membership of those industries ranged from 20 to 30 per cent of workers. It is clear that Australians think that unions are somewhere where they can have their cases heard and find support.

Workers in this country have suffered for nine years under the previous government, experiencing the worst decline in real wages since records began in 1998, a decline of 3.2 per cent. The previous government didn't advocate for aged-care workers. Perhaps if they had listened to the unions and the workers that were giving them that information, they wouldn't have been subjected to a royal commission that showed the neglect that was going on under their watch. Union members were talking to our side of the House and to their loved ones who were being looked after in aged care about all the things that were going wrong.

The previous government has admitted their policy on wages was built on intentional wage suppression. But wages aren't the reason we have inflationary pressures at the moment. The Australia Institute in May 2022 estimated that a five per cent wage increase across the entire economy would mean a price increase for a cup of coffee of about nine cents. It is not the reason why we have problems at the moment.

When the rest of the country came together last week for the Jobs and Skills Summit to find real solutions that the country needs, the opposition decided to live in their own reality. Are the opposition seriously saying to us that business, government, advocacy groups and individuals—and, yes, the unions—didn't have an important part to play and an important story to tell? What the opposition fails to understand with the way that they have embarked on their period in opposition is that the Australian people have conflict fatigue. The members of my electorate and electorates all over the country voted to have us talk to each other and talk together. We need to be together, and that includes unions, who represent such a large part of the Australian people—the people who, like the member for Monash said, voted for everyone.

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