Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Australians are hard-working and patient. They have contributed to over a decade of healthy company profits and shareholder value, but precious little of that value has been returned to their own pay packets. Reciprocity has broken down. This is the social compact between workers and their employers. Australian workers are now running out of patience and time. They are in that pincer grip of rising cost-of-living pressures and stagnant wages. In fact, that pincer grip has turned into a stranglehold. It is disproportionately affecting our lower-paid workers, particularly those in our feminised industries—childcare workers, healthcare workers, aged-care workers, cleaners and workers in the disability and community sector. Not coincidently, these sectors have also seen an exodus of workers during the pandemic. If things were bad before the pandemic, they are now much worse. The pandemic effectively acted like a threat-multiplier—much like climate change will. It blew off those weaknesses and exposed fault lines. Those fault lines were then rent further apart so that they are now wide, and this has led to growing inequality in our society.

Although we have near record low unemployment, at 3.25 per cent, it hides a dirty secret—moribund wages growth that has not kept up. It has averaged 2.2 per cent every year over the last 10 years. We have a tight labour market, but we are not seeing a growth in wages—why? Because the pipeline of job security is leaky—it is vulnerable to exploitation, secret pay clauses that affect women, neutered bargaining power and insurmountable power dynamics. There is no contest between a cleaner and a CEO.

While wages have tanked, what has burgeoned is a growing underclass—effectively, a working poor. That's what we have in Australia—a working poor. There's a term for this that I discovered only during the election. They're called a precariat. They live on the edge of precariousness. There are about four million of these workers who are in insecure work, and they have many faces. They're in the gig economy, in labour hire, in part-time work, or on rolling fixed-term contracts. Let's meet a couple of them. One is Lucy, a woman I met in my electorate of Higgins. She lives in Malvern. She's in her 60s, a nurse educator, and she has been on a rolling fixed-term contract for 10 years. Over that time, she has done pretty well—she has managed to buy a lovely house with a beautiful garden. She has a cat. She has had a really good quality of life. Then the pandemic came, and her hours were cut. Do you know what happened? She started falling behind on her mortgage repayments. When I met her, she was on the edge of losing her home, and she's two years off retirement. That is the human consequence of a decade of wage suppression.

Then there's Maia, a colleague of mine, someone I met when I was working on the COVID wards at the Alfred Hospital during the omicron wave in January. Maia is a cleaner. I met her in the change room when we were taking off our scrubs. There she was, removing a top which was saturated with perspiration. The only part I could see that was dry was a tiny little hem at the bottom of her scrubs. I looked at her and said, 'Are you okay?' She said, 'Michelle, it's my third change of the day.' It was about one o'clock in the afternoon. I was on an enterprise bargaining agreement, and I was getting paid well for what I was doing, but I'm not so sure about Maia. She's a cleaner. What about all the other people that keep hospitals go going—porters, security guards, the people who turn up when there is a code grey for occupational violence and aggression, the people who sterilise the instruments in the bowels of the hospitals, and the people who clean up the laundry? They are almost certainly not on EBAs in the same way that I was.

What we are currently seeing, with an exodus of low-paid workers from mission-critical industries like health care, aged care and early childhood education, is a product of misplaced priorities. Low wages were a deliberate design feature from those opposite for over a decade. To me this is something much more sinister—it is a violation of the social contract between people and their leaders. When you come into this House it is such a privilege, and your job is actually to govern for everyone, for the whole country, not just for a thin slice of a sector—your favourites. You don't come in here to govern for your favourites, you govern for everyone. The complete distortion of this value is what we're now reaping from the last 10 years.

The secure work, better pay bill actually seeks to restore reward for effort and it tries to even up the field, particularly between men and women. We've heard much about the gender pay gap sitting at 14.1 per cent, and that's probably an underestimate. It's been stubbornly resistant to change—stubbornly resistant. Everyone in this House has been bemoaning the fact that this is a terrible thing and that we need to do more about it. We don't need pious proclamations: what we actually need is structural reform to close this gap, and this is what this bill introduces.

It zeros in on gender equity; it zeros in on it and makes it a key objective of the Fair Work Act. It means that the Fair Work Commission will now have to apply a gender lens to everything it does. The Fair Work Commission will be backed up by two expert panels, one focused on pay equity and the other focused on the care and community sector, which is disproportionately feminised. We will also outlaw pay secrecy, removing that cloak of secrecy which hides a dirty secret: that women are paid less than men for similar types of work. Casting sunlight over the organisational structure will help make amends.

We will also help to stamp out sexual harassment by making it easier to make claims to the Fair Work Commission rather than having to go through the courts. We will limit the use of these rolling fixed-term contracts—the same contract that was hobbling Lucy in my electorate—and we will expand access to flexible working arrangements. That's so Maia, the cleaner in my hospital, can turn up to work at 7 am knowing that she has someone to look after her children, or that maybe she can defer her work to a little later because her childcare centre hasn't opened yet.

We will increase access to bargaining. People on EBAs, like myself in my former life, earn more money than people who are on award wages. In fact, on average, $600 a week more. But only 15 per cent of workers are covered by EBAs. There is a strong emphasis throughout this bill on bargaining and arbitration. But what I've heard over the last few hours and days is that a scare campaign is being waged around strikes, or an onerous imposition on small business, or that it's overly complex legislation that we need more time on. Australians have already waited for 10 years to get to this point: how much more time do you need? The writing is on the wall!

Then, of course, there have been complaints about a lack of consultation. Really? We've had five months of continuous consultation with peak business groups, with some of the largest employers in our country, with unions, with women's groups, with academic experts and with state and territory ministers. And we've also had a long process of public consultation. We need to end the race to the bottom and to end the sort of mentality that, when it comes to wages, for too long workers have been seen as a problem to be managed rather than the social and economic benefit that they are. Our government ushered in an increase to the minimum wage and a wage rise for aged-care workers, but leaving that to elections is fraught. There must be a better way, and there is. Reforming the system is what this bill will deliver, so that we end up, as I said in my maiden speech, with healthy, happy workers who make the economy hum. I commend this bill to the House.

See this speech in context