Ged Kearney (Cooper, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Skills) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Our economy is about to take a dive, it seems—simply, as the RBA tells us, for want of higher wages, infrastructure spending and the delivery of secure, decent jobs. The answer to all of that and more, like a sustainable future that will protect our planet, is right before us—or even behind us if we look to Labor policy history. Right now, the fractures in our economy brought about by globalisation, deregulation, privatisation of essential services and cuts to the remaining public sector, through to automation and technical changes and the deliberate destabilisation of work, have profoundly undermined the job security of working people across the developed world, sending them on a trajectory of fearfulness and anxiety.

We in Labor had an ambitious social reform agenda to reverse that trajectory—so ambitious that some have argued it might have been too much all at once and might have played a role in our not winning the election. So maybe we need to start with the basics: securing livelihoods through decent jobs that people can rely on. There is a crisis in Australia right now—a crisis of unemployment and underemployment. And forty per cent of working people are in insecure work. Beyond the cities, youth unemployment gnaws at the edges of regional economies, where globalisation and the withdrawal of government enterprise and services has devastated the means of entry to reliable jobs. The so-called gig economy is driving a further destabilisation of minimum standards, pay and workplace expectations. And if anyone here has been on the dole, let alone recruited into Work for the Dole or Community Development Programs, they would understand the punitive and cruel nature of that experience.

We know that decent, steady jobs are what communities across the country demand, and rely upon governments to provide. The good news is that the framework for how we can make that project work exists in a powerful policy inheritance of Australia's Labor movement. The Curtin Labor government's white paper on full employment in Australia was a policy framework for structural change. It was born in another crisis—that of the Second World War. Even as armies marched, bombs fell and entire cities were destroyed, the Curtin Labor generation realised an opportunity existed to build the structural order of a new economy—one unburdened by the unsustainable inequalities that had provoked the Great Depression and, with it, war and catastrophe. What it proposed was informed by the ideas of John Maynard Keynes in the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936. To summarise: fluctuations in private demand and investment provoked recessions and depressions and, with them, unemployment. But if governments directly employ surplus labour to build public works, maintaining full employment, the effect is levelled out. The income generated by employment stimulates demand for the private sector to supply goods and services.

Curtin made the government responsible for jobs and job creation to meet the full employment target. At the same time, the nation was enriched and modernised by the construction of public infrastructure. Australian unemployment averaged two per cent for 30 years. The Liberals retained Curtin's framework for the subsequent 23 years of government lest they risk the wrath of a generation that was rather enjoying its effects. These were the days before the neoliberal orthodoxy that took hold in the seventies redefined full employment as 'five per cent of unemployed people at any time'—before government walked away from direct job creation so that business could encourage downward pressure on wages through forcing workers not to bargain for jobs but to compete for them.

The public works of the past are today's initiatives for the collective good—like sustainable jobs that will deal with climate change, or service industry jobs to address the looming workforce crisis in aged care.

I want to read out some of the statements from the white paper and think about them with our current economic status in mind: 'To prevent the waste of resources which results from unemployment is the first and greatest step to higher living standards. Full advantage must be taken of modern methods of production and training in branches of industry.' The paper goes on to say: 'Full employment has advantages to offer every section of the community'. To the worker, it means 'steady employment, the opportunity to change employment if one wishes, and a secure prospect'. To the business or professional person, the manufacturer, the shopkeeper, it means 'expanding scope for enterprise, free from periodic slumps'. To the people as a whole, it means 'a better opportunity to obtain all the goods and services which their labour is capable of producing'.

It's extraordinary to me to consider that what is demanded of us as a society is to meet the current economic challenges, insisting that somehow rates of unemployment or underemployment are in any way 'natural'. Australian governments can and should play a direct role intervening in job creation and industry support. The Curtin white paper shows us how this is done.