Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make some comments in relation to the question I asked around the Public Service enterprise bargaining that is going on at the moment and the answers provided by Senator Cash, particularly her comments where she said she valued the role of public servants and believes that they should be well paid but that this should be within reasonable community standards. She then went on to make a whole range of statements about 'in the real world where real Australians live'—I think again trying to perpetuate the myth that public servants are not real Australians and do not live in the real world. I am sure it will come as no surprise to the Minister for Employment that the vast majority of public servants are living on average wages. The vast majority of the Commonwealth's employees earn average wage incomes. These people, these public servants, people who turn up and provide services to the community as part of their work, have been denied a fair pay offer and denied any pay increase for more than two years now. So I do not think it is fair for those statements to be made about real Australians living in the real world only getting a real pay rise if they show real productivity. The Public Service show productivity improvements all the time. It is a constant in the work they do, because they are always asked to do more to implement government policy and agenda, often without any additional resourcing. The fact that under this government the Public Service are now probably being asked to produce a higher amount of work, with 17,700 fewer staff than a couple of years ago, is a testament to the productivity gains that are being made across the service simply as a result of the job cuts that have been viciously pursued by this government.

With the pay offer as it stands, and the bargaining framework that the government has put in place, we all understand the conservative drive to reduce wages, conditions and working standards for ordinary workers. We can see that with the attacks on penalty rates and in other areas, and we are seeing it enforced in the Australian Government Public Sector Workplace Bargaining Policy. It is exactly this policy that is stopping the resolution of bargaining across the APS. We know that the executives within agencies have no ability to resolve these EBAs, the enterprise agreements, with their staff, because of the constraints that have been put on them by this framework. The constraints around the 1½ per cent, the productivity savings and the reduction of conditions being sought by the government are stopping the agencies having any capacity to bargain or to fix any problems that relate to the individual agencies. That is why, after 18 months of bargaining and some two years without a wage increase, we see that 96 per cent of public servants still do not have a new agreement in place.

When you look at those agreements that have gone to a vote, you see that 91 per cent in Immigration and Border Protection, 83 per cent in Human Services and 81 per cent in the Productivity Commission have voted no to the offer. These staff are making a decision that it is actually better to have a wage freeze—or, essentially, a real wage cut—than it is to settle for what the Commonwealth government is offering its employees. I note that in DHS, a big employer where the majority of the staff are at the APS 3 or APS 4 level—primarily because they work in Centrelink or Medicare—the main reasons that people have voted no are (1) the pay offer; (2) that the streamlining of their enterprise agreements, as mandated by the bargaining policy, will cost them some of their entitlements; (3) that they do not think that they will get salary advancement; and (4) that the family-friendly conditions were threatened. These are the reasons that your staff are saying they cannot settle for 1½ per cent, because of all the strings attached.

There are 152,000 public servants who need a pay rise and deserve a pay rise, and this government should prioritise the settling of these agreements now.