Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Coronavirus Economic Response Package (Jobkeeper Payments) Amendment Bill 2020. What we have here is a bill that extends the time frame for JobKeeper but facilitates cutting of the rate of JobKeeper and that doesn't address the fact that so many people have missed out on JobKeeper. Moreover, it now reduces some workers' rights even though the business of that employer has recovered. Whilst we support the extension of JobKeeper, there are some serious stings in the tail of this bill.

I think we all acknowledge that this global pandemic has not only challenged us all this year but has really revealed the existing inequalities in society. We know that young people have lost their jobs at record rates, which came after an already too-high youth unemployment rate. We know that more women are losing work than men—there is a disproportionate gendered impact there—and we know the industries that have been hardest hit are where young people and women are over-represented as workers.

We've said no-one should be left behind. The government, in its response, has chosen to leave people behind. It had the opportunity in this bill to fix that and to broaden the coverage of eligibility for JobKeeper, but it's chosen not to do so. When the crisis first hit, the Greens were proudly the first to call for a wage and job guarantee, so we welcomed the government's foray into this field. But, sadly, so many people were left out. Over a million casual workers missed out on eligibility for JobKeeper simply because they hadn't been in a job for more than 12 months or, at that magic date of 1 March, didn't meet that employment criteria. As I'm sure colleagues of mine will speak to, this had a massively disproportionate effect on gig economy workers and on people in the arts and recreation sector, who don't do traditional hours. They work seasonally. They work gig-to-gig. They've missed out on support. There have been some hastily patched-up promises that, frankly, do not give people the hope they deserve. We saw childcare workers have JobKeeper removed from them prematurely and, of course, the free childcare has ended, which has increased the pressure on many households when it should have been kept. We saw universities, which have already been subject to massive, successive cuts by this government, were not eligible for JobKeeper either. In some bizarre parallel universe, we're somehow meant to recover from a pandemic but there's no investment in the training and tertiary skills to do so.

This government have now come to us with a bill to extend the parameters and the Treasurer's ability to extend the parameters of JobKeeper, which we support, but they've left these stings in the tail and have failed to address that lack of coverage. We think JobKeeper, and JobSeeker for that matter, should continue at the current rates for as long as they are needed. That is how we get economic stimulus and that is how we help the community in a global pandemic. So we support this continuation, but we will be moving amendments, which my colleague Senator Faruqi has already mentioned, and she will be championing those amendments in the Senate.

The first of those addresses the fact that this bill creates a new category of employee. This bill allows the employers who were previously able to get JobKeeper for their workers because their business had been suffering to that relevant proportion and who have now recovered—they might have had a 10 per cent cut in their profits, but they're essentially on the road to recovery—to have huge powers to reduce their workers' hours up to 40 per cent, which we know might actually be greater than 40 per cent in monetary terms if you're talking about penalty rates. Businesses which are on the road to recovery and have essentially bounced back are now able, according to this bill, to reduce their workers' rights. Perhaps if they were still eligible for JobKeeper we could deal with that, but if they are on the road to recovery such that there's less than 10 per cent of an impact on their business they should not be given the right to slash their workers' hours by up to 40 per cent. That's not how you protect people in a pandemic. That's not how you reduce unemployment figures in a pandemic. Essentially, those employers are now feeling the economic benefit off the back of their own workers. So we'll be supporting amendments that have been moved by the opposition in that regard, and we have our own amendments drafted as well. We could pass the good bits of this bill without having those sorts of nasty provisions included in it.

The other concern that we have is that this bill, as the government has flagged, sets us up for a two-tiered system. The bill sets people up who were previously working low hours and generally not by choice—it was generally all of the shifts that they could actually get. For the first time they had finally been earning a living wage. That original rate of $1,500 was actually having a huge impact on pulling people out of poverty. It was helping single-parent families. It was helping kids. It was helping so many people actually meet their daily expenses, yet the government now wants to dump people who are, often through no fault of their own, working lower hours onto below a living wage.

I can tell you something about those people: they're disproportionately women. I've got some figures here. Many of the JobKeeper recipients who've previously earned less than the weekly minimum wage. That is, those low-paid, low-hours insecure workers who I've already said are predominantly women will now disproportionately—twice as many women as men—be affected by this change. Of course, many of the industries with the highest proportion of workers who work less than 20 hours a week, including retail, accommodation and food, arts and rec, have been hardest-hit by COVID and, again, are disproportionately worked in by women. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that this government still hasn't got the memo about gender equality despite it being the 21st century. We should not be cutting people's income in a global pandemic at a time of economic crisis. That's another unnecessary sting in the tail of this bill and another issue on which we'll be moving amendments to excise those nasty bits that are, frankly, unconscionable in the situation that we're in.

I hope that we have support on that amendment. It's not clear to me where the opposition stand on that front. People will recall that for a time Labor were saying that people who were getting paid more than their original wage didn't deserve that. It was a bit bizarre having the opposition party advocating for folk to be returned to below a living wage, but such are the strange times we live in. I hope they've changed their perspective on that and I hope they support our amendment when it comes to a vote.

Here we have a bill that extends out JobKeeper and the time it will go for, but it doesn't fix the fact that so many millions of people have been left out from getting that necessary income support, and I want to go to some of the categories of those people: casual workers, temporary visa holders, and university and childcare workers. Despite the fact that the scheme is still $44 billion under budget, this government does not want to help casual workers, university employees, childcare workers and temporary visa holders, and that is an unconscionable choice this government is making with this bill. So we will be moving in the committee stage to expand JobKeeper to include those categories of workers in JobKeeper eligibility. We have a choice here. The government has dipped its toe in the waters of the wage subsidy, which has been shown to really help people. It's necessary in the global situation we are in, and we urge the chamber to continue with these supports, not to slash them, not to continue to turn a blind eye to folk who are missing out on that support and to actually start extending that support to the folk who need it. I look forward to the committee stage of this bill.