Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021. To be frank, I find profoundly offensive the use of the phrase 'supporting Australia's jobs and economic recovery' in relation to this bill, which is a deep and hypocritical betrayal of working Australians. This bill does nothing to support secure jobs and it does nothing to support the long-term economy. More than ever, working Australians know that you can't trust Scott Morrison, the Liberals and the Nationals with their wages and conditions.

During COVID-19 we witnessed extraordinary service and sacrifice from our essential workers, coupled with a realisation that an essential worker extends beyond those who protect our health and rescue us from natural disasters. They are cleaners, truck drivers, security guards, aged-care workers, public servants and workers in our ports. They deliver food, they care for us, they protect our borders, they make sure we get our support payments, they unload ships, they stack shelves and they keep us safe, all the while taking risks with their own safety. Yet, as we emerge from this pandemic, our essential workers are being rewarded for their dedication and sacrifice with a deep betrayal from the Morrison government with this bill, which purports to support Australia's job and economic recovery but which is absolutely intent on reigniting the industrial relations wars that Australians are so very tired of.

Hundreds of thousands of workers experienced the brutal reality of insecure work during the worst of this pandemic. They were stood down or lost their jobs without compensation. Others struggled without income in self-isolation or in quarantine with no paid leave. Aged-care workers, cleaners, hospital staff and security workers who were holding down multiple casual jobs to make ends meet faced extreme pressure to restrict themselves to one workplace, with little or no financial compensation. That's not to mention the travel agents who help bring people home, help them get their money back and assist them in so many ways. The whole experience taught us a great deal about the value of having a secure job. We know now more than ever that we need more jobs, not fewer.

In April 2020 Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared, 'We're all in this together and we've got to put down the weapons.' It is now quite clear that he has picked up those weapons in the form of this industrial relations bill, claiming it is necessary to support economic recovery. That claim is rubbish. We need only remember the disaster of the Howard government's Work Choices experiment back in 2006 and 2007 to hear alarm bells ringing. The Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill scraped through the House of Representatives and is now with us in this place and we are faced with all its ugliness and naked ideology. It is a grubby sellout that will not protect workers or provide secure jobs. It will not lead to economic recovery. It creates a pathway for employers to cut pay. It wipes out back pay claims for misclassified casuals and proposes new so-called flexibility for part-time workers to pick up shifts without overtime rates.

This bill will allow part-time employees covered by awards in the retail, food and accommodation industries to work extra shifts at ordinary rates. This has been referred to as part-time flexibility, but in truth it's casual employment by another name and allowing extra work without paid overtime that will cut take-home pay. Basically, it will allow employers to use part-time workers as yet another form of casual labour. What about creating secure full-time jobs? Why would anyone hire an employee in a full-time secure job when they can hire them as a part-time worker for, say, 16 hours a week and then just demand that they work extra hours on a business-needs basis at no extra cost or penalty to the business? Under this bill, any job can be casual so long as a worker is desperate enough to accept it. This will feed the further spread of insecure employment without paid leave entitlements.

In terms of the pandemic, a significant group of public health experts from the Australian National University have called these IR exchanges an 'immediate threat to public health', a significant threat to public health. I urge every member to let that sink in for a moment. Casuals with no sick leave have already borne the brunt of this pandemic, and now the government is shamelessly attempting to legislate to have as many casual workers as possible. In reality the changes in both part-time and casual employment rules will discourage new hiring. If existing employees can be flexibly required to cover overtime shifts without costing employers any extra, why would they hire anyone else?

This IR bill has been spruiked by two hollow men, our Prime Minister and his Attorney-General, Christian Porter. It's being sold to us as a trigger for post-pandemic job creation. This claim is as hollow as they are. This government cannot accept that the best way to ensure economic recovery is by making sure that workers have a secure job, a regular pay packet, paid leave and fair superannuation to allow them dignity in retirement. Our economy will be buoyed by workers spending their pay, taking holidays and getting home loans, not by cutting wages and job security. The Liberal government is back to its old ways, once again declaring war on working people and using the pandemic as an excuse to scapegoat unions, casualise more jobs, drive down wages and fatten profits. To add insult to injury, they are now attempting to freeze the next rise in the superannuation levy. ACTU secretary Sally McManus pretty much summed it up when she said, 'You can't heal the economy by hurting working people'.

Since the Prime Minister won't listen to sound economic arguments, perhaps we could get Jenny to talk to him about it. Let us just consider the possible working life of a young person moving into work in 2021. Their first job in their teenage years is usually a casual one, and casual at that time in life is probably what suits them best as they juggle study and all the changes and decisions of those formative years. But this government would have that worker look forward to a lifetime of casual work. This bill entrenches casualisation. It makes it easier for employers to make you a casual worker when you don't want to be and gives you no effective right to challenge an employer's decision to block your conversion to permanent work.

A few years later, when this worker is keen to buy their first house, there is no home loan, because banks don't like lending money to casuals. So there they are, stuck in a rent cycle in a world of escalating rents and house prices. If a pandemic or an economic disaster hits, their casual job is most likely to disappear. Maybe then they decide that they're ready to start a family. What's the prospect of them having a decent amount of paid parental leave as a casual worker? Well, it would be very, very low. After that, maybe they decide to return to work on a part-time basis, to balance family and caring responsibilities. Well, under the changes that this bill proposes, they can be pressured to work endless amounts of overtime without being paid overtime rates.

Let's say they end up in a workplace where there's an enterprise agreement. Under this bill their employer won't have to tell them that they have started bargaining that agreement for a whole month and won't have to give the worker a comprehensive explanation of the agreement they will be voting on. If that worker is younger, has lower-level English skills or is unrepresented, their employer will no longer have to explain that agreement to them. To add insult to injury, unions will not be allowed to assist the Fair Work Commission in assessing non-union agreements, and the commission will be forced to tick and flick agreements, under severe time pressure.

There is no reasonable argument that this bill is good for economic recovery, job creation or economic growth. We do not know—but will know very soon—how each member of the crossbench will vote on this bill. However, I understand that it is highly likely that the future security and prosperity of every Australian worker will soon rest on the shoulders of one senator, one member of the crossbench. I hope every member of this chamber is thinking right now of the millions of Australian working people this bill will affect, possibly for their whole working lives.

We live in a democracy, and if we live in a democracy then the abiding interests of those working Australians and their families, their children, must be our guiding light. This government has absolutely no mandate from the Australian people to make these changes. It hasn't taken these profound life-changing reforms to an election. It hasn't commissioned rigorous economic modelling—or, if it has, it hasn't shown it to us. And it hasn't consulted as an honest broker with working Australians. No: it has slithered through the past seven years keeping its precious workplace reforms close to its chest, waiting for its moment, swearing black and blue that there will be no return to Work Choices and waiting until we're in a pandemic, waiting until people are desperately worried about their economic future, to quietly lay out the same old playing cards on the table.

There is simply no case, no substantive argument, to change the nature of casual work, to steal overtime from part-time workers and to undermine the enterprise bargaining process so that workers can be left completely in the dark about the agreement they are to be employed under at critical times in the negotiation process. There is no case for these grubby changes. But it's what the Liberals always do. Cutting Australians' pay is in their DNA. Their vision for Australia is one where millions of Australians struggle to pay the bills and to take care of their families, where millions of Australians are left behind. The idea that these Australians are beholden to any one man or woman, one Australian among millions, sitting on a very comfortable senator's salary with excellent superannuation, to negotiate on this grubby agenda—to think that making such a profound decision about the future of work in Australia should rest on one individual set of shoulders—should be untenable. The only way a person in that position can go is to say: 'No, it is not my place. I do not represent the millions of Australian workers now and into the future whom this will affect. I cannot possibly own a decision that affects so many for so little reason.'

Labor understands that Australians want jobs they can rely on, jobs they can buy a house on, jobs they can raise a family on, jobs that pay the bills, jobs that don't disappear overnight when disease breaks out. I urge all members of this chamber to think deeply on that, to pause and reflect very deeply on the weight that may well be sitting on one set of shoulders—an inappropriate weight, a decision that should not be one person's to make, a weight that should be and must be cast aside. Australians who work at their jobs should be rewarded, not have their pay and hours cut. Australians work hard at their jobs.

Debate interrupted.