Jess Walsh (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the opposition for their trifecta of questions, served up on our Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill and its regulatory impact statement. And I thank them, of course, for their rigorous examination of the RIS for our bill. I also thank them for making it patently clear, through their behaviour in the chamber today, which can really only be described as frantic and frenzied, that their opposition to our bill has nothing to do with the details of the regulatory impact statement. Their opposition to the bill has nothing to do with what we're trying to achieve as a government for workers and businesses in this country. Their opposition to this bill has everything to do with the coalition's absolute love for low wages in this country.

We all know that the Liberals just love low wages. We all remember that low wages were a deliberate design feature of the previous government's agenda, and that is exactly what we are about to change. When I think about why the secure jobs, better pay bill is so important, some of the people that I'm thinking about are the early childhood educators who have come to this place, year after year, telling us all their story about how hard it is for them to live on the wages that they earn. They come here and tell us that $24 an hour for caring for and educating and nurturing the next generation is an insulting amount of money.

They've been telling us that the money is so low, in this profession, that while they're doing work they absolutely love—educating children—many of them can't even afford to have their own. These workers, 90 per cent of whom are women, need multi-employer bargaining to get their wages moving. When I think about our bill, I'm also thinking about the cleaners, who do absolutely essential work. They go in at night, after everyone else has gone, and clean toilets for a living, and are proud to do that for a job. But what they can't stand is earning wages that are so low they can't support themselves and their families—wages like 20 bucks an hour. This is another group of workers that need multi-employer bargaining to get their wages moving.

The enterprise bargaining system has completely failed all of these workers and failed their families too. What educators and cleaners have in common is not just that they're low paid, it's that they're employed in small workplaces, where the workers and employers don't have the resources to engage in bargaining effectively. If they could use enterprise bargaining, it would literally take decades, enterprise by enterprise, to get wages moving. We can't wait that long. These workers can't wait that long. Australia can't wait that long to get wages moving in this country.

The system as it exists today just doesn't work. Workers know it. Employers know it. Everyone who came to our jobs summit knows that the system we have in place just doesn't work. It's why only 14 per cent of Australians today are covered by enterprise agreements. It's why reform is needed. It's why wages were flatlining for 10 years under the previous government. It's why we need multi-employer bargaining and why we're proud to present it to this parliament. We need to get wages moving in this country after a decade of those opposite. The problem is not that wages are going too far or too high, right now, in Australia. The problem is that they've not been moving at all.

These laws are about redressing the imbalance that has emerged over the past 10 years. The sky won't fall in. Demand for workers won't dry up. It will not be the 1970s again. What will happen is wages will start moving.