Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to take the opportunity to extend 'Eid Mubarak' to Senator Faruqi and to all Muslims in Australia.

The Morrison government has said a lot this week about our supposed economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. But what sort of economic recovery is it when the Morrison government forecasts a real wage cut over the next three years? What sort of economic recovery is it when 60 per cent of jobs created in Australia since the height of the pandemic have been casual jobs? What sort of recovery is it when Uber is now the second-largest employer in Australia and pays its workers as little as $6 an hour?

The pandemic of insecure work is spreading across the economy. As the Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Job Security, I've heard time and time again that the biggest culprit is in fact our own federal government. The Morrison government is financing the destruction of secure jobs across publicly funded sectors like aged care and the NDIS. Sectors that used to offer secure, unionised, middle-class jobs with decent pay, training and career progression are now plagued by insecure work.

In the publicly funded NDIS, the Morrison government is promoting the funding of disability gig platforms that treat workers like commodities—platforms like Mable, that styles itself as the Uber of the disability sector. This company spruiks its independent disability contractors, who are then paid below the minimum wage. They're not provided with sufficient training, and Mable takes no responsibility for the standard of disability care that is delivered on behalf of its operations. Of course, that resulted in disaster when the Morrison government paid Mable to provide additional staffing at an Anglicare facility in Western Sydney at the height of the pandemic.

Professor Sara Charlesworth of RMIT University provided evidence to the job security inquiry last month. She told us:

Mable's staff were found to have been absolutely hopeless coming into Victorian aged-care facilities… They had absolutely no experience. That was an unmitigated disaster.

It is the same story in aged care. The job security inquiry heard last month that 90 per cent of the aged-care workforce are either casual or on part-time contracts. Part-time workers are kept on guaranteed weekly hours that are in some cases as low as three hours per week, and they are in a permanent state of uncertainty. As in the NDIS, this has proven to be a disaster for elderly Australians. To quote the aged-care royal commission report, 'Australia's aged-care system is understaffed and the workforce underpaid and undertrained.' The wages and terms and conditions of the bulk of the aged-care workforce do not adequately reflecting the important caring role that these people play. Inadequate staffing levels and training and an inadequate skills mix are principle causes of substandard care in the current system. Again, this is the standard of work that the Morrison government is directly publicly funding. The job security inquiry heard from Tracey Colbert, who has been an aged-care worker for the last 14 years. She said:

I work permanent part-time hours. I would love to have permanent hours. I don't know from one week to the next how I'm going to afford to pay for all of my living expenses. There are workers that only get five hours a day. They can't live and support their families… I've had a lot of friends that have left the sector because they just can't afford to make a living, and some of them had two or three jobs.

The Australian people have rightly been outraged about the conditions and pay inflicted upon Uber Eats and delivery riders. It's incredibly important we have secure, well-paid and unionised jobs, and they are middle-class jobs in those circumstances. Workers like Tracey still have a responsibility to have a middle-class job.