Senator GREEN (Queensland) (09:37): Last week, I attended rallies in Townsville and Cairns with workers who are against this Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021. I told those workers that I would come in here and vote against this legislation because it does nothing to help our recovery, it does nothing to support jobs and it does nothing to fix insecurity in work, which we know this government talks a lot about but doesn't do anything about when it comes to the crunch.

Those rallies took place outside the member for Herbert's office and the member for Leichhardt's office, but we weren't able to get straight answers from either member of parliament about whether they would guarantee that no workers would be worse off under this legislation. The member for Leichhardt didn't even front the media after this rally was held. Workers had to go all the way to his office to be heard and they still had no answers from this government or the member for Leichhardt about why this legislation is being pushed through at a time when regional economies are facing an economic crisis, with JobKeeper being pulled out. It doesn't make any sense. Just because words are put in the title of legislation doesn't mean that it's what that legislation delivers.

The worst part about this legislation—and I will go through the provisions in a moment—is that we know the government are using COVID as an opportunity to attack workers' rights. It says a lot about the government and their priorities. The workers who got us through this crisis are now the workers the Morrison government want to attack—the cleaners, the retail workers, the transport and dock workers. The people who kept the country moving in the middle of a pandemic are the people now being attacked by this government. It says a lot about them. They were in here thanking those workers, posting things on Facebook, thanking people for going out there, doing their jobs and keeping the country moving, but now this is how they thank those workers.

This bill does a number of things to undermine the working conditions of Australian workers. It cuts workers' pay by changing the hours, and overtime power is given to employers instead of workers. It does this by introducing what they say is a modest change to have, by agreement, part-time workers work extra hours without getting overtime. They say that if the employer and employee come together and decide that this is a good thing to do then what's the harm in that? The Liberals will tell you that there is a level-playing field between employees and employers when it comes to making this agreement, but we know that is not true. Individual workplace agreements were the cornerstone of Work Choices. Maybe members of this government don't know what it is like to have an individual workplace agreement slid across the table and for you to have no other option but to sign that agreement. Well, I know what that feels like. When John Howard was here, when Work Choices was in, when this government was trashing workers' rights, that is what happened to me as a young worker: an individual workplace agreement. I didn't have another choice. I didn't have a choice to sign another agreement or to push back; I needed a job.

So many people are now in that situation. They are desperate for work, desperate for hours. This government is putting through a system that means that part-time workers will receive less take home pay, because they won't be able to get overtime. Their employer will slide an individual workplace agreement—that's what it is; they might want to call it a different name now, but that's what this is—across the table. And they can't say no to signing that agreement; otherwise, they probably won't have a job. They won't get the hours that they need. We know how this works. This government doesn't talk to workers. They don't understand what happens in workplaces, so they don't understand how this will play out when it comes to workplaces in this country.

The Liberals will tell you the other thing this legislation does is create a pathway to permanency. They like that term: a 'pathway to permanency'. What it doesn't do is actually give workers a right to permanency. We know that there are two Federal Court cases at the moment that say you can't keep a worker as a casual forever. If you do, you will have to pay them all of the entitlements that you didn't pay them when they were a casual. It's a pretty simple concept. That's why workers, supported by the CFMMEU mining division, took these cases to the Federal Court. This government joined the Federal Court case not on the side of workers but to support the company to stop these cases going forward. They lost that bid; they lost these cases. The Federal Court ruled in favour of the workers to stop them becoming permanent casuals. So what has this government done? It's bringing legislation forward to overturn those decisions. That's what this government is doing. The Liberal and National parties will tell you that all they're doing is just cleaning up the definition of 'casual', but what they've done is overturn those Federal Court cases.

Members of this government have been out in Central Queensland and North Queensland telling people that this legislation will provide a pathway to permanency, but where is the enforcement? If a case goes to arbitration then an employer can decide not to take part in that arbitration. There is no enforcement mechanism. It is all smoke and mirrors from this government. For all of the time that Senator Canavan, that the member for Dawson, George Christensen, and that members of this government have been telling people in Far North Queensland, regional Queensland and Central Queensland, 'We are going to do something about dodgy labour hire, about the problems with casualisation in the mining industry'—here is their chance, and what do they do? They put forward a haphazard overturn of Federal Court cases that will do nothing to help workers in Central Queensland.

This bill also contains eight-year greenfields agreements, so no negotiation can take place between workers and employers for eight years. We heard evidence at Senate inquiries that greenfields agreements have locked in what workers call suicide rosters. They haven't been able to negotiate that. After four years, right now they can go and negotiate those rosters. They can go and negotiate the terms and agreements. Things change in a workplace when there is no project. For years, as a project progresses, those workers invest their hard work and time in getting that project off the ground, and this government will remove the opportunity for them to negotiate for eight years. There are not many projects that take eight years to complete, so this means workers on these greenfields agreements will never get to negotiate their workplace conditions.

This government is bringing forward legislation that it says will improve wage theft laws, that will make wage theft laws better in this country. But we know that the Labor state government in Queensland has already brought in workplace wage theft laws. Those wage theft laws make sure that the penalty for stealing from a worker is the same as the penalty for someone stealing from their boss. There is an equivalency. That's an important part of those laws. But this legislation from this Liberal-National government is watering down Queensland's wage theft laws by not delivering the same level of penalties for employers. That's not good enough for Queensland workers. That is why they rallied outside the offices of LNP members.

What is not in this bill says a lot about this government. There is no policy in this bill that if you work the same job you get the same pay. If you work the same job, you should get the same pay. If we had laws that delivered that, then dodgy labour hire would not be able to undermine the working conditions of people in our country—people working in regional Queensland on dodgy labour hire agreements that undercut their hard-fought working conditions. Labour hire companies have been able to undercut these working conditions so that people are now not able to plan for their future. They don't know when they're going to be able to take a holiday with their family. They are being paid less than the person standing next to them doing the exact same job. This is an opportunity for the government to fix this problem, but they're not doing that through this bill. It says a lot about them that they're pushing through this legislation but not doing anything to make sure that if you do the same job you get the same pay.

This legislation doesn't do anything to stop permanent casuals or continuing short-term contracts. It doesn't provide a way for wages to increase by bargaining better. It doesn't fix that problem. When it comes to IR legislation and making changes, it doesn't provide things like 10 days domestic violence leave. The government is making industrial relation legislation changes, but it left that one out.

In the short time that I have left, the other thing that is deeply concerning about this bill is it makes work more insecure. It means workers won't be able to plan for their future. It means they will be paid less. It means work in this country will be, as they refer to it, more flexible, but we know that when they say 'flexible' they really mean 'insecure'. And this is at a time when the government is also cutting JobKeeper, taking off the table support for communities, jobs and workers around this country. The problem with that is that the government's plan to rebuild the economy is to let workers do it themselves.

The Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment said of the recovery plan the government is delivering that Australians had to 'dig deep' and resist the urge to be 'stingy' when booking a holiday at home. Mr Tehan said that he encouraged Australians not to 'be tight', to spend the same way they do overseas. He said there should be 'no penny pinching in Australia this year'. At the same time as the Morrison government is asking Australians to spend their own money to save jobs in tourism, it's pushing through legislation that makes work less secure. At the same time as the Morrison government is cutting JobKeeper, it's pushing through laws to make jobs less secure. At the same time as thousands of workers risk losing their jobs, the Morrison government is pushing through dodgy IR legislation. At the same time as thousands of workers in Cairns and around the country are concerned that they will lose their job because the government's only plan to support workers is to ask other Australians not to penny pinch, this is the legislation that the government is pushing through. This is their plan for recovery: to cut workers' rights; to make it harder for workers to get a secure, well-paid job; to make sure that the rights and conditions hard-won through Federal Court cases in this country are overturned. That is their plan. Do you think it's going to work? The Morrison government's Liberal National Party member for Leichhardt, Warren Entsch, said that cutting penalty rates would create jobs. Do you remember that one, Madam Deputy President? They said, 'If we cut penalty rates we'll create more jobs.' It didn't create a single one. Cutting penalty rates didn't create a single job, and this legislation will not save or create a single job.

Senator WHISH-WILSON (Tasmania) (09:52): It's disappointing that we find ourselves standing here in the Senate chamber today, at the end of a very difficult 12 months for Australians, who've been doing their bit to get through a pandemic, dealing with a piece of legislation, the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021, which proposes the most drastic changes to our industrial relations system in over a decade. It's no coincidence that this is coming in the recovery phase—we hope—of a pandemic. It's just like the way the government has used COVID to push its agenda, or the agenda of its donors, for a fossil fuel led recovery, the 'gas led recovery'. I and many senators have sat on the COVID committee hearings over many months and we've witnessed this cynical use of a pandemic to say: 'Hey, we need a COVID recovery. Jobs are important, the economy's under assault; let's do this.' They've used it to push their agendas. Today is another example of an agenda, which they just can't let go, to do whatever they can to undermine workers' rights—to come into this place and work for their special interests, the big business sector.

It is especially disappointing because two things we can reflect on from COVID over last 12 months are how it relates to workers' rights and how we operate in this place. Firstly can I say that it gave me, as a senator, a lot of hope during the first phase of COVID, when we were all in lockdown and working from our homes, to see political parties come together and unions and business advocacy groups come together to put in place a stimulus package that helped both businesses, especially small businesses, and workers. Of course, that was the JobKeeper program. It wasn't perfect. Not enough people got it. The Greens pushed hard for those who were unfairly or unnecessarily, through mean-spirited politics, left out of JobKeeper.

I remind my colleagues across the chamber that the Greens were the first to be campaigning and calling for a living wage during the pandemic. We worked hard to speak to stakeholders to try to get everybody on board, as I am sure the Labor Party did. To your credit, you did listen. It took a few weeks for you to get on board but eventually you did listen to the business sector, the unions and other political parties in here, and we got a good result for Australians. I don't think any of us can deny that JobKeeper and certainly an increase in JobSeeker, which we would like to see made permanent, has helped every state economy and our national economy. It has helped small businesses stay in business. It has given workers the certainty they have needed during this very difficult period. So where has that spirit of cooperation gone, where everybody is working for the public interest? Where has that spirit of cooperation gone? It's especially damning that it's back to cynical self-interested politics so early.

We also know that COVID laid bare just how bad and how big a problem insecure work is in this country. Many of us probably felt the frustrations. It wasn't just state premiers or the Prime Minister who felt frustrated when we saw outbreaks from hotel quarantine. But we learned that those hotel workers who had spread COVID, which led to more shutdowns, were working two or three jobs. They were out there because of insecure work. They had to do two or three jobs to put food on the table. If that's not an indictment of just how bad insecure work in this country is, I don't know what is.

What we have before us today is a cynical attempt to use the COVID recovery period, under the guise of 'we need jobs and growth'—just the name of the bill tells you that: the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021—to say: 'Forget about these concerns that workers, unions and some in the small business sector have about this bill. What's more important is that we have jobs and recovery during a pandemic.' If anything, it should be the other way around. The pandemic should be an opportunity for us to press reset for the next 20, 30 or 50 years. We should use this as an opportunity to get things right—to maintain a higher level of JobSeeker to give people fairness and dignity in their life, and review this concept of a living wage that has so helped so many Australians. That money has been circulated through the economy. The circular flow of income has worked. It has kept certainty in our communities.

The reaction we are seeing right around the country to the removal of JobKeeper tells you something very important. People aren't confident, without government stimulus, of the economic landscape, both here and overseas, in the next nine to 12 months. While government regulations are in place, while the government are dictating border closures and restrictions for business and restrictions on international travel—and, may I say, restrictions that are totally necessary—they have a role to play and a responsibility to look after small business and workers. It has worked very well in the last 12 months. But here we have, before us today, an attempt to lock in insecure work. I'm going to go through my key problems with this bill in a moment, but it's worth pointing out that over two million people in Australia are unemployed or underemployed, with women, young people and migrant workers particularly bearing the brunt of this statistic. Instead of improving job security and lifting wages—which, as the Reserve Bank governor continues to remind us, is absolutely necessary if we're going to have a future recovery—the government's pushing for a bill that will further entrench insecure work, suppress wages, give more power to businesses at workers' expense and undermine the role of unions. It is more of the same, more of what I and other senators in this chamber have seen every day in this place since the government came to power in 2013.

I've mentioned that the pandemic has highlighted inequality that's been allowed to flourish as a result of the push by this government for insecure work over many, many years. Casual workers were hit the hardest during the pandemic, accounting for approximately two-thirds of people who lost their job when the pandemic hit just over a year ago. Those casuals who still had a job were amongst the lowest-paid and most insecure workers, with no access to paid leave entitlements. And we mustn't forget the role insecure work played in spreading COVID across the country as workers without paid sick leave were forced to choose between their health and their income. I once again remind senators of issues around quarantine outbreaks among hotel workers. Many employers have built insecure work into their business models. While they turn a profit, workers have not had a job or income security. Changes in this bill will just entrench that. Instead of passing a bill that further entrenches insecure work, reduces wages and increases the powers of employers, we need to outlaw insecure work and ensure the right of all workers to a safe, meaningful, secure job with good wages and conditions.

The first issue I have with this bill is the definition of a casual. The new definition will give employers all the power to determine whether a worker is casual and will allow businesses to classify workers as casual at the start of their employment, regardless of what ends up happening after that or how many additional hours they end up working. The bill clarifies that to avoid any doubt: the question of whether a person is a casual employee is to be assessed on the basis of the offer of employment and the acceptance of that offer, not on the basis of any subsequent conduct of either party. In other words, it allows the use and abuse of casual workers, who may be required to work full-time hours but don't get any of the entitlements that go with that. I've got no problem with casual work if it's with the agreement of the worker. I've been a casual worker myself, and that has suited my personal circumstances. But without agreement and with a scant regard for workers' wellbeing it's totally unacceptable.

The other issue is casual conversion. Casual-conversion offers must be made to casuals who have been employed for 12 months unless—and I stress 'unless'—there are reasonable business grounds not to make the offer. This is unenforceable, as arbitration is available only if both parties agree, and the employer has very broad rights to refuse conversion on reasonable business grounds. Well, what does 'reasonable business grounds' mean? Does it mean the employer wants more profit? As if that's going to work and be a fair basis to make casual-conversion deliberations!

I've also got problems with a new class of workers, what we call 'part-time flexi'. This bill will create a new class of de facto casual workers by robbing part-time workers of hours and income security by allowing businesses to effectively treat these workers like casuals, with the power to increase and decrease their hours. The bill introduces simplified additional-hour agreements, which allow part-time workers in industries that have been hardest hit by the pandemic, such as hospitality and retail, to be employed on contracts that offer a guarantee of only 16 hours a week, with their employer able to increase their hours without paying overtime. We note that penalty rates will still be paid where applicable. This applies to 12 modern awards; however, the minister will have the power to make regulations to include or exclude modern awards. If you were a worker, having seen the track record of this government in the last nine years, would you trust the minister and this government to make those decisions in your interests? I wouldn't.

Enterprise bargaining: there is a suite of proposed changes in this bill that significantly erode workers' rights and undermine the role of unions in the enterprise-bargaining process. Time and time again, we've seen big businesses act in their own self-interest at the expense of workers' wages and conditions. However, the government is removing the safety net checks and balances that are designed to protect workers and asking them to trust big business to do the right thing. Once again, I'll remind the chamber of Philip Lowe's comments when speaking recently about the need for wages growth. What is needed, and what economists, unions and workers call for, are for policies that will increase wages. However, this government is pursuing a bill that will suppress wages as if we haven't learnt the importance of being fair and equitable during the pandemic.

Greenfield agreements: this bill will allow the Fair Work Commissioned to approve greenfield agreements to operate for eight years, locking workers into subpar agreements without the opportunity to renegotiate or access arbitration—eight years! That's a long time; eight years is nearly a decade. And wage theft: while the bill criminalises wage theft for systemic patterns of underpayment, which is welcomed, it doesn't apply to one-off underpayments, inadvertent mistakes or miscalculations. That needs to be fixed also.

So there are six or seven key things in this bill that the Greens fundamentally oppose. But, more importantly, I ask senators in this place to think about the last 12 months. Think about the spirit of cooperation that we've all worked together on in this place—something we can be proud of for the rest of our careers—helping our country to get through a difficult period. Unions were working with businesses and politicians were working across political parties to help workers, small businesses and everybody to get through the most difficult of times. That spirit of cooperation has now gone. This bill signals that. This bill is a return to business as usual: trying to screw workers, trying to help big business and supporting their donors in politics. I urge senators to reject this bill.

Senator McCARTHY (Northern Territory—Deputy Opposition Whip in the Senate) (10:07): This Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021 shows what this government is willing to sacrifice for its conservative idealism, attacking workers at the expense of our economic prosperity. That's what this bill does: it takes away job security for millions of Australian workers; it delays our recovery from the pandemic by crushing wage growth; and it strips away workers' rights which, in turn, impacts on our economy. This bill sickens our economy and it certainly sickens our workers.

The ANU submission to the Senate inquiry into this bill called it an immediate threat to public health. They warned that lack of paid sick leave will exacerbate a weakness in Australia's COVID-19 response. This bill promotes insecure work and erodes the security and protections provided to employees. It allows businesses to hire employees as casuals and to deprive them of leave entitlements, even if they subsequently work a regular roster. The ANU research school's submission noted that Australia already has one of the highest rates of individuals without leave entitlements among OECD nations, with estimates ranging from 25 to 37 per cent of the workforce. And we know that casual workers are doubly impacted by the COVID pandemic due to the absence of leave entitlements and them being among some of the lowest-paid workers.

The public health experts cited modelling that paid leave, including for flu and other infectious diseases, can reduce workplace infections by at least 25 per cent. They argue casual workers are already at risk of infection and transmission, as we've seen this year among healthcare workers, personal care attendants, cleaners, security guards, abattoir workers, delivery workers, supermarket staff, public transport and taxi drivers, and childcare staff. We have listened to the public health experts in our response to the pandemic. This has been a big part of our success in staying safe and reducing the impacts of COVID-19 on Australians. We should be listening to the public health experts on this bill. They said very, very clearly that the proposed changes will undermine our world-class response to COVID-19 by increasing casual employment and insecure working conditions. The so-called reforms will hurt workers and hurt the economy at the exact moment that both need help the most.

Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe has said jobs and wages are key to Australia's recovery. But the government, as usual, isn't listening and it's getting it wrong on both sides of the jobs and wages equation, with no plans for investment on the scale that this once-in-a-generation crisis demands. The government still plans an abrupt end to income supports in a few weeks, despite pleas from workers and businesses. This bill fails every test. It makes work less secure and cuts pay. It is a fundamental attack on the very workers who got us through this pandemic. It's a fundamental attack on the very workers who campaigned so hard and so long in the past to ensure Australian workers have these rights and protections. Many of you, both in the Senate and in the other place, would have seen and spoken with so many workers' representatives who've been in Parliament House this week campaigning against this bill, telling us what harm it's going to cause them, their families, their colleagues and their workplaces. Among them are representatives from Kalkarindji in the Northern Territory, people from the from Gurindji nation, from the place of the Wave Hill walk-off.

The history of the walk-off and land rights is tied to the history of the union movement and workers' rights in this country, and it is a significant legacy. I'd like to quote some of the speech given by Kara Keys, the then ACTU Indigenous officer, at the 50th anniversary of the Wave Hill walk-off:

It is a great legacy because, once the Gurindji walked off Wave Hill, the NAWU gave them their 100% support.

It is a great legacy because the union movement nationwide galvanised around the workers and gave them great support.

It is a great legacy because it fundamentally shifted the NAWU and other unions in the country. It showed unions that Indigenous workers were willing to fight for wage equality and it shifted unions to the role of supporting and fighting for all workers.

And it is a great legacy because while the trigger for the Wave Hill Walk Off was equal wages, the gun powder was the systemic racism, poor living conditions, a legislative environment which allowed for the theft of children from their families and the theft of Aboriginal people having any agency over their own lives.

The Wave Hill Walk Off shifted the nation.

Thank you, Kara Keys, for reminding all Australians of that. That legacy continues, and it is fantastic to see so many First Nations union members here today in the Australian parliament. I thank each and every one of you, the union members of First Nations families from across the country who are not just in the parliament this week but around the country, working with our unions, working to improve the working conditions of all people around Australia. Your message is very clear: this bill will cause more harm to workers and it will particularly hurt casual workers. The government has ignored years of common law and overturned the recent Federal Court decisions on what it means to be a casual.

Under these laws if a worker agrees to be employed as a casual at the start of their employment then they remain as a casual regardless of their actual work pattern, so long as the employer employs them on the basis they make no firm advance commitment to continuing and indefinite work according to an agreed pattern of work. If a court finds later they are in fact a permanent then any casual loading they received will be offset against any permanent entitlements they are owed. Both the definition and offset apply retrospectively. Under the government's own figures, this involves cancelling around $39 billion in back pay that would otherwise be owed to casuals.

There were just over 2.6 million casual workers employed in Australia in August 2019. They accounted for 24.4 per cent of all employees. Tasmania had the highest casual employee share of total employees in August 2019 at 28.3 per cent, while the Northern Territory had the lowest casual share at 21.2 per cent. That is still more than a fifth of our Northern Territory workforce, particularly in our tourism and hospitality sector. This is a sector we know has been particularly hard hit by the pandemic. Many hospitality businesses have closed or downgraded. Hundreds of hotel rooms are offline. Many workers have lost their jobs or they've had their hours reduced or have relied on JobKeeper to stay employed. Making it easier for employers to casualise jobs that would have otherwise been permanent will not assist or stabilise an industry where workers are already struggling.

The mining and construction sectors also make up a critical part of the Northern Territory economy, creating hundreds of direct jobs and contributing in a huge way to the economy. But workers in these sectors will be hard hit by this legislation. Workers on mining and construction projects could be locked into eight-year enterprise agreements, which could actually see wages that don't keep pace with inflation. So how is this good for workers or for the wider economy? How does ensuring workers end up with less money in their pockets contribute to our economy and its recovery? The simple answer is it doesn't.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fact that too many people in this country work in low-paid, insecure employment—casuals, contractors, freelancers, labour hire workers and gig workers. These vulnerable workers, the ones who can least afford it, were hit first and hit the hardest. Rather than taking this opportunity to learn lessons from COVID-19 and dealing with the twin problems of insecure work and flatlining wages, the government's proposed new laws do exactly the opposite. This bill is bad for Northern Territory workers, it's bad for Northern Territory businesses and it is most certainly bad for our nation. It cannot be supported.

Senator WALSH (Victoria) (10:18): At the outset, Labor said that we would apply a very simple test to this legislation: will it deliver decent pay and more secure jobs for Australian workers? In fact, this legislation does the exact opposite. It fails our test, and that's why we will not be supporting the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021. This bill is an attack on workers, especially the lowest paid and most insecure workers in the country. Labor have always stood up for and Labor will always stand up for the workers of Australia. We will stand up against pay cuts and job insecurity and we will stand up against this legislation.

The legislation before us has come to us at an absolutely unprecedented time in our history. We face remarkable challenges as a result of COVID-19. COVID has seen the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country. The recovery is patchy, and jobs in some sectors are still at risk. So the government's pay cuts and their attacks on job security could not come at a worse time. But one of our greatest problems—that is, low wage growth—cannot simply be blamed on the pandemic, because under this government wage growth has never been slower. The problem of low wage growth will only be made worse by this legislation.

Low wages growth is bad for workers—of course it's bad for workers, who are finding it hard to make ends meet and put food on the table—but it is also bad for the economy, because right now we need people with money in their pockets and with the confidence to spend it. It seems that everyone agrees with that basic proposition—everyone except the Morrison government. We know the Reserve Bank Governor, Philip Lowe, has said on multiple occasions, so many times, that we need to get wages moving in this country. He said wage growth is absolutely fundamental to repairing the economy and lifting spending, investment and growth. The Australian economy desperately needs wages to get moving right now, and so do Australian workers. But the wage-suppressing policies of this government are hurting workers and putting a brake on the economy.

The bill that is in front of us today, make no mistake, will only make this worse. The Prime Minister is asking us to believe that cutting wages will create jobs. Where have I heard that before? The government is a repeat offender on the lie that cutting wages creates jobs—it's a lie. Cutting penalty rates did not create a single additional job in this country. Even business groups admit that. So, for Australia to recover from the pandemic, we need people with money in their pockets and with the confidence to spend it. We do not need pay cuts and even more insecure jobs.

It's estimated that today up to five million Australians have insecure work arrangements. The government's legislation will make work even less secure through an expanded employer controlled definition of 'casual labour'. Under this provision, if an employer says that you're a casual, even if you work like a permanent staff member, you'll be treated like a casual—no leave, no entitlements, no rights, no security. That is what the government is offering you with this bill. And while you could ask your employer to be made permanent after 12 long months, if they say no, well that is just the end of it: full stop. If this legislation is passed, it will hurt wage growth and it will increase job insecurity and financial uncertainty for Australian workers. It will damage the economy more broadly by hurting consumer confidence and consumer spending. Too many Australians are already in insecure jobs; too many Australians are casuals, contractors, freelancers, labour hire workers, gig economy workers.

We saw the devastating consequences of this insecurity in the pandemic. We saw aged-care workers juggling two or three jobs just to make ends meet. Their insecurity, tragically, put them and the people in their care at extreme risk. Aged-care workers, like so many workers, often have jobs with no certainty of work for the next day, the next week, the next month ahead. Workers like Sherree, a veteran aged-care worker with more than 20 years' experience in the sector. Sherree is contracted to work just 16 hours a fortnight. While she consistently works above that, she is never sure exactly how many hours she's going to get from week to week. On top of her irregular hours, the pay is low in her job, so she can't convince a real estate agent to give her a lease, she can't convince a bank to give her a loan and sometimes she can't make enough money even to meet her own basic needs. Sherree wants us to vote this legislation down. She has spoken out against this legislation and, today, I stand with Sherree and I stand with all of the Australian workers who are stuck in casual jobs and in insecure jobs. We need to vote this legislation down.

This government's legislation would increase the casualisation of jobs and insecurity for all workers. The so-called part-time flexibility arrangements turn permanent part-time workers into casuals. These measures allow the government to extend the sorts of hours Sherree works to everyone on an award—16 hours one week, 20 hours the next, 30 hours the week after that, no overtime for going above your rostered hours, no certainty of when you will be offered more hours, no security whatsoever. This is happening right at the time when we need more job security, not less.

Last year, the Prime Minister took every opportunity he could find to thank an essential worker—every photo opportunity, every doorstop. But what a difference a new year makes, because this legislation is how he is thanking the workers of Australia—the hardworking, essential people who kept our country going through the pandemic. This nasty IR bill is how Prime Minister Morrison is thanking the essential workers that this year he once called heroes. This nasty IR bill contains pay cuts, it casualises work and it makes work less secure. It gives more power to employers over workers and it gives fewer rights to unions.

Well, I have a different message for Australia's essential workers, and Labor has a different message for Australia's essential workers, because we know that you turned up every day last year to do your job. We know that you turned up to deliver the parcels. We know that you turned up to put food on the shelves. We know that you turned up to take care of our elderly in aged-care facilities. We know that you turned up every day to our childcare centres. And we know that you continue to turn up every day to do your job. The Morrison government needs to do its job and turn up for you. The Morrison government needs to do its job and turn up for you and scrap this nasty IR bill. The Morrison government needs to do its job and turn up for you and tell the people of Australia, tell the workers of Australia, exactly what their plan is to get wages moving and exactly what their plan is to make their jobs more secure, because this bill is not that plan. This is a bill that will keep wages low, this is a bill that will keep jobs casual and make more jobs casual, this is a bill that will hurt people's job security, this is a bill that will hurt Australians workers and this is a bill that will hurt our economy and hurt our recovery. We fundamentally and absolutely reject this bill.

This government has had nine years to answer the questions that I've asked today: How are they going to get wages moving? How are they going to make jobs more secure? Nine long years—in that time, I have to say that I cannot think of a single thing this government has done, a single initiative this government has taken, to get wages moving. I can't think of a single thing this government has done, a single initiative this government has taken, to make our jobs in this country more secure. In nine years, I cannot think of a single thing this government has contributed to getting wages moving and making jobs more secure.

One thing is clear today: this bill is not the answer the people of Australia are looking for. This nasty IR bill is not the answer to getting wages moving. This bill is not the answer to building more secure jobs. It's not the answer for workers struggling to put food on the table. It's not the answer for local businesses, who actually want to see people in their communities opening their wallets and having the confidence to spend; that's what local businesses want to see. This bill is not the answer for our economic recovery. It is just one more tired and nasty iteration of this government's same old ideologically-driven policies that hurt workers and unions: cutting wages; going after union bargaining rights; and calling insecurity 'flexibility', the better-sounding and more acceptable word. This is the Liberals' go-to plan. Well, enough is enough. People need good jobs. They need secure jobs they can count on, they need rights at work and they need a government that is going to look out for them and back them up. This Morrison government will never deliver what the people of Australia need.

This bill also misses the opportunity to deal with wage theft, which is a national epidemic. Wage theft robs workers of wages and entitlements, and it also robs us of tax income. It's estimated that national revenue loss due to foregone income is over $9 billion annually. Wage theft is bad for workers, bad for the economy and bad for government, but this government doesn't seem to care. If this bill passes, it will wipe out Victoria's and Queensland's stronger wage theft laws—laws that workers themselves stood up for and fought for.

The government's bill will set an impossibly high bar for successful prosecution of wage theft offences; employers will face little prospect of prosecution and will face trivial criminal penalties if, indeed, they are caught. That's why workers like Jules fought so hard for those Victorian wage theft laws. She's a veteran hospitality worker. In her time she's seen every type of wage theft in that industry. These are her words about the stronger wage theft laws she fought for in Victoria being overturned by this bill: 'When Victoria introduced legislation criminalising wage theft, I cried. Finally, workers were going to have something solid and strong. The federal government's legislation is a kick in the guts to workers like me.'

The Victorian government has said that the Commonwealth should amend its legislation to bring wage theft provisions in line with stronger Victorian offences. But instead the Morrison government will give unscrupulous employers in Victoria a free pass, and workers will find it much harder to prosecute their employers for wage theft. So the next George Calombaris, the next Rockpool, the next MasterChef who comes under scrutiny could very well get off the hook if this bill becomes law. The government is pursuing a deeply entrenched ideology in this legislation. There is clear evidence that better agreements are struck where unions are engaged in effective bargaining.

Senator KIM CARR (Victoria) (10:33): I rise to speak on the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021. The Morrison government spends a great deal of time talking about the economic recovery from the pandemic. It likes to talk about reviving the manufacturing sector to reduce Australia's dependence on fragile global supply chains. In this process it asserts it is creating new skilled jobs for Australians. But so far we've seen very little evidence of the investment necessary to actually achieve those objectives. The truth is that the government does not have a plan for recovery. It only has a plan for increasing the amount of insecure work, for keeping wages growth stagnant, for doing the bidding of the top end of town.

What we see outlined in this bill is the nearest thing to an agenda that this government has. It is a bill which is aimed at increasing what the employer advocates like to call flexibility. 'Flexibility is a very, very familiar word in the mouths of conservative politicians. We've come to understand what it really means of course: it's code for cutting wages, cutting working conditions, undermining job security and making it harder for workers to organise in defence of their rights. All the talk about flexibility masks the fact that increasing numbers of people are being forced into insecure, precarious work. The Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute estimates that casual jobs account for some 60 per cent of the jobs that have been created since May last year. From May to November 2020, casual employment grew by 400,000—the biggest increase in Australia's history. They have massively added to the numbers of what have already been called 'the precariat' in this country.

In late May 2020 the International Labour Organization called for urgent and large-scale policy responses to prevent long-lasting damage from the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly to young people. It feared that multiple shocks would lead to a lockdown generation, lacking social and human rights including the right to collective bargaining and participation. It noted that little or no social protection, including adequate unemployment and sickness benefits, accounted for these precarious conditions. What we're seeing in this government is a repudiation of that approach.

The initial response to COVID from the government was to spend very, very large sums of money to ensure that we did not sink too far into depression, but now we see a reversion to kind, to type. What we are seeing is a return to policy positions where the government is seeking to impose a regime of competition—the neo-Liberal settings which inform employment relations and welfare policies that are about fostering more precarious approaches to social relations in this country. We have seen this develop since the economic crisis of 2007-08 and we've seen it exacerbated throughout this last pandemic, right around the world. We've seen it happening not just in this country but across all market economies. It's not just a technological change—although some will say 'What do you expect, with the changes of digitisation?'—but a deliberate policy of conservative parties. It is a consequence of the disruption of the pandemic but it is exacerbated by the policy positions being pursued by conservative parties. These policies, when applied to the workplace, to the welfare system, to vocational education and training, maintain a pool of low-paid and mostly unemployed workers who have to compete with one another at the bottom end of the labour market. So they're able to provide reserve wage conditions to maintain suppression on the growth in real wages. Instead of stimulating growth, what we've got is a competition for jobs. That is the fundamental principle that underlies the economic theory behind the development of the precariat not just in this country but in so many other countries. It's why we see the deregulation of employment conditions; why we're seeing, under internationalisation and marketisation, the growth in casualisation; why we are seeing the reduction in social protections. It is why we're seeing this push for supply-side employment policies aimed at developing a marketing arrangement matching existing skills, rather than the development of new skills for new industries.

This is a bill that employer advocates would naturally support. They say it's not really a problem, because insecure work has really been much the same over the last 20 years. They say casualisation has remained about 20 per cent of the workforce. What they do not acknowledge is the rise in casualisation throughout the period starting probably even before the previous economic crisis. In 1982 casuals comprised some 13 per cent of the workforce. By 2017 they were 25 per cent of the workforce. More importantly, casual work, which has a narrow definition in terms of sick leave and other entitlements, forms only one part of 'precarious work'. Precarious work is work that's performed by workers with little economic or social security, with little control over their lives, with little control over their work environment. It includes not just casual work but work on fixed-term contracts, seasonal work and employment under labour hire contracts. According to the OECD, in 2015 Australia ranked third in the world for non-standard forms of employment. The OECD average for those forms of employment is one in three jobs, but in Australia, the OECD noted, it was 44 per cent.

This bill before us will increase competition for low-paid, precarious work, but it will not drive economic growth. It will be a further rip into the social fabric of this country. People will find it more difficult to control their economic lives and maintain the bonds that keep households and communities together. People will start to become alienated from a system that they feel no longer works for them. It will further exacerbate the tensions within society. It will undermine trust amongst citizens and between citizens and public institutions such as parliament. As a consequence of this kind of thing, in many democracies around the world we have seen the rise of far-Right populist movements. In many parts of the world, we've seen fascism in its many forms—which many said was defeated in 1945—re-emerge from the economic crisis of recent years.

Conservative governments in this country seem oblivious to the social and economic costs of the policies that they are pursuing. They have clung to a neoliberal approach aimed at driving down wages and placing more people in more precarious situations within our society—a goal that gives the lie to their supposed interest in economic recovery. Increasing the general wage level is the most direct means of stimulating economic growth. It's probably the most effective way of increasing people's opportunities. It's not complicated. When people on low incomes are paid more, they will spend more, and that benefits businesses and the workers they employ.

It is a short-sighted approach that the government is pursuing. Cutting costs is a prescription for a downward spiral in economic activity. That's what we've been locked into for quite a while. The Centre for Future Work stated in its submission to the Senate inquiry into this bill:

… a dramatic and lasting deceleration in wage growth took hold beginning around 2013. Wage growth fell by half, with private sector WPI plummeting to a low of around 1.8% in 2016 and 2017. … plummeting to record-lows during the COVID recession to only 1.2% …

Because the government keeps chipping away at everything that protects the standard of living of Australians, you might think that the government is set upon an ideological agenda of undermining the living conditions of the people of this country. You'd be right to think that, because what you're seeing in these circumstances is that people who are often self-employed, who are often engaged in informal work or casual work, have all had to face increasing economic pressures associated with a precarious way of life, and their entitlements and their protections and their employment rights have been reflected in the lower bargaining power that they enjoy and, as a result, a decline in their economic independence.

It's often presented to them that they are in fact more independent, because they're self-employed. In fact, their position is more and more dependent upon others. For work, they depend on a relationship with a single source, rather than a range of clients, and that's exactly what the courts of this country have found, and that's what obviously distresses the government so much. The provisions of this bill seek to overturn those court rulings. Under this bill, a worker who agrees to be employed as a casual at the start of their employment can remain casual, regardless of their actual work patterns. That requires that the employer hires them on the basis that they make 'no firm advance commitment to continuing and indefinite work according to an agreed pattern of work'. If a court were later to find that the worker in this position was in fact permanent, any casual loadings paid would be offset against the permanent entitlements the worker is owed. Both the definition and the offset can apply retrospectively.

By the government's own estimate, these changes will cancel up to $39 billion in back pay that otherwise would be paid to casuals. Under the National Employment Standards, employers are required to make a written offer of a conversion to permanent employment after 12 months if there has been a regular pattern of work for six months. But under this bill an employer faces not having to make the offer if there are no 'reasonable grounds' to do so—for example, if an employer thinks the job might not exist in another 12 months or if there has been a significant change in the hours of work. So, the 'reasonable grounds' exception is broad enough to block any transition to permanent employment. The bill offers people who are in insecure casual work a catch 22. Of course you can become a permanent employee, but there's still another reason you can't: this bill allows for an employer of a part-time employee who is working a minimum of 16 hours a week to agree to work extra hours at the ordinary hourly rate—that is, without overtime.

The provision initially applied to 12 awards nominated in the bill, but the number of awards to which this simplified additional-hours provision applies can be expanded by regulation. It's another pernicious increase in the amount of delegated legislation, which of course is a matter that this Senate should be concerned about. This is a provision that will inevitably reduce job security, because it effectively casualises part-time workers.

The better off overall test has been a crucial protection for workers during EBA negotiations. The Fair Work Commission has been able to exclude changes that would disadvantage employers, but this bill suspends those protections. And with greenfield agreements, the bill provides extended new EBA periods of up to eight years. This provision will apply for projects with a construction cost of $500 million, but the minister can declare it to be a 'major project' and the production cost can be as low as $250 million—and we know that, on the scale of infrastructure projects in this country, that is not a great deal of money.

So, the parliament's ability to scrutinise these agreements, to hold to government to account, is removed, and the government's capacity to introduce flexibility, as defined by employers, is increased dramatically. This bill increase penalties for the underpayment of wages, and that's a good thing. But the government is very deceptive. It does not define what 'dishonesty' is. It does not in fact provide the protections it is alluding to. These measures are in no way a plan for recovery and they in no way protect us from the precariousness and the undermining of working conditions in Australia. (Time expired)

Senator WATT (Queensland) (10:49): I'd like to begin my contribution to this debate on the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia’s Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021—the government's changes to workplace laws—with a story of a guy in Central Queensland who I've got to know pretty well through my travels in Central Queensland over the past few years. His name is Chad. Chad's a coalminer, employed as a casual, through a labour hire company, by a major multinational mining company.

Chad has been treated as a casual, paid as a casual and employed as a casual by that mining company and the labour hire firm despite the fact that for over seven years he has worked the same roster, week after week, month after month and year after year. If any objective person were to look at Chad's employment and recognise that he works the same shifts, week after week, month after month and year after year, they would say that he is a permanent employee. And if Chad and the thousands of colleagues he has who are employed on the same basis were treated as permanent employees they would get job security, they would get annual leave, they would get sick leave, they would be able to get a home loan and they would be able to take a day off when a member of their family was unwell and needed attention.

But of course Chad and his colleagues who are employed as casuals, despite really being permanent employees, get none of those benefits. Chad, and every casual employee—whether they be coalminers or in any other industry—who are really permanent workers, don't get job security, they don't get annual leave, they don't get sick leave and they don't get a whole host of other benefits that permanent workers get. And of course they can't even go and get a home loan from a bank, because they're casual employees and banks don't lend those sorts of sums of money to casual employees.

Chad is just one example of what I have come to learn is an epidemic of casualisation in the mining industry across regional Queensland. It's not just in the mining industry, and I'll come to that shortly, but it's certainly something which has changed dramatically in the mining industry in Queensland over recent years—the explosion of casualisation and labour hire at the expense of permanent employment. Major mining companies in this country now employ the majority of their workforce as casuals through labour hire firms. It's being done as a cost-cutting exercise; the mining companies don't deny that. It's important that mining companies make profits and it's important that mining companies employ people, but it is a tragedy that in recent years, on this government's watch, we have seen that occur at the expense of coalminers and workers in general.

I'll give another example, of two other miners who I've met: Simon and Ron. Simon is the permanent employee, paid the EBA rate of pay. He has permanent employment, job security and all those types of leave benefits that come with permanent employment. His colleague Ron, who does exactly the same work as him—day in, day out, week in, week out, month in, month out and year in, year out—is employed through a labour hire firm as a casual. Ron doesn't get the permanent employment, he doesn't get the job security, he doesn't get the leave and he doesn't get all the benefits of permanent employment.

This isn't just some academic exercise; this has real-life consequences for people. As I said, they miss out on all of those benefits and they can't get loans. It puts immense stress on their families because they never know from one day to the next whether they're actually going to have a job. That's one of the consequences of casual employment: you don't have job security. You can be terminated by your employer at very short notice and without the usual redundancy pay that permanent employees get. So you're in constant fear and your family is under constant stress.

It's a disgrace that this casualisation epidemic has exploded across regional Queensland on this government's watch. Day after day, we see members of this government from the LNP in Queensland say how much they love coal, dressing up like coalminers and parading themselves around as if they're the friends of coalminers—

Senator Ayres: They put makeup on!

Senator WATT: You're right, Senator Ayres; some of them, including Senator Canavan, actually even go as far as wiping a bit of dust on their faces to impersonate coalminers! But every time they're actually given the opportunity to do something to help coalminers, or other workers who are trapped in casualisation, they squib it. Every single time they line up with big businesses which are making profits at the expense of ordinary working people. This legislation that we're dealing with today is just another example of that. Have you ever noticed that the only time we hear anything about casualisation from this government is in the run-up to an election? I've been here about five years—

An honourable senator interjecting—

Senator WATT: It has gone quickly. But, sadly, what has been going on in the time that I've been here is this government's continued neglect of casual workers. In the run-up to the last election we put a lot of pressure on the government to fix this casualisation epidemic, as did our friends in the union movement, as did workers themselves. Because we put so much pressure on the government, in the run-up to the last election they promised to fix casualisation. I remember in the run-up to the last election all the press releases, the press conferences, the advertisements with George Christensen, Michelle Landry, Matt Canavan and Ken O'Dowd, all saying they would fix casualisation. And here we are, nearly two years after that election, and they still haven't done anything about it. They did the same thing in the run-up to the Queensland state election last year. They were silent for a year and a half after the federal election, having said they would fix it, but in the weeks leading up to the Queensland election, they were going to fix it again. They brought in this legislation which not only doesn't fix casualisation but actually makes things worse. It opens the door for more casualisation of our workplaces.

I have spoken quite a bit about the effect of casualisation and labour hire in the mining industry, because that is one of the most egregious examples that we've seen in recent times. But this is something that is affecting so many different parts of our economy and so many different types of workplaces. Throughout our workplaces, in security, in aged care, in retail and—I'm sure, Senator Sterle—in the trucking industry, we see this explosion of casualisation, insecure work and labour hire with people being exploited. This government continues to do nothing about it. I well remember a particular day in the last term of this government. I'm pretty sure I was in Rockhampton—certainly I was in regional Queensland—talking to coalminers about labour hire and casualisation and how hard their lives were as a result. I got on a plane to head home to Brisbane to do a function with Commonwealth public servants, mostly working in places like Centrelink and the tax office. Do you know what their No. 1 complaint was? It was the fact that this government was moving so many of their colleagues onto labour hire and casual work. In the space of one day, you can go from two different parts of Queensland, talk to blue-collar workers in the mining industry and white-collar workers in the Commonwealth Public Service and they'll have the same complaint about the fact that they can't get permanent work because there's been such a push towards casualisation of their work and labour hire.

We often hear from the apologists for casualisation that it's okay, people choose to be casuals, people get compensated as casuals, they get a loading and all that kind of thing. I don't know where they're getting their figures. I invite any of those people to come with me next time I go and speak to miners in Central Queensland or to public servants in Brisbane, or anywhere in between, because they will tell you that, despite the fact that they miss out on the benefits of permanent employment—the leave, the regular hours, the job security—they actually get paid less than the permanent workers, even after their casual loading is applied. So this claim that casual workers are fairly compensated for missing out on the benefits of permanency through their casual loading is absolute rubbish. I have met people working in the mining industry who are being paid less on an hourly basis than the permanent workers they work right next to, and they're still missing out on all the benefits of permanency.

This is a tragedy for the individuals concerned and their families but it's also a tragedy for regional economies. At a point when we know the economy is very weak, when consumer confidence is very low, what we actually need is a workplace system that gives people the confidence that from one day to the next their job is going to be safe, their wages are going to increase, they will be fairly treated at work. If people have that confidence, they're more likely to take out a loan, they're more likely to go and spend money in the local shops and businesses. Do you know what? That creates more jobs. But, instead, people are terrified of losing their jobs and of not being able to pay off their loans. They rein in their spending, which means we don't have those jobs created in local economies. So this system that the government is presiding over, which will be made worse by this bill, actually threatens to prolong the pain that we are experiencing through this recession and it threatens to rein in the recovery that we all so desperately want to see happen.

In my contribution I have focused a lot on casualisation because it is something that is of great concern to many workers, but there are a whole range of other changes that are being proposed in this bill which will also make people's employment more insecure, rein in their confidence, cut their pay and take away conditions that have been hard won over many years. Again, those changes, whether we're talking about changes to greenfield agreements, to flexible work directions or to how enterprise bargaining is achieved—all of those things combined—are on the wish list for big business and will actually only harm the average working person and be another impediment to trade unions doing their job of working with workers to try to achieve better pay and conditions.

Just to give one example, which goes back to casualisation, of what these laws actually will do—laws that this government says will fix casualisation—is to leave in the hands of employers to choose whether someone is going to be employed as a casual or as a permanent. At least under the current system an employee has the opportunity to go to a tribunal to get a fair hearing as to whether or not they're actually a casual or a permanent. But these laws would enshrine and entrench power in the hands of employers to make the decision at the point of employment about whether or not someone is a permanent or a casual. And even if an employer decides, 'Okay, Johnny, you're going to be a casual,' when the facts are that they're permanent, Johnny's going to be employed as a casual, and there's nothing he's going to be able to do about it because that's what these laws will do.

In addition, what these laws do is effectively leave it up to employers to decide whether or not someone will be able to convert to permanency after 12 months. The government's out there saying that this is going to give casual employees the right to convert to permanency after 12 months. What they don't tell you is that the decision is still left to the employer as to whether or not they will convert someone to permanency, and it basically takes away all appeal rights that an employee has. An employee whose employer unfairly turns them down when they ask to be made permanent can go off to the Fair Work Commission, but only to get conciliation of the matter. The Fair Work Commission can't actually make a decision that someone is a permanent or should be made permanent, and the only option that a casual employee has to enforce their rights is to trot off to the Federal Court. I don't know about you but I haven't found many casual coalminers, public servants, retail assistants or hospitality workers who have a lazy $50,000, $70,000 or $100,000 sitting around in their pockets to spend on barristers to fight out a matter in the Federal Court.

These laws do nothing to fix the casualisation crisis that we've seen across Queensland and across the country. In fact, what they will do is make things worse. Labor have been very clear from the moment we saw this bill that we will be opposing these laws, because what they will do is actually entrench casualisation in the workforce. They will see people's pay cut and conditions taken away from them at the very time that we want to see people spending more in our local economies and creating more jobs and having more secure employment.

There's one group who still haven't shared their hand about what they're going to do on this legislation, and that is Senator Hanson and her colleague, Senator Roberts, in One Nation. This legislation is a very big test for One Nation. They've spent a lot of time rolling around Queensland talking about how much they support battlers. Well, this will be a test. Will they vote with Labor to stop this legislation which will cut workers' pay, or will they side with the LNP and back in big business?

Senator AYRES (New South Wales) (11:04): On this day last year Australia had recorded its 100th confirmed case of COVID-19. There were recorded coronavirus cases in every state and territory. There'd been COVID-19 deaths in New South Wales and in Western Australia. The first, ultimately inadequate, stimulus package had been announced and the first public health restrictions were coming into effect. Australia's case numbers were rising in line with comparable countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. Our trend followed that of Italy, who'd just entered their lockdown.

When the isolation measures were announced, millions of Australian workers lost their jobs—700,000 in the first week of April. Those who could do so prepared to work from home. And still millions of Australian workers went to work. They were the essential workers, the ones we could not function without. Every morning, many of them went into a dangerous and uncertain world. Health workers, doctors, nurses, paramedics, receptionists, porters and cleaners risked exposure to the virus to treat those who were already infected. It was dangerous and important work, and it still is. In January, the International Council of Nurses announced that globally 2,262 nurses died from coronavirus in 2020, yet nurses went to work. Some of them came out of retirement in order to staff hospitals. We saw that same courage in so many types of workers in those early months—teachers, supermarket transport and warehouse workers, aged-care workers, cleaners and food-manufacturing workers. Those were food-manufacturing workers like the ones on strike at McCormick today, who haven't had a pay rise for five years. The company's opportunistically using these current bargaining laws to strip away their rights, entitlements and conditions.

A promise was made by the Parliament of Australia in that moment of fear and uncertainty that as a nation we would rebuild in a way which would look after those workers who have looked after us. This bill is a repudiation of that promise. It is a broken promise for Australian workers. It is especially a broken promise to all of those workers, mostly women, who stood by us during the pandemic. If it's passed, it will make workers' jobs less secure. If it's passed, it will mean many workers are subject to pay cuts and less secure work. It will casualise some permanent workers' jobs and create new loopholes for employers to exploit and put competitive pressure on those good employers in a race to the bottom in Australian workplaces to drive their own wages and conditions down. It will further entrench a bargaining system that is sclerotic and failing and that denies workers the right to be effectively represented and to win the pay and conditions they deserve.

Minister Porter, the architect of this piece of legislation, is conspicuously absent this week. He's availed himself to the paid leave that this bill would deny to many millions of Australian workers. In his speech commending this bill to the other chamber the minister concluded:

This bill removes barriers that stifle the job growth of today and limits the job creation of tomorrow …

To the Morrison government, measures to give workers a fair say in their conditions of work are an impediment. To the Morrison government, measures to ensure job security and protections for fair collective bargaining are a problem for employers. The underlying assumption of this bill is that the recovery will be built on an increasingly insecure labour market, low wages and less secure jobs. That's not a plan to rebuild the Australian economy. That is a plan to entrench the problems that were already present in our labour market, that were driving higher levels of casualisation and that were producing more bad jobs in the economy instead of producing good jobs.

For one thing, Australia's bad experiences during the coronavirus pandemic were in no small part driven by problems in our labour market. There were leaks from quarantine facilities that had come from insecure workers forced to take multiple jobs just to make ends meet and, particularly in Melbourne, spread by casual workers who were forced into an impossible choice between their own family's financial security and taking appropriate public health measures in the public interest. It was that combination of insecure work and working multiple jobs that brought the virus into our nursing homes, yet the government's plan does nothing to deal with insecure work.

The problems of insecure work are well documented. It's not as if we don't know what they are. Casual workers can't make long-term financial decisions. Many of them can't buy a house. It expands the gender pay gap. Women workers are more likely to be casual workers. It means that businesses fail to invest in skills, and the long-term real productivity gains that this country needs are not made. Real economic recovery doesn't come from cutting wages and it doesn't come from holding back real wage growth. A real plan for recovery would come from investing in Australian workers. A real plan for recovery would understand that job security is a critical component of all of our long-term prosperity.

A bargaining system should encourage employers to negotiate fairly. It should ensure that workers' interests are properly represented. It should ensure that workers solve these problems in partnership with their employers, on an equal footing. It should allow labour market institutions to deal with the real productivity problems that plague our economy. It should deliver real, tangible economic benefits for everybody. It's not just about fairness and ensuring that Australian workers have the democratic rights that they deserve and should be their birthright in this country; it's about building a better type of economy, about lifting productivity and about creating more good jobs. This plan does nothing to achieve any of those objectives.

Last month Anthony Albanese offered a very different vision of work and dealing with insecure work in the economy: job security explicitly inserted into the Fair Work Act; rights for gig economy workers through the Fair Work Commission—and five food delivery workers have died in Sydney over the last six months; there's no plan from the government to deal with that question—portable entitlements for workers in insecure industries; 'casual' work properly defined; a crackdown on cowboy labour hire firms that plague in particular the mining industry—and Senator Canavan and some of these other characters put the Maybelline on, pretend they are mining workers, wander around in high-viz and confect interest in the jobs of mining industry workers, but when it counts they're on the side of the worst kind of labour hire operations that discriminate against ordinary workers and put them in a very tough position indeed—a cap on back-to-back contracts for the same role; more secure public sector jobs; government contracts to companies and organisations that offer secure work; and, on top of that, a real plan to deal with the gender pay gap.

We have a very different vision of the economy. What has been shown this week is that there are two very divergent visions for the future of the Australian economy and Australian jobs: firstly, Scott Morrison and Mr Porter's sclerotic, narrow, pea-hearted vision of a race to the bottom on wages and conditions on a low-wage, low-road future for Australian workers and, secondly, Anthony Albanese and Labor's vision of lifting everybody up, of producing more good jobs, of having a real strategy to lift wages and conditions and to improve productivity in Australian workplaces—a vision that keeps its promise to those essential workers who stood by us during the pandemic and delivers fairness and prosperity to everybody.

There have been critical failures of leadership by this government when it comes to the economy and the public health response. This government had to be dragged to measures to stop mass redundancies. This government left it to the states to run quarantine, blamed them when it went wrong and undermined it. I remember seeing senators from here, from Western Australia and Queensland, bellowing about opening the borders. It was Mr Morrison, the Prime Minister, who teamed up with Clive Palmer, so he can indeed take credit for the Western Australian election result. He should take credit for the Western Australian election result, because it was his decision to team up with that plutocratic, absolutely in the interests of Clive Palmer and Mr Morrison, to undermine the public health response in Western Australia. If they had succeeded—and every Western Australia knows this—the Western Australian economy would have been decimated, as well as the public health response. The truth is that there's no economic recovery without a public health recovery. The states got it right and Mr Morrison got it wrong at every juncture last year.

At the end of March two important events will occur. One is that the JobKeeper program ends and the second is that we will get to see whether Mr Morrison's promise to the people of Australia that four million vaccines will be delivered will really come to fruition. We'll see whether the four million vaccines that Mr Morrison promised have been delivered around the country. Why on earth are we cutting the JobKeeper program when we know that it will cost at least 110,000 jobs? Why on earth are we cutting that program if Mr Morrison can't deliver on his promise to Australian workers and the Australian people?

And why on earth would Senators Hansen and Roberts, and anybody on the crossbench, vote for this rotten piece of legislation, which will make workers' jobs less secure, not more secure? We should be legislating in this place to make people's lives better, to make people's lives safer and to lift people's wages and conditions. Instead, the miserable vision that this government has is a bit of tinkering to create a few more loopholes to make it easier for bad employers to work their way through the system and undermine wages and conditions. It puts pressure on good employers to do the wrong thing in order to compete and survive.

Instead of doing what we should be doing, Mr Morrison is breaking the promise that he made to those workers who got us through the recovery. The strongest symbol of that, of course, is the fact that the Minister for Industrial Relations is not here to push this package through the parliament and make the arguments for it. The Prime Minister wants this chamber to pass significant changes to our industrial relations system while there are serious questions about whether the Minister for Industrial Relations is indeed fit to hold his own job. The Prime Minister wants this chamber to pass a bill condemning more workers to insecure work and which erodes their right to negotiate better wages and conditions while the relevant minister is on paid leave. The Prime Minister wants this chamber to pass a bill that will likely extend the gender pay gap in a week when thousands of Australian women have been marching for equality.

One of the demands, indeed, of those marchers—one of the things that has been squarely on the government over the course of the last 12 months—is that if they were really interested in people's rights in Australian workplaces they would deal with the Respect@work report, which was launched more than 12 months ago. Three out of 55 recommendations in that have been partially dealt with. If that's a measure of the commitment of this government, and if this bill is a measure of the commitment of this government to better jobs, no wonder our labour market performance is deteriorating so badly.

Senator O'NEILL (New South Wales) (11:19): I rise to make a contribution on this very important piece of legislation, the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021. There are a lot of perceptions in the community about how difficult it is for people to understand the lawmaking that goes on in this place, but I want to make a few things pretty clear to the ordinary Australians who vote and send us here and expect us to stand up for them, especially when the government is going to have a good go at them.

The government has created this bill and called it an omnibus bill. It has 'bus' at the end of it. We understand what a bus is; it carries an awful lot of people. This bill carries an awful lot of legislation in it, and it's going to affect every Australian. It's very significant. Instead of having a long time line for careful consideration of the legislation they're advancing, the government limited the amount of time for due scrutiny of this bill. I know that the crossbench, who deal with Labor senators in good faith on many issues, will be paying attention to this debate. They were right when they made it clear on the weekend that they wouldn't support this legislation this week not only because it's such a bad piece of legislation, which I will get to, but because of the unseemly haste with which the government has tried to push it through.

Instead of allowing hearings right across this country for Australians to participate in, the government forced us to hold only three days of hearings. The committee travelled to Townsville and to Adelaide for hearings, and then had a hearing in Canberra. People were on the clock for half an hour each, being rolled in one after the other. They were not even able to have their say. The committee had to apologise to nurses who came to Adelaide to give evidence, because they weren't allowed to give their statements because there wasn't adequate time allocated. That is the contempt we see from the government about due process, and the people of Australia are waking up to it on many fronts. This is not just an idea out there that might or might not affect you; this is something that is going to affect your business. If you're a decent businessperson employing people in your local community, you're going to be caught in this trap the government is setting. The changes the government is advancing are being advanced by people acting in bad faith against the workers and the good small businesses of this country.

I want to put on the record right at the beginning of my speech what Ms Pulleston, a nurse, had to say in Adelaide of this bill. She read it. She got across the detail. She stood up on behalf of nurses at the front line. She came to Adelaide, and this is as much as she got out on this legislation:

I would say that it's a real kick in the guts. Other people got to stay home and work from home and not have the risk of taking this infectious disease—

referring to COVID—

home to their families. That is something real we had to prepare for. I had to prepare my husband and my kids and say, 'If there is an outbreak, I am not coming home to give it to you. Mum has to stay somewhere else.' That was a real fear that we had to face, and we still showed up—

This is what she says about this bill—

Cutting shifts and making life harder for us when we are going to have to put in that extra effort and when it does affect our residential aged-care facilities, that's the time when everyone has to stand up.

The 'everyone' who needs to stand up today, who can prevent the government from advancing this bill in a way that will negatively impact on Australian workers and small businesses, is the crossbenchers sitting on the benches in this chamber. They have the capacity today to slow this bill, to halt this bill, to send the government back to do better consultation than three short days on legislation that will linger long and have a profound impact on Australians.

We see that the government have got form on this. Every time the Liberal-National government get an inch of wiggle room on industrial relations, they try to ram through anti-worker provisions. As soon as they got control of the Senate in 2004, as people will remember, what did they push through?

Senator Sterle interjecting—

Senator O'NEILL: They rammed through Work Choices—indeed they did, Senator Sterle. Senator Sterle remembers it well. It was one of the most repressive and cruel blows to workers outside of the Depression.

With everyone focused on a pandemic and a vaccine rollout that is very problematic, disgraced minister Christian Porter's omnibus bill is put before us. This is a Frankenstein amalgam of anti-union provisions meant, deliberately, to crush wages at a time when workers absolutely need them to grow. The bill as it stands for debate is a little changed from what it was just a few weeks ago, when the last version of the bill sought to exempt enterprise bargaining agreements from the better off overall test. That was so bad; it was really the 'worse off overall test' the government wanted to put in. The crossbench stood up to them at the time and said: 'Forget it. That's just got to go.' The government, under pressure from the crossbench, removed that. Well, the crossbench have the power to halt this bill today, and that is what I encourage them to do.

In a time of wage crisis, if the government's bill gets through this house today it will push wages further down. The government's plans are actually revealed in this bill. There is a plan for fewer full-time jobs. In all of their media they call it 'flexibility', and they speak about it as 'flexibility'. Flexibility that only goes one way is a form of abuse. Flexibility for workers and flexibility for business owners needs to be something that's negotiated in good faith, and nothing about this bill has been undertaken in good faith. Everything about it has been a stitch-up by very, very powerful advocates of the largest businesses in this country against decent, hardworking sole traders, small-business men and women, and the workers of this nation, who keep things on the road.

The government ludicrously pretends that this bill will allow a path to permanent conversion for a casual worker. But, in fact, what it does is the exact opposite. It gives the employer a veto over that request. We had considerable evidence about this. If you're a casual worker and you definitely want to be a casual worker—sometimes it does suit people's lives—that's not a bad thing. But, if you're a casual worker who can't get a car loan because you're a casual worker or if you're a casual worker who can't get a housing loan because you are a casual worker and you decide you'd like to become permanent, do you know what this government has cooked up for you? A few magic words: 'Give them the old razzle-dazzle so they can say that they're giving them casual conversion.' Mr Morrison—the master of spin and show, the showman—

An opposition senator interjecting—

Senator O'NEILL: Absolutely! The reality is that, under this legislation, your employer will actually be able to say: 'There's a pattern of work. If I don't really want to have to offer them casual work, I'll just change their pattern of work and, then, in that last six months, they haven't worked a regular pattern—sorry, not eligible.' The definition of 'casual' is really entirely up to the employer. If they say you're casual, you're casual. You're stuck with it. That is not an advance in security for the Australian people. That is not good business practice. It's not good for the genuinely great small business employers who know their employees by name, who pay the right wages, who want to do the right thing. In the committee hearings, they were on the record talking about the need for a very, very different view of the conversion from casual status to full-time work.

I acknowledge that this bill does address one issue that is relevant to some states—that is, the crime of wage theft, which is absent in federal legislation. Again, it is so close. They look like they're doing the right thing, but it's a bit like The Wizard of Oz: you pull back the curtain, and what's really going on with the machine? Well, behind the scenes, what this really means is that, for workers in Queensland and for workers in Victoria, this legislation will water down the protections they have in getting back the wages stolen from them by unscrupulous employers. These are stolen wages, wages taken from Australian workers. They've showed up, they've worked the shifts, they've done the hours, they've provided the service—they've done their part of the deal. This government says, 'We need to do something about wage theft, but, oh, my God, let's make sure we don't do it as well as Victoria or Queensland.' They've literally got the template for how to do it right, yet, if this bill passes today, they take those rights away from the workers of Queensland and Victoria.

Again I say to the crossbench: do not let this government get away with this absolute con job. It is a con job with regard to protection of workers' wages. I had a great conversation with Senator Gallacher, who is in the chamber and who may be making a contribution very shortly, about who's robbed when wages are robbed. It's not just the individual, and I'm sure he'll make more comments about that himself.

I read an article just the other day—and people are seeing this happen; we saw the 7-Eleven debacle—in which Adele Ferguson said there's another wage theft case involving truck drivers in Victoria. She notes in the article:

In the past month alone 10 security businesses, Chatime bubble tea, … a toy retailer and an IT services business have been pinged by the regulator—

for various sets of arrangements to take people's wages. On 1 July this year that Victorian legislation comes into effect. Is that why the government are so hell-bent on pushing this through this week? Do they want to trump Victorians, who fought for their fantastic piece of legislation for years and years and years? Is that the idea? Get the crossbench on board, look like you've done a little bit of work this week and totally do over the Victorian and Queensland states and everyone who lives and works there? Is that what the rush is, because if that's the reason for the rush then that is another reason why the crossbench should say, 'Hold the phone guys; we are not going to advance with this today.' There are so many reasons why this bill should not be passed.

At a time when everyone from unions and the Reserve Bank to prominent business leaders are clamouring for the government to do anything—anything!—to grow wages, the government have introduced this bill that will cut wages. Deloitte Access Economics reports that, even on our current trajectory, Australian workers could wait up to five years for wage growth. If this bill passes it will be even longer before you get a wage rise. If the government were really serious about helping struggling businesses, they wouldn't be pushing this through today. Instead, they would be advancing something to support the extension of JobSeeker, especially for select industries that are still struggling from lockdowns and the pandemic. They should be keeping consumers spending, not rashly ending the supplements for JobSeeker and JobKeeper, which have lifted thousands of Australians out of poverty for the first time in years.

I know that there are nine public health experts from the Australian National University in Canberra who wrote about this bill. One of the terms they used to describe it was that 'it is an immediate threat to public health'. That's how they described the bill that this government is trying to get the crossbench to sign onto today. Their submission notes that Australia has one of the highest rates of individuals without leave entitlements. I love Australia. I'm so proud to be Australian, even though I am celebrating St Patrick's Day today. The reality is we have problems in our country. Leave entitlements in Australia are amongst the lowest in the OECD, with estimates ranging from 25 per cent to 37 per cent of the workforce without them.

I'm sick and tired of the attacks on workers by this coalition government. If it isn't an attack on their democratic representatives in the union movement, it's an attack on Australians' wages and conditions. It's a Neanderthal view from those opposite that the only way to achieve economic growth, the only way to achieve national prosperity, is to pay workers less, to make them work more hours and to give them more insecure conditions. It is a recipe for disaster for this country—not just for individuals but for the whole fabric of society. We should all be sharing in the wealth of this nation, instead of concocting, through this omnibus bill, some ridiculous plan to disadvantage Australian workers, the people on whom this country relies to lift us during pandemics, to lift us every day when they go to work. They need security; they don't need this bill. They need leave; they don't need this bill. They don't need this government. (Time expired)

Senator GALLACHER (South Australia) (11:34): I rise to speak against the passing of the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021. There was a time when the conservative side of the chamber was much more forthright and open. The Hon. Peter Reith gave a speech at the Royal Perth Yacht Club where he said: 'I know whose side I'm on. I'm on the side of business—small businesses, medium sized businesses and big businesses, and we will do what's necessary for those businesses.' I think that's what's missing in this debate. I listened to the contributions from Senator Bragg and others talking almost as if they were the workers' friends. They are far from the workers' friends.

I want to put some economic data on the record before I hop into a bit of criticism of the other side. The share of national income going to Australian workers has been steadily declining since the 1970s, with the profit share increasing. But the labour share has suddenly fallen below 50 per cent for the first time since 1959. Obviously the trend is exacerbated by the COVID-19 recession. On Thursday, the Bureau of Statistics released its June quarter gross domestic product data, and the data showed that economic activity across April, May and June shrank by seven per cent, the biggest quarterly contraction in 60 years. But the ABS noted something else. It said that company profits jumped a massive 14.9 per cent in this quarter, while the total wages and salaries bill for workers—characterised as compensation for workers—fell by a record 2.5 per cent. That meant that the labour share of income has fallen below 50 per cent for the first time in decades, while profits have hit record levels.

Why would wages and salaries decline when the government has been providing billions of dollars for JobKeeper payments? Mr Pickering, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab and a former Reserve Bank official, told the ABC the emergency subsidies to businesses had helped:

What's basically happened is there's been a range of sectors that have reported quite a significant increase in profits, largely due to subsidies received from the government — JobKeeper.

At the same time, we've had a significant decline in employment, which is putting downward pressure on compensation of employees [wages and salaries].

However, he said, the large shift in the income share between labour and profit in the June quarter should only be temporary:

It should unwind over the coming quarters.

Saul Eslake, a very familiar name in economic circles and now a Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Tasmania, said the noticeable shift in income share in the June quarter was largely a 'statistical artefact'. He said:

It's because a whole lot of people stopped working and had their income replaced by government benefits, so profits represented a bigger share of what was left.

From one perspective, you could say JobKeeper propped up profits and in a way they did, because if it hadn't have been for JobKeeper, profits probably would have been a lot lower.

But it's basically showing that a whole lot of employees, and hence their wage payments, were removed from the equation.

Mr Eslake said there was an important phenomenon to consider when thinking about this issue. He said that we had to keep in mind what had happened to low-paid workers this year. He said that the data shows average non-farm compensation per employee actually increased by 3.3 per cent in the June quarter and by five per cent from a year earlier. That was the fastest year-on-year growth in that measurement since March 2012. Mr Eslake said:

Now, how do you explain the total wage share going down [by 2.5 per cent] and the average non-farm compensation per employee going up?

The answer is: it was disproportionately low-income and low-paid workers who've lost their jobs this year.

So, what's left tend to be higher-paid people, and even though higher-paid people have taken pay cuts themselves, the impact on that has been more than outweighed by the culling of workers at the bottom end of the scale, so the average income goes up, even when the overall income goes down.

The punchline, when we get to it, is fairly straightforward:

… over the last six years in Australia especially, and over the last 20 years in other countries, and over the last 40 years in the United States, there has been a steady shift in the distribution of income from labour to capital.

Australia was sheltered from that for a while by the mining boom, but not anymore.

If we have a predicament like that, where labour's share of national income has consistently been declining for a number of years and has now fallen below 50 per cent, disproportionately shareholders and companies are taking the lion's share of the national income. So you end up with low inflation, clearly not a bad thing, but stagnating wage growth. In an environment where people can't get a pay rise at the moment, where people can't get an increase in hours at the moment, where some of them can't get jobs at the moment, we have an omnibus bill designed to help them. Well, I think I've been around industrial relations long enough to know that the other side of the chamber has never put up a bill that's designed to help workers get a pay rise. If they were honest, they would say that. There's never been a case where that side of the chamber has put forward any sort of legislation which is designed to get people a greater share for their labour.

It just doesn't happen, and Peter Reith was honest enough to say that. That honesty is lacking on that side of the chamber now, because people are saying, 'Look, we're helping you.' They're not helping people into higher, more secure, better paid employment. They're not doing that at all. They're making it easier for employers to spread the meagre amount of money they want to spend on labour across a greater number of people. We will end up exactly like the United States, where, if you're working in a bar or restaurant and you don't get a tip, you basically can't pay your rent; you can't afford your outgoings. I don't think those on the other side of the chamber are innovative enough or smart enough to come up with a new scheme, with a new paradigm; they're basically taking an old well-trodden path in the United States, in the United Kingdom, in other parts of the world, bringing it to Australia and making Australia a poorer place for working people.

If they were honest, they would say that their job is to look after capital, 'and you lot look after labour'. But what's happened in looking after labour is they had 12 years of the Howard government, with probably another seven years of this government, which makes it extremely difficult for organised labour to actually operate. In the meantime, as Senator O'Neill alluded to, they're actually ripping off Australia. There are submissions to the wage theft inquiry which say that the amount of forgone taxation revenue from wage theft would probably be approaching a $9 billion hit to the national economy. The amount of forgone contributions tax on super is also quite a large figure. The Taxation Office is on record saying what it is. Coincidentally, the Taxation Office is in charge of collecting it. They know how much has been forgone, but they don't take any steps to collect it. If this government and the other side of the chamber had half the acumen they profess to possess, they would stick on another thousand tax collectors. I think the figures are quite simple: for every dollar you spend on a tax collector, the return to the government is $5 to $6, so another thousand people in the taxation department chasing people who are not paying superannuation and therefore not paying contributions tax would be beneficial.

If we had another group of people looking at those who systematically underpay wages, we would have more taxation revenue. We're not talking about mum and dad with two trucks or mum and dad with a small landscaping business; we're talking about huge corporations, like Woolworths owning up to $300 million worth of underpayment. How much was forgone in the taxation area? How much was forgone in the superannuation area? But, no, the coalition came up with the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021, which I think basically will mean: if you haven't got a job, you can probably get one, but it's not going to be as well paid as the one you lost, and, by the way, we'll determine whether you're actually going to get overtime or not based on who's willing to work. If you're starving or you've got bills to pay and you want overtime, you won't get it, but, if someone wants to continue on ordinary pay, they will get it.

These are disgraceful things: eight-year agreements. Who's going to know what is happening in terms of the CPI and the like in eight years time? By the way, you won't get a chance to negotiate that because, if it's a $250 million investment, that will be done before you get there. By the time you get there, it will be: 'Great news! We have an eight-year agreement here.' If you ask what the wage rise is, they'll say, 'Stuff all,' or you might get CPI or half a per cent. Anyway, that'll be nothing to do with you; that will already be sorted out. How do you change it? You can't. This is a prescription for a dire situation. We should be trying to recover for people proper, full-time, secure work that's reasonably paid, not creating another underclass of people in Australia who will never see permanent employment.

There are many young people at the moment who have never had the luxury of a permanent job. They have never had it. They can get 16, 17, 22 or 25 hours but they can't get a permanent job. In other areas of quite reasonable economic activity, you have an inordinate number of casuals or labour hire people. Once again, those people don't see a permanent opportunity coming forward. But the coalition's putting up the smokescreen, in my view, that this legislation is coming along to help reinvigorate the economy. If the national labour income share continues to decline, we'll end up exactly like the United States, where you have a lot of people who, since the seventies, haven't seen their share of the wealth of their great country increase, which hasn't been good for the economy. America's deficit, you can't count the zeroes on the end of it. Australia's different. I suppose because we are different and capital is no different—capital is international—we're attracting attention. But I wish that those on the other side would at least come to the argument with clean hands.

The ACTU and other parties sat down with the Hon. Christian Porter and the Hon. Josh Frydenberg and attempted to resolve areas of concern. But, in my view, the whole lot should be just opposed absolutely. There are no redeeming features in here which will redress what is a national shame—that workers who carry this country, such as cleaners, garbagemen and all of the people who do all of those jobs we take for granted, are not getting a fair share of the national income. This bill will make sure that that never happens. It will never happen. They will be consigned to insecure work, low pay and no hope for the foreseeable future. Unless the electorate changes and votes in a different government, there will be no respite.

Actually, this is a culmination of decades of attacks on working people. We are now starting to see, in economic measuring terms, the fact that the labour share of income is dropping below 50 per cent of national income. I would prefer an economy where we were growing through productivity and economic activity, where workers were getting an increasing share of the national income, because workers spend their money. Workers do not put it in a tin and dig a hole in the garden or send it to the Cayman Islands and seek to avoid tax. There's no seeking to avoid tax if you're a wages and salary earner. You earn your money, tax goes to the appropriate place, super goes to the appropriate place and you are contributing fully to the economy. If we paid that sector correctly and gave them more freedom to bargain and the ability to increase their wages and contribute economically, they would educate their families and contribute all around in the community, and Australia would be a much better place. I don't want to see the low-wage inequality that exists in the United States.

Senator HENDERSON (Victoria) (11:49): It's my great pleasure to rise and speak on the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021.

I was disappointed to hear the contribution of Senator Gallacher, who made a number of sweeping statements, many of which were incorrect, with no credibility. Unfortunately, it reflects the sad fact that Labor doesn't seem to understand that strong businesses equal more jobs and greater opportunities for Australian workers. I just want to put on the record that I can only imagine, if the member for Maribyrnong, Mr Shorten, had been elected prime minister in 2019 with his plan to impose $387 billion of more taxes on Australians, what that would have done to this country. So I reject very strongly the sweeping, discredited statements made by Senator Gallacher which do not, in any way, represent the truth of the work of our government, the Morrison government, in backing jobs and our economic recovery at this very important time.

It is the case that COVID-19 has derailed our economy and forced hundreds of thousands of Australians into the bleakness of unemployment or being stood down. Despite the darkness of 2020—the lockdowns, the mass closures of businesses, the isolation from our friends and families—one small glimmer of hope remained: that all of this would eventually pass and that we would emerge, once again, a stronger and more resilient nation than before. Already we have seen huge rebounds in our economic recovery, led by Prime Minister Morrison and the many hardworking members of our government. There are few better indications that this hope has been vindicated than this bill, which manifests the government's commitment to ensuring Australians get back to work quickly and fairly.

This bill makes a number of balanced and sensible changes to the Fair Work Act which will stimulate jobs growth and boost the economy. It provides much-needed certainty to businesses and employees by clearly defining what it means to be a casual employee, and it gives eligible casual employees a pathway to permanent full-time or part-time jobs that are guaranteed by statute. The bill gives casual employees the best of both worlds. If they wish to remain casually employed, they can do so and take advantage of the flexibility of casual work. However—this is probably a key issue which Senator Gallacher overlooked—if they wish to transition to full-time or part-time work, they can do that too and take advantage of the stability of these forms of work. In this way the bill gives casual employees concrete rights which respect their employment choices, but it also gives employers the kind of certainty and transparency they need when negotiating agreements with prospective employees. The bill also introduces greater flexibility into awards in sectors of the economy hardest hit by the pandemic: the retail and hospitality industries. Many businesses in these industries have emerged in the wake of the pandemic battered and bruised but are still fighting hard to keep the employees they have and take on new ones. This government is committed to helping these hard-working Australians re-establish themselves in our economy. In keeping with this commitment, the bill adapts the government's successful JobKeeper flexibilities concerning duties and location of work, which helped save thousands upon thousands of jobs during the pandemic. They remain available for employers and employees to whom key awards apply across the hard-hit retail and hospitality sectors. The bill also allows employers and part-time employees in these sectors, which together employ over a third of all casual employees, to work together to agree on additional hours of work for part-time employees who want them. This will help to increase working hours and wages. It will also encourage employers to offer more permanent and secure roles with benefits including paid sick leave, over traditionally more flexible forms of employment like casual roles.

The bill simplifies and expedites enterprise bargaining by requiring that these agreements be finalised, as far as practicable, within 21 working days. This means employers can get on with creating jobs and employees can enter the workforce more quickly, easily and fairly. Enterprise agreements pay, on average, 69 per cent more per week than award wages. That is an average of $542 more per week. This shows that the government is serious, not just about getting Australians back to work but also about getting them better working conditions.

A big part of the government's plan for Australia's economic recovery is securing investment for greenfields agreements involved in large-scale projects valued at over $500 million, or between $250 million and $500 million if they are major projects of national or regional significance. The bill enables the Fair Work Commission to approve greenfields agreements for longer-term major projects by allowing the nominal expiry date to go up to eight years. In this way, the bill ensures that there will be certainty for investors in these large-scale projects, and this will help to create jobs and drive wage growth. In other words, employers and large-scale projects cannot be held to ransom by protracted and uncertain EBA negotiations, which put jobs at risk. The bill also protects workers on these projects by guaranteeing that any longer-term greenfields agreements will include annual pay increases for the nominal life of the agreement. Of course, this government proposes these changes with its eyes wide open. We all know that some businesses—including universities, I might add—have in the past underpaid their workers. In light of this, the bill introduces stronger protections for employees by instituting tougher penalties and orders to deter noncompliance.

These are incredibly important measures. They include a new criminal offence for dishonest and systematic underpayments of one or more employees, with a maximum penalty of four years imprisonment, automatic director disqualification for five years and/or a $1.1 million fine, or $5.55 million for a body corporate. The measures also include increasing maximum civil penalties for underpayments, sham contracting and failure to comply with a regulator compliance notice; increasing penalties available under infringement notices; and prohibiting employers from advertising jobs with pay rates below the relevant national minimum wage. The measures also include clarifying that the courts can make adverse publicity orders where appropriate. The bill encourages businesses to proactively identify and self-disclose and to rectify underpayments more quickly and efficiently to ensure that employees are repaid as soon as possible.

This is a good bill. It is good for the economy. It is good for employers. It is good for employees. This bill and these changes to our law are good for all Australians. It is a bill that takes the economic recovery of this country seriously and tackles the challenges of casual employment for both employers and employees head-on. It complements the government's other economic measures, such as the $9 billion of tax cuts that have already gone into the pockets of hardworking Australians. It is a bill that implements changes to the law that will see our economy restored and our hopes fulfilled. I commend this bill to the Senate.

Senator PRATT (Western Australia) (11:59): Here we are today, debating a bill, the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia’s Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021, in the middle of an economic crisis. The government needs to be supporting economic recovery. Instead, we have a bill that makes it easier for employers to cut wages and conditions, which is contrary to our national interest; it's contrary to recovery. On this side of the chamber, in the Labor Party, we stand with working families. We oppose the government's bill that will allow workers to have their pay and conditions cut, leaving them worse off and, indeed, stymieing our national economic recovery. We have a bill that takes rights from workers, and we need a parliament that supports workers and that does not strip them of hard-won rights, pay and conditions.

Through COVID, we've seen how important it is for us to stand together as a nation to support each other. However, making workers more vulnerable by allowing employers to cut their pay and conditions, which this bill facilitates, is the opposite of that. Our Prime Minister paints himself ostensibly as 'the fair-go PM', yet this bill undermines that fairness. It entrenches insecurity, inequality and a very unfair go for Australian workers. Why does the government want to do this? It won't help economic recovery. It will not help working families. But who does it help? Is it big businesses that claimed JobKeeper while giving executive bonuses, sacking staff and enjoying increased profits? Yes, it certainly helps them.

The government need to be on the side of workers, not their mates, which makes it easier for them to rip them off. A good example is that, in Qantas, $267 million worth of JobKeeper subsidies retained its workforce. Now it plans to axe 2,000 jobs. These jobs still exist—Qantas still needs baggage handlers—yet Qantas is outsourcing its work and is therefore able to pay workers less, owe them less in entitlements and create more insecure jobs. This bill does nothing to address this. It's unbalanced. It favours employer interests in the name of flexibility.

This bill weakens fundamental safeguards in our industrial system. It does this on the basis of a theory that employers will create jobs only if labour is cheaper. This ignores fundamental economic theory and, indeed, the lived reality in our nation, as economic commentators have shown, that, frankly, labour demand is derived by market demand for goods and services. Lower labour costs do not create jobs and they do not drive productivity; they simply add to profits. Increasing demand and increasing employment require local consumption—consumption that's heavily influenced by confidence. Insecure work and low wages are dampeners on consumer confidence. Again, this bill pushes in the opposite direction. It does nothing to address the problem of insecure work and low wages growth.

I draw the attention of this place to the evidence of Ms Sheree Clarke, an aged-care worker whose evidence to the committee was very moving. She said:

Because most of my work is so insecure, I can only plan to live on my minimum contracted hours, and a contract of 16 hours per fortnight is not enough to live on. This impacts all aspects of my lifestyle, including health. My budget does not allow me to choose healthy options and I often miss meals. Paying my car registration or visiting my dentist is a day-to-day decision for me.

She expressed her distress that she could not afford to assist her own elderly parents or even afford her own housing. She said she can't secure a long-term rental lease because she doesn't have an income. She lives in a caravan park. She said:

As a low-income worker, I'm not alone here.

We have in the legislation before us a how-to guide for corporate lawyers who want to construct employment contracts that casualise not just the existing casual jobs but any job in this nation. Far from being a pathway for conversion to permanency, the impact of this bill—on any analysis of the detail—is the opposite. It's there to manipulate the system and contrive employment offers that lock people into casual employment.

I note that the government did drop one hurtful amendment to the BOOT, but I have to say that this is not a win. The government dropped that disastrous amendment knowing that they would never receive support and creating a facade of compromise, but there has been no compromise. What we have is a bill that's designed to cut workers' pay and conditions and keep going the long-term trend of weakening wage growth in our nation.

I ask this place to think about the frontline workers who risked their safety to serve their communities through the pandemic, who ensured Australians still had food on the supermarket shelves, hospitals that had been cleaned and a public transport system that kept running. While some Australians were fortunate to work from home, many workers were not. Frontline and casual workers put their families' safety at risk to support our communities. Because casual workers can't earn a living wage, they work in multiple locations, including at multiple quarantine hotels during the pandemic. There are the aged-care transport workers. Many Australians put themselves on the line for low incomes to ensure that Australians are being looked after. How does this government thank them? By cutting their pay and conditions.

This pandemic has reminded us that our actions affect those around us, that we have a responsibility to keep our fellow Australians safe and looked after. This government is not only ignoring this by allowing workers' pay and conditions to be cut, leaving families worse off and the economy worse off in its recovery, but also thanking frontline workers, who have so courageously served our communities, by cutting their pay and conditions. This bill allows wage cuts to be made and also makes it easier for wages to be stolen. The government has placed much weight on its rhetoric in here about increased penalties et cetera, but the detail in this bill means that the recovery of stolen wages is less likely, not more likely.

I also note a submission signed by nine public health experts from the Australian National University. They have called this bill a threat to public health. The submission notes that Australia currently has one of the highest rates of individuals without leave entitlements in the OECD. Is the new OECD chief, Mathias Cormann, going to fix this? This bill increases the casualisation of work, the growing number of workers without paid sick leave. These experts state that casual workers' lack of sick leave is a threat to Australia's public health, because, whether they have the flu, COVID or whatever, they can't afford to take a day off.

Some 62 per cent of all jobs created between May and November 2020 were casual. The majority of jobs were casual. Casuals have fewer rights, fewer entitlements and less security. Casualisation is already an incredibly difficult and great issue in Australia. This bill doesn't fix it. This bill makes the problem worse.

The bill is entitled the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill, yet it is very clear that the jobs it is supporting are jobs that are casual, insecure and make life more difficult for workers and our economic recovery. Our recovery is slow and will be inequitable with these changes. Some 23 labour law experts across Australia signed a submission warning that this bill leaves workers worse off. They contradict very clearly the government's claim that it will not facilitate pay cuts. Once again, this government has ignored academic experts. I don't have time today to go through all of the important detail in this bill, all of the examples, but the detail is there in the submissions from working people, academics, health experts, unions, the ACTU, migrant workers and a great many others.

In closing, I want to highlight an important issue in relation to greenfields agreements. The ETU's submission detailed the story of a worker, Robert, an electrical fitter mechanic and instrumentation technician. He worked on the Gorgon project on Barrow Island, a $53 billion project. He worked 29 days on, nine days off. It was tough, and he saw depression run wild through his workmates. At one point there was a run of suicides. One worker tried to take his own life on a flight home. The roster was the root of these issues, but it was locked in by the greenfields agreement which covered the job.

We know that the Gorgon project took a long time, but here we see an eight-year time line for greenfields projects. Mental health issues are rife, and it is morally wrong to have greenfields agreements with a lack of flexibility for up to eight years. Suicide clusters happen. Fourteen suicides were reported in connection with the INPEX project alone. I implore this place: the greenfields regime must be flexible enough to adapt to the evolving needs of a site. The amendments proposed in the bill do the exact opposite, locking in life-of-project agreements that in all likelihood, I believe, have the capacity to kill people.

We on this side strongly oppose this bill. The Labor Party is the party of working people. It always has been and it always will be. We will stand up to ensure that workers in our nation receive fair pay and conditions for the work that they do. We are the party of award safety nets, leave entitlements and secure work. The coalition is the party of cutting penalty rates, delaying rises to super and entrenching insecure work. The coalition is the party of Work Choices, union-busting bills and ensuring Australian workers do not get a fair go. This bill is just the latest attempt by this government to hurt working families. It will ensure that recovery from the pandemic is slow and inequitable. It's a story we've heard before: the coalition wanting to hurt workers, under the guise of economic improvement. The bill should not be passed in its current form. There are too many fundamental problems and all the risks fall one way: into the laps of working people. The coalition says that this bill will create confidence for employers to employ, but the risks all fall into the laps of working people. Here in this place we are defending workers from having their pay and conditions cut once again. The Labor Party will continue to fight to make sure that workers are treated fairly and that this bill does not pass.

Senator CHISHOLM (Queensland) (12:14): It's a pleasure to follow Senator Pratt, who laid out the Labor Party arguments on this Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021, which have been consistent for a number of months. Increasingly those arguments have actually been taken across Australia—and certainly across regional Queensland, where a number of unions have been out having meetings and talking to people. They've really been giving people the opportunity to understand the damage that this bill will do to their ability to go about their lives and their workplaces.

It's a bill that says so much about this government. It sums up how they operate, what they stand for and how they see life for Australian workers and families into the future. We can start with the name of the bill, 'supporting Australia's jobs and economic recovery'. It's always the cynical, political messaging with this government. They never miss an opportunity; it's politics all the time, and we see that with the title of this bill.

We've also seen it in the way that they've negotiated on this as well, and their positioning. They dropped getting rid of the better off overall test—the BOOT—during the first effort to get the bill passed. But they're prepared to use that to play on the fears of Australians, knowing full well that it was brought in around Work Choices the first time. Let's also think about this moment in time and look at what the world has been dealing with and going through over the last 12 months, then consider what Australians have been going through as well over this period of time. We know that hundreds of thousands of Australians have lost their jobs and that many of those have been relying on JobKeeper, which is due to expire in a couple of weeks.

We know that Australians have a new-found sense of what an essential worker is through what we went through last year. Australians have appreciated those people who were able to provide the support so that many of us could get through, whether it was from frontline health workers—those people behind the scenes in health services who have helped to keep hospitals in shape and enabled us to deal with the pandemic—or those who have been on the frontline in supermarkets. We know how under pressure they've been. The last 12 months have certainly given Australians a new sense of what an essential worker is.

But this bill is the vision of this government. All it is is a series of ideological attacks—long-held beliefs that they've always wanted to pursue and have racked up under cover of dealing with the pandemic. That's what says so much about this government: the fact that they're pursuing long-held beliefs and agendas that they've always wanted to get on with in terms of attacking workers but wrapping these things up in terms of dealing with the pandemic. That is their cynical way of trying to get this through.

Some of the challenges that all workers are facing across the country were in place before the pandemic, such as increasing casualisation. We know that two million people were unemployed or looking for more work and that record low wage growth was well in place before the pandemic. And, sadly, from Queensland's point of view, there was the use of labour hire through many parts of Queensland, particularly through some industries. That's being used to drive down wages and conditions. We can then add onto these existing conditions the pandemic, and that's what the Australian people have been dealing with. But this bill is being presented today as this government's vision for a solution for those challenges that workers are facing.

It's so lacking in vision and it's bereft of any creativity from this government. They're incapable of offering up a better Australia. If this bill is the best they can put up then it's a sad indictment on this government that this is their vision for Australian workers. We actually had a moment, during what Australia went through over the last 12 months, when people did work together. The opposition were prepared to work with the government to try to find solutions to these challenges. Yet here we are, 12 months on, and Australia might have got through the pandemic but the government don't have a vision for what the future looks like. They don't have a vision for a better Australia, and all we see in this legislation is actually going to make things worse. It's going to make things worse for workers and it's going to make things worse for those families as a result of this.

Those challenges I spoke about before—low wage growth, casualisation and people looking for work—were around before the pandemic. They've been accentuated now because of what we've been dealing with, but still the government shows no vision and no creativity. They just revert to the age-old attacks on workers that we've seen since the Howard days. It really is a tragedy that this is the best they can do, given the opportunity that they have had.

So what does this bill do to hurt Australians? It makes it easier for employers to casualise jobs that would otherwise have been permanent. It makes bargaining for better pay and conditions more difficult than it already is. It allows for wage cuts. It weakens wage theft punishments in jurisdictions where wage theft has already been deemed a criminal act, like my home state of Queensland; this is something the state government has been really proud of delivering on, and was something that was seen as a significant factor in the recent election.

I turn to some of the evidence that was placed before the committee hearings. They were truncated committee hearings, because of the government's urgency on this, but it was a great job by Labor senators and others to get some of this evidence on the record. I know the committee spent time in Townsville as well, within Queensland. According to the Centre for Future Work:

Australia has not experienced such a sustained deceleration of both nominal and real wages in its entire post-war history.

The Liberal-National government's plan to get wages growing again is to make it easier to casualise workers. The Senate economics committee looked into the government's bill and heard from workers and other groups. Included in this was the Centre for Future Work, who said that weakening casual labour definitions and increasing employer control over these definitions will suppress wage growth and fuel insecure work:

The worrying expansion of insecure work in Australia is already associated with major economic and social consequences, including the slowest wage growth at any point since the Depression, undermined consumption spending, rising household financial instability, and rising inequality.

This was furthered by Per Capita:

… the Bill is likely to exacerbate, rather than relieve, the insecurity of hours and income experienced by too many workers in Australia.

…   …   …

At its worst interpretation, the new definition and conversion clause could encourage employers to offer casual employment to all new employees, giving them a year of 'try before you buy' employment for all employees, regardless of the eventual hours worked.

This is particularly important given that the growth in employment has been on the back of casual work.

Sixty per cent of all jobs created between May and November last year were casual work, according to the Centre for Future Work. In this period, casual employment grew by 400,000 jobs. Similarly, part-time work has also grown strongly in the same period. Australia's COVID recovery can't be built on the back of more insecure work, and this bill is going to make that worse. It won't improve conditions for casuals. The government even overturned the Federal Court decision on what it means to be a casual, making it harder.

Under these laws, if someone starts a job and agrees to be employed as a casual they remain a casual regardless of their actual work hours and patterns, as long as the employer employs them on the basis that they make no firm advance commitment to continuing in indefinite work according to an agreed pattern of work. Even if a court finds that a casual worker should be permanent, any casual loading they have received is deducted from outstanding permanent entitlements. So they still find a way to punish workers.

There are countless examples of workers doing the same job but being paid less—30 per cent to 40 per cent less on average, it is being reported, than their permanent counterparts. We've seen numerous examples of that in Queensland through the resourcing industry. Not only are they getting less than their full-time counterparts; they will not get what is owed to them even if they are found to be permanent.

This bill does very little to address the permanent-casual problem, something that is rife throughout Queensland and regional Queensland. The provisions don't offer a realistic pathway to permanency, with a loophole of potentially unlimited reasonable grounds that employees will not be able to challenge. The ACTU called the provisions 'essentially meaningless', given that employers are not bound to offer permanency if they do not think it is reasonable and can also refuse to consent to arbitration before the Fair Work Commission.

I think this is a key part of this, particularly from a Queensland point of view, because we have seen this become prevalent throughout regional Queensland. I've spoken about this in the chamber before because, ultimately, what this is doing is driving down the pay and conditions of all workers. But it's also changing the nature of many of these regional towns in terms of regional Queensland being a good place to live, work and raise a family. If the only employment you can rely on is casual, you aren't able to make the same decisions in life as others who have full-time or permanent work. It is changing the nature of these places and making them less attractive for people to live, work, and raise a family as generations of Queenslanders and, indeed, Australians have done.

There is the simplified additional hours agreement. This provision means an employer and a part-time employee can agree to the employee working additional hours at their normal pay rate without the employer paying overtime. The Queensland Nurses and Midwives' Union stated there has been a proliferation of part-time employees who are being treated as casual employees whilst negating the need to pay the 25 per cent loading required for casual employees. It argued: 'Effectively, the employee has limited control over hours worked and loses the benefits of part-time employment. Whilst the employer gains flexibility and reduced hourly rates, expansion of part-time employment practices by employers will further exacerbate insecurity and precarious employment.' The Queensland Nurses and Midwives' Union obviously covers so many vital workers, particularly given the health crisis that we have been dealing with over the last 12 months.

The bill will also weaken wage theft laws in Queensland. The Queensland Council of Unions said in their evidence that the bill considers the penalty for stealing by a worker to be 2½ times worse than stealing by an employer. In contrast, wage theft in Queensland is set at the same corresponding penalty if the stealing is conducted by a clerk or servant in relation to the employer's property. The Queensland government has criticised the wage theft changes. Queensland has a maximum penalty of up to 10 years imprisonment, whereas the Commonwealth regime has a maximum of only four. The Queensland government said in their submission:

The setting of a lower penalty at the Commonwealth level appears to signal that the Commonwealth Government regards wage theft as a less serious act than, for example, the forgery of postage stamps (which attracts a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment).

I think that shows the attitude to wage theft of this government, which has been its attitude for years, despite the overwhelming evidence that has been presented for Australian workers being ripped off.

Australia and Australian workers need an economic recovery that benefits all. Labor believes that we need to promote inclusive prosperity, where we create wealth through improved job security and decent wages. Per Capita summarised Australia's recovery well:

Despite a strong recovery in asset prices and a falling headline unemployment rate towards the end of 2020, the reality is that Australia's broader economic recovery threatens to take the shape of a 'K' rather than a 'V': that is, some people will do very well, having retained their jobs and saved money during the lock-downs last year, while others will fall deeper into insecurity and poverty.

The reality of this bill that we are debating today is that it will make that worse. Labor has been consistent since this bill was first introduced that this is bad legislation and it needs to be voted down, and that is what Labor will do. But more than that, it is such a missed opportunity for the country.

At a time when Australians are actually looking for a better vision, looking for something to look forward to that offers hope for their future, the government have turned up and put forward this bill that is going to make Australians and their families worse off. It is a sad indictment on this government that this is the best they can do, but they are so lacking in vision, they are so lacking in creativity, that this bill has to be opposed. I encourage the crossbench to oppose it as well. There is nothing that can be done to improve this. It is something that needs to be voted down, and the Australian people need to punish this government at the next election.

Senator STERLE (Western Australia) (12:29): I rise to make my contribution to the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia’s Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021 and I state at the outset that the first thing that should be front of mind for most Australian people is that, when the Liberal-National government set out to tell workers that they've got their back and that this fantastic piece of legislation is in the best interests of Australian workers and is going to improve their lifestyle, the warning bells and the alarms should be screaming at fever pitch.

I remember sitting in this chamber back in 2005 on the day Work Choices went through. The Howard government had the numbers in the Senate, in their own right, to ram through any legislation, and they did—and weren't they proud! I also remember a clap of lightning hitting this place—true as I speak. There was a little bit of sunlight shining through on Senator Abetz's head at the time, and I remember wondering if that shard of light would turn into a lightning bolt one day. Well, how did that end up for the coalition? What coalition member couldn't stand proud and tell us during the Work Choices legislation debates and when the subsequent bill hit the streets that they were so proud of the Howard government for doing that? I even saw a couple of them doing high fives, slapping each other's hands.

One thing about being in this place is that you know history does repeat itself. Here we go again. Regardless of the bad behaviour we've seen in this place—the cover-ups and the alleged offences in the last few years that would make any decent Australian want to vomit—what do they do as soon as there's a pandemic? They can't help themselves; it's in their ideological DNA. I heard the contributions of a couple of senators yesterday, one of whom was Senator Small from WA, and I did read some comments on Facebook—and I'm not going to be so rude as to mention anything about his name and his capability; I wouldn't dare do that—telling us that this is not ideological. Bulldust! This is ideological. I'll tell you why. If the government over there, any of those Liberal or Nationals senators, had a shred of decency in them they would be telling the Australian people, while they're telling them what a magnificent job of looking after people they're doing with this piece of legislation, what they have done for Australian workers in the last seven years they've been in government. I'll make it easy for them: just name three things that would have Australian workers standing up saying, 'What a magnificent job the Liberal-National coalition have done!' Not one of them can do that, because they would get torn to shreds. What have they done for their mates in big business? That would read like a Funk & Wagnalls; that would be 26 or 27 volumes. And here we go again.

While we're talking about history, I want to send a message to my crossbench colleagues. I do respect the crossbench; I am one of those who absolutely respects the crossbench. Even though we have differences of opinion, they were elected in their own right. They have faced the people and they have been sent by their respective states to represent the good people of those states. I say to Senator Lambie, Senator Patrick, Senator Griff, Senator Hanson and Senator Roberts: the last time we saw a wonderful—and I've got my tongue in my cheek—piece of legislation to 'help' working men and women in Australia, the crossbench senators who supported that bill are no longer here. There could be myriad reasons why, but I've got to tell you, Senators, the biggest thing going into the 2007 election was Work Choices. The Howard government, with all the lemmings on the other side and the crossbenchers who supported them, couldn't wait to put it in. They all went out the exit door. They're not here anymore. I appeal to the crossbench senators not to fall for it—no matter how those opposite fluff it up, no matter how many hundreds and thousands they sprinkle on this horrible sandwich—because the Australian people will not be taken for mugs.

We know one of the greatest issues this nation faces is wage theft. This is not new to me. I've been talking about wage theft for many, many years. I'm really happy now that the media are actually talking about wage theft. I want to congratulate those two magnificent Labor state governments in Queensland and Victoria, who not only talked about wage theft but moved heaven and earth to bring in legislation to address the issue. When will it ever happen in this place? Never. I shouldn't ask myself the same questions. It's never going to happen. I have been running around the great nation of Australia talking to truck drivers left, right and centre—not just to the suits and the representatives of transport associations. Senators opposite, if you want to have a bubble, bring it up now; give me examples of where I might be wrong. All they want to talk about—they want to talk about many, many things, but the biggest issue is wage theft. What really irks people is that mob over there. They pretend to be the friends of small business. This is the nonsense you'll hear from the LNP: 'We're the party of small business.' Well, if you are the party of small business, please explain to me how we have small businesses in this day and age that are getting the living daylights screwed out of them by the top of the supply chain. Nothing in this bill goes to addressing that. What about all those magnificent, hardworking small businesses in every industry you could think of who are being told to sharpen their pencil every time they put a quote in. They are being told, 'We can't pay you in 30 days. We might pay you in 45. We might even pay you in 60.' I have examples of 120. I have examples of 150, but that was one of the multinationals.

So, LNP senators, tell me what you've done for small business in this nation in terms of getting them remunerated on time or in a reasonable time. LNP senators, it's crickets over there. Not a thing! Also, where in this nation do we have a body called the Fair Work Ombudsman? The Fair Work Ombudsman is charged with a number of things. One is to seek out those people who aren't doing the right thing in paying their wages. Where in this bill—please point me to it—does it even say that thou shalt fund the Fair Work Ombudsman, let alone have it get out there and prosecute people and put them behind bars if it has to, or whatever it needs to do, to recuperate hard-earned moneys for people who have not been paid properly? I gave examples of that in this place two or three weeks ago. Please tell me where in the bill it tells me that you're going to address this in order to look after workers? As expected, there is not a thing. I'm giving you the opportunity.

We have examples of high-profile businesses self-reporting, and good on them. They've self-reported and come out and said, 'Look, we haven't paid our people properly.' And I can understand that sometimes there could be bogies in computers and all that. I get all that. We have celebrity chefs and we have Bunnings. These are people—not the celebrity chefs but the likes of Bunnings—who normally do pay, but there has been a slip-up. They've fixed it. That's fine; that's great. We heard that Maurice Blackburn had done it. They got out there and fixed it. When the grand party of the small business stand ups and says, 'You know what? Every time we give the opportunity for an employer to do the wrong thing and not get pinged,' where in your psyche do you think to yourselves, 'But what about the poor people that are doing the right thing?' Point me to the clause in this bill that says that you will do your best to look after the people who are paying the correct wages but are losing contracts to people who absolutely engage in wage theft and superannuation theft? Is there anything there? No, I didn't think so. You can't point me to it.

I listened intently to a number of contributions today. One of the best contributions I heard was from Senator O'Neill, who was on the committee. A legislation committee looked into this bill. I've done a few committees myself over the years. I heard Senator O'Neill tell me very clearly that the government—not the opposition and the crossbench and the Greens—only let them have three hearings. This is a massive bill that is going to be so fantastic for Australian businesses, so fantastic for Australian workers, so fantastic for casuals, so fantastic for those that have insecure employment now! There were three days.

I've made a couple of contributions in here in the last couple of weeks about how disgusted I am in the modus operandi of this LNP government. In the last seven years they have done everything they can to not answer questions in the inquiries. They get the departments not to answer. And—lo and behold—it happened again to me last week when I was conducting the inquiry into the Transport Security Amendment (Serious Crime) Bill 2020. It was the same old same old: 'We'll insult the Senate. We'll insult the senators.' That's fine; you'll get away with that for a while. But you insulted the witnesses who had travelled and who wanted to come and present their cases. You, the LNP Morrison government, are all guilty, the whole lot of you together, of sitting back and thinking that you could control it and that there would be only three hearings. Last time I looked, there were about six or seven capital cities that we would normally go to to seek that information from the people. Then I heard the example from Senator O'Neill of the nurses who had travelled. There might have been one nurse or a couple of nurses; I apologise if I've got that wrong. They were most upset that they couldn't get to present their take on insecure employment and their take on the bill.

As Senator O'Neill said very clearly, our frontline workers were the ones that ministers and the Prime Minister couldn't wait to get their photos taken with. They were standing next to the nurses, standing next to the healthcare workers, standing next to our essential workers fighting the pandemic. Senator O'Neill described when a nurse had to say to her husband and kids, 'If it breaks out, I might not be able to come home for a month.' The LNP senators—I don't know who the LNP senators were on the inquiry; I'm blaming the whole damn lot of them because they're all guilty through association. Where in your psyche do you think it's fantastic that you can snub the Australian people on the one hand, while on the other hand telling them you're doing everything you can to look after them? I know no-one on that side is going to answer that. I know there are Labor senators who are going to answer that, and Greens senators and crossbenchers who can answer that.

Here's another one—casualisation. Before they all start jumping up like a pack of cockies carrying on, casual work suits certain employees. But I've got to tell you, as someone who didn't slither my way through university while I was trying to figure out how I could work for someone and then get a job in the Senate or as a member of parliament without actually going off to work and doing things, when you are casual there is no way known you can seek a loan. You cannot get a loan for a car. You can't do it. You certainly can't get a loan for a house. How do I know? Because I have spent many, many years—I broke every industrial law in the land I could find, and I am proud of it. I marched truck drivers and forklift drivers and loaders off the job in the good old days, when workers could collectively bargain, before Howard got his claws in there with the support of all the lemmings behind him, to proudly stand on picket lines and proudly make it known to anyone around, 'We ain't moving until our brothers and sisters have got permanent jobs.' I'm so proud of my history there. I just wish I could have spent the last 15 years doing it as well, but I've been in here trying to fight the good fight for workers. So, in this bill, you point me to where any worker can say, 'Thank you LNP, thank you Mr Morrison and the lemmings; you have got my back.' What a load of bull.

There is another part here I want to find out about. One of my greatest hatreds in the transport industry—and I'll let other senators talk about this—was, and still is, labour hire. I might be wrong; labour hire may now have a conscience. But back in the great old days, when I had the steelcap boots and jeans on, there was not one decent word that I could put my tongue around to describe or link to labour hire. Labour hire were the parasites of the road transport industry. If it's changed, come and see me. Labour hire: the preferred option for the multinationals and everyone else who wanted to screw down wages and conditions. Do you know why I hated them? They never invested one single cent into the welfare of the workforce. Show me one single cent in the transport industry that labour hire put towards training and skills development. It ain't going to happen because it never happened. Give me one example where labour hire said: 'Gee whiz! We're making a motza, so how can we pay our labour hire people on a multinational site the EBA rates of pay that the permanent employees get on those sites, or the casuals?' Guess what? Chameleons. The labour hire mob could blend in with the jungle because they were never responsible. They never did anything for anyone except for themselves, except for helping bosses screw down the working conditions and wages of their permanent and their casual staff. Please point me in the direction of whatever page, of whatever paragraph that proves me wrong, shows where this bill is so darn good for working men and women in Australia?

Senator McKIM (Tasmania—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens in the Senate) (12:44): Well, here we go again! Under the cover of the pandemic, the ideologically driven neoliberals in this place have come in here, once again, to do the bidding of their corporate masters at the expense of ordinary Australian people. Let's just take pause as we debate this legislation and reflect on where neoliberalism has brought us to today. The planet is cooking. We are in the sixth mass extinction event in the history of the Earth. We are pricing an entire generation of young people out of the great Australian dream of owning their own home. We have millions of Australians unemployed or underemployed, with women, young people and migrant workers bearing—

Debate interrupted.

Senator BIRMINGHAM (South Australia—Minister for Finance, Vice-President of the Executive Council and Leader of the Government in the Senate) (15:01): For the information of the Senate, I table information from the Chair of the Select Committee on COVID-19, Senator Gallagher, regarding seven recommendations made by the committee in its second interim report.

In addressing those recommendations and the correspondence that I have just tabled, at the outset I would like to restate some of the remarks made by Senators Paterson and Davey in their additional comments to the second interim report. It is important to note that the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19 was appropriately established with bipartisan support on 8 April 2020, notably under the broadest possible terms of reference and with a tenure that effectively ensures it does not expire until the end of this term of parliament. That is the wish of the committee. It is beyond doubt that both government and opposition parties acknowledge and respect the important role parliamentary oversight plays in our Westminster system of government, as reflected by the establishment of this committee during the most extraordinary of times.

To date, the committee has held over 40 public hearings, published over 500 submissions by interested organisations and individuals and published over 700 associated documents. It is noteworthy that, in a time of health and economic crisis, officials from the Department of Health have appropriately appeared before the committee in public hearings no fewer than 10 times, and officials from the Department of the Treasury have appeared before the committee in public hearings no fewer than eight times, to answer questions on how they and the government have responded to the dual health and economic crises.

The committee has received nearly 2,000 answers to questions on notice throughout this period, overwhelmingly from government departments—a remarkable demonstration of cooperation and transparency, especially when considering they did so while managing the day-to-day fight against a once-in-a-generation global pandemic and associated economic crisis. They did so in addition to the work of those departments responding also to other estimates questions on notice and other parliamentary questions on notice, which appear to have been no less frequent during that time. The relatively few disagreements between the committee and the government about a small number of public interest immunity claims should be viewed in light of the overall significant cooperation and information sharing undertaken.

In relation to the specific claims of public interest immunity, as noted in my correspondence to the chair of the committee, Senator Gallagher, the government maintains the public interest immunity claims advanced in the initial responses to the committee's requests. The government holds the strong view that the documents and information sought would or could reasonably be expected to disclose the deliberations of the cabinet or a committee of the cabinet. Along with national security, this is the most longstanding and fundamental ground of a public interest immunity claim. As is well recognised in the Westminster system, it is in the public interest to preserve the confidentiality of cabinet deliberations to ensure the best possible decisions are made following thorough consideration and informed discussion of relevant proposals within cabinet. It is not in the public interest to disclose information about the cabinet's deliberations, as it may impact in the future upon government's ability to receive confidential information and to make appropriately informed decisions impacting upon the Australian community. In keeping with this longstanding practice, information about the operation and business of the cabinet and its committees—including when a matter went to the cabinet, who attended and what form of submission was provided—could potentially reveal the deliberations of the cabinet, which remain confidential for the reasons I've outlined.

In relation to the request for legal advice, while I note that the Senate has not accepted legal professional privilege as a public interest immunity, it has been the longstanding practice of successive Australian governments not to disclose privileged legal advice. This practice has previously been outlined by the Hon. Gareth Evans QC, in 1995:

Nor is it the practice or has it been the practice over the years for any government to make available legal advice from its legal advisers made in the course of the normal decision making process of government, for good practical reasons associated with good government and also as a matter of fundamental principle.

That was from former senator Gareth Evans on 28 August 1995.

The Hon. Philip Ruddock stated on 29 March 2004:

It is not the practice of the Attorney to comment on matters of legal advice to the Government. Any advice given, if it is given, is given to the Government.

Former senator the Hon. Joe Ludwig, on 26 May 2011, put the position as follows:

To the extent that we are now going to go to the content of the advice, can I say that it has been a longstanding practice of both this government and successive governments not to disclose the content of advice.

The government maintains, consistent with the positions put by ministers of previous governments of both Labor and coalition persuasion, that it is not in the public interest to depart from this established position.

It is integral that privileged legal advice provided to the Commonwealth remains confidential. Access by government to such confidential advice is, in practical terms, essential to the development of sound Commonwealth policy and robust lawmaking. The specific harm that the doctrine of legal professional privilege seeks to prevent is the harm to the administration of justice that would result from the disclosure of confidential interactions between lawyer and client. Both the High Court of Australia and the Federal Court of Australia have confirmed that legal professional privilege promotes the public interest by enhancing the administration of justice, facilitating freedom of consultation and encouraging full and frank disclosure between clients and their advisers. I thank the Senate for the opportunity to respond to and comment on the matters in the tabled letter to Senator Gallagher.

Senator RUSTON (South Australia—Minister for Families and Social Services and Manager of Government Business in the Senate) (15:09): I refer to the comments made by the Leader of the Government in the Senate today and the correspondence that I sent to the Chair of the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19 dated 18 December 2020. I confirm the government maintains its public interest immunity claim over the content of the advice that was provided in the context of cabinet deliberations.

Senator CASH (Western Australia—Minister for Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business and Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) (15:09): I also refer to the comments made today by the Leader of the Government in the Senate and the correspondence from the Attorney-General to the chair of the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19, dated 14 May 2020 and 11 June 2020, and confirm that the government maintains its public interest immunity claim over the content of the confidential legal advice in question.

Senator COLBECK (Tasmania—Minister for Sport and Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services) (15:10): I refer to the comments made by the Leader of the Government in the Senate and the correspondence from the health minister to the chair of the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19, dated 23 September 2020 and 1 October 2020, and confirm that the government maintains its public interest immunity claim over the confidential cabinet deliberations in question.

Senator GALLAGHER (Australian Capital Territory—Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) (15:10): I move:

That the Senate take note of the statements made by the Minister for Finance (Senator Birmingham), the Minister for Families and Social Services (Senator Ruston), the Minister for Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business (Senator Cash) and the Minister for Sport and Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services (Senator Colbeck) in relation to the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19 and the public interest immunity claims.

The Senate has just witnessed four ministers come into the chamber and give the proverbial finger to non-executive members of this place. That's what just happened. Make no mistake. There were a lot of words expressed by the Leader of the Government in the Senate, but they were a lot of words to try to justify the unjustifiable.

Let me be clear: the Senate committee have worked well and have worked hard—Senator Birmingham made those points—but have been thorough as well. Public servants refused to provide information and hoped that we would just forget about it, but we didn't. We wrote to those heads of department and said, 'You took this on notice and you haven't replied.' They then referred it to ministers and eventually, often months later, we got a response from ministers with the lazy use of the public interest immunity claim. Often they did not even specify the nature of the harm that would be caused to the public by providing that information to the committee. Most of them didn't even abide by the Cormann motion of 2009 that clearly sets out the way for public servants and ministers to work through that process.

We then considered the claims. On two of them we agreed with the government. On the others we didn't. We brought that to this chamber and we won the vote. Every non-government senator in this place considered the matter, as we are required to do. As Harry Evans specified in his note in 2005, when that matter arises in a committee it should be brought back and reported to the Senate. That is what we did. The Senate voted to order the government to provide that information or, in the absence of doing that, to make a statement outlining exactly why they aren't going to provide that information, and I'll come to that.

I want people to understand this because there's a broader principle here. Yes, we are after the information. We are after information that I didn't even think would ever be refused by the government, such as the date the cabinet first got briefed about the pandemic. That's pretty relevant to the work that the COVID committee was set up to do, which is to monitor the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. When did you first get briefed? When did the Chief Medical Officer first provide information to the cabinet? The minister for aged care had a COVID crisis. COVID was raging through the aged-care facilities that he was responsible for and hundreds of people were dying. When did he first brief the cabinet? Was it in May, June or July? We didn't ask what he briefed the cabinet with, but when he briefed it. We didn't ask about cabinet deliberations. We never sought information that related to ongoing discussions within cabinet. We accept that. But dates? Come on!

How are we meant to fulfil our job? We find the government in this position after, in a very stubborn way, they took the decision not to provide it. We won an order for the production of documents, some six months after the questions were asked, and you're still saying they relate to cabinet deliberations. It's ridiculous. The information sought is not unreasonable. It should've been provided at the time. For example, we asked for the date on which the AHPPC—a body that the government often tosses around as being the most important body that's been assisting them with the pandemic—first briefed the Minister for Health and Ageing. When did they first go to cabinet? When did they brief the national cabinet? The Productivity Commission chair gave a presentation to national cabinet, so it's gone to all of those governments. 'Could we have a copy of the presentation, please?' 'No. Top secret. Not allowed to have it.' Other governments are allowed to have it, and what they do with it is up to them. They've all got the presentation, but we're not allowed the PowerPoint. It's ridiculous. We asked for some of the information about the economic support packages, the information that went into determining that that was the package. We didn't ask, 'What were the options before you made the decisions about the package?' but we asked, 'What were the expectations for what that package would deliver?' 'No, not allowed any of that information.'

Our terms of reference are very simple: to monitor the Australian government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. All of these questions relate to the health and economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes, we have got a lot of information out of the Public Service. Sometimes it's been painful, but we have got it. Sometimes it's clear they don't want to answer, probably because they're worried about whether they'll get in trouble or not. But we persist and we tell them, 'You're not allowed to say nothing or refuse to answer.' We explain that to them. But that is part of their job. Senator Birmingham says, 'Well, they've come to all these hearings and they've provided all this information.' Yes, because they're accountable to this chamber as well as working for executive government. It's not an option; it's part of their job to support the work of Senate committees. They may not see it that way and, under this government, I think their interaction with Senate committees has changed a little. But it is part of their job. They do not have an option about whether or not they want to participate. So, yes, I appreciate the fact that they have come before the committee. But I don't think it's out of charity or that we should feel honoured that they've come, and I've explained to them before that it is part of their job.

When I read the advice of the great Harry Evans, he is clear in his note about the grounds for claiming public interest immunity and what the Senate has accepted as being legitimate or potentially acceptable grounds, which are listed. He also goes to those grounds that haven't been accepted by the Senate as reasons to withhold information, and they include advice to government. Quite often we ask witnesses about whether they've provided advice. They might not want to answer even that question. They say: 'It's advice to government. You can't have it.' No, the Senate has never accepted that. Legal professional privilege: the Senate has never accepted that. Cabinet-in-confidence: the Senate has never accepted that. They are all reasons that this government is using to withhold this information. The Senate has never accepted that. We have accepted that, if it would disclose information that relates to the deliberations of cabinet, that is a reason to withhold information, and we are not trying to change that. But just because you've stamped 'cabinet-in-confidence' on it or it might have been walked through on a trolley along with the sandwiches and cups of tea—in a COVID-safe way, of course—that does not mean that that information should be withheld from the Senate.

Senator Birmingham has a very polite style, but what he has done today is to say to every non-executive member of this place, 'Whatever you ask for and on whatever terms you ask for it, we are the ones who decide and we have decided that the Senate is not having it.' So, whilst they're trying to get through the IR bill and do deals with crossbench members, think about this. They're trying to be nice to you on the one hand, but you said the other day that you wanted this information and they have come in here and said, 'Bad luck.' That's what they've said.

That's what this government is known for: secrecy, doublespeak and withholding information when it's politically inconvenient to release it. That is what this is about. So maybe we won't get this information, even though the committee wants it and the Senate has actually asked the government to provide it. But the principle here is that we don't accept the lazy approach and the misuse of the public interest immunity claims process. We don't accept it; the Senate should not accept it. We do think this information should be provided and that this is a principle that the Senate should stay firm on, because if we let this one through, what next, Senators? I think anything becomes possible then. If we don't stand up and push back on this today and have some consequence for this, what next?

Senator SIEWERT (Western Australia—Australian Greens Whip) (15:20): I'm a member of the COVID committee and am absolutely appalled that the government hides behind public interest immunity. I'd also remind the chamber that it's not the first time that this has happened in very recent history. We don't have to go far back to work out when it occurred—robodebt. It was repeatedly used there, and they refused to provide the Committee on Community Affairs with the information that we were very justified in asking for, about their decision-making around robodebt. I'm using that as an example not to prosecute that argument yet again but to show that this government keeps hiding behind cabinet-in-confidence arguments again and again. As Senator Gallagher has just said, wheeling a trolley through the cabinet with some documents piled high on anything that the Senate might ask for is not appropriate. This isn't the first time the government has been hiding behind cabinet-in-confidence or public interest immunity.

I'd argue very strongly that there's not a cabinet-in-confidence argument against telling us. One of the questions that they refuse to answer is how they determined the Coronavirus Supplement rate. How did they determine it? Wouldn't you think it was in the public interest to know that? I tell you what, I'm really interested to know, because it's very important for the debate on the legislation that we'll have later in this chamber, probably tomorrow—rushed through, and we'll no doubt get a motion on hours, where they'll then of course include the guillotine and try to gag debate on the government's appalling rate of increase to JobSeeker, which the legislation that will come before this chamber sets at just $25 a week. When the Coronavirus Supplement was doubled, this Senate supported and agreed with it. The government knew that people couldn't survive on $40 a day. We wanted to know, quite justifiably, because it was a COVID response, how that rate was determined. No, they won't tell us. We also asked for the modelling on the JobSeeker payment. No, they won't tell us.

We asked for the modelling around the stage 2 tax cuts. No, they won't tell us. We asked when cabinet was first briefed by the Chief Medical Officer—an absolutely fundamental question. No: 'It's secret; we won't tell you.' You have to ask: what have they got to hide? It's a really simple question that Australia has the right to know the answer to. Why not tell us?

We also asked: when did the minister for aged care, Minister Colbeck, brief cabinet on the aged-care issues that we plainly saw roll out in this country? Nuh, he wouldn't tell us. We also asked how often the minister for aged care had briefed cabinet on the aged-care crisis—and not one person here could deny that we had a crisis—but did he tell us? No. Apparently that's secret too. How many times? When did he recognise that we had a crisis on our hands? When did the government know that Australia had a crisis in aged care on its hands? We don't know, because he won't tell us. He wouldn't tell us. The government won't tell us. Oh, that's right—it's cabinet-in-confidence! How often did he brief? When did he brief? When did he attend cabinet? When did the government know? It tells us how urgently, and when, they started responding to the crisis. No, they won't tell us.

We also asked about child care. We all know that in the heat of the crisis last year there were amendments made to payments and to how we approached child care. They won't provide the modelling for why they then changed their mind and ended that particular approach. They won't provide that and they won't provide the parameters on JobKeeper.

They won't provide the information on when cabinet decided that Australia was going for a suppression approach to COVID rather than an elimination approach to COVID. These are all questions that are very legitimate questions for the COVID committee. They are part of our work. The committee was charged by this place to do this work, but the government won't provide that information. They are key bits of information for the committee to do its work, and not just for us to do our work but for broader Australia to know. But, no, it's cabinet-in-confidence. As has been discussed in this chamber before, we don't accept those claims. This is information the committee should have access to and Australia should have access to.

I'll go back to the issues around the coronavirus supplement. Those were very important decisions that the government made. They were happy to take the Australian community's support for it and its welcoming of it, but they're not happy to tell us how they came to the rate. That is appalling. Australia has a right to know how we decided on that rate. Having access to that rate has made a lot of difference to Australians who are unemployed, so I argue very strongly that we have a right to know how that rate was arrived at. It was so important and it is so important. But of course the government don't want to release that information, because they know it will make an absolute mockery of the lousy 25 bucks a week, $3.57 a day—I challenge people to find somewhere in this country where they can buy a cup of coffee for $3.57—that they are going to ask this place to pass within 24 hours or—it may be a bit longer depending on whether we get an hours motion—36 hours.

This information is important to this country and it should be made available.

Senator PATRICK (South Australia) (15:29): I rise to take note of the minister's response. I accept what the Minister for Finance has said in relation to the Select Committee on COVID-19 being set up with bipartisan support. That's a good thing. But in order for a committee to do its work it has to be properly informed. It needs to have access to information. You can't stand and say, 'It's okay, we've assisted and we've given our support to a committee,' but then, on the other hand, deny it relevant information for its line of inquiry.

I want to go to two claims which have been made by the government. The first goes to legal professional privilege. It's worthwhile understanding the purpose of the privilege. The purpose of the privilege allows for confidential discussions between a client and a lawyer. In this case, the lawyer will be either the Solicitor-General or the AGS, or perhaps a contracted lawyer. But the client is of course the Commonwealth government. One of the things that you can do in relation to legal professional privilege when you are the client, because the privilege belongs to you, is that you can simply waive the privilege. You can say, 'I accept that this is legal advice, but the release of this information will not cause harm so I wave my privilege.' That's the first thing that the government could do in these circumstances. Have a look at what the content of the legal advice is and, in the spirit of openness and transparency, simply waive the privilege.

I know that people stand up on a regular basis and say that this undermines the well-established doctrine. Well, the bottom line is that it does not. The doctrine permits the waiving of privilege. The client simply has to say, 'I agree to waive the privilege.' I might point out that on 2 March 1986 cabinet made a decision under the secretary of the Attorney-General's Department at the time, Mr Brazil—it's called the Brazil Direction. This was a direction from cabinet that, in actual fact, legal advice belongs to the government, paid for by the people, and only in circumstances where harm could be caused should it not be released. I invite people to have a look at the Brazil Direction. Study it and you'll see that there's no reason, unless there's harm caused, as to why legal advice can't simply be handed over. The minister did not stand up and say, 'This is the harm that would be caused by a particular piece of advice being given.' He didn't do that. He simply said that it would be harmful just because we do it and that would cause harm. That's wrong—that's simply wrong, I say to Minister Birmingham. I think he should go away and reflect on that.

The second part of the equation, if you don't wish to waive privilege, is that the Senate has the power to order the production of legal advice. Earlier in this chamber—on Monday—I read out from the judgement in Egan and Chadwick in the Supreme Court of New South Wales where, unanimously, the appeals justices basically said that the New South Wales Legislative Council has the power to order the production of legal advice in circumstances where they believe it relates to the work that they carry out as a legislature, either in respect of considering legislation or in its oversight role.

So there's no reason why the government should not hand over that advice. It is consistent with the doctrine of legal privilege and it is consistent with the rule of law in this country. Please don't stand up and say, 'An Attorney-General said this, therefore it is.' Why don't they listen to the justices within our legal system, who I think are much better qualified than people in this chamber to understand what the law of this land is? It would be good if the government complied with the law of this land. Unfortunately, they're not.

In relation to the second aspect of some of the claims—the claim of cabinet in confidence—again, we should go back and look at the root purpose of cabinet in confidence. The dominant purpose of that protection is to protect the deliberations of cabinet—that is, the exchange of words between ministers across the cabinet table for the protection of what is referred to as collective responsibility. We allow ministers to have their opinions and say what they want to say about whatever is being talked about in cabinet, but the guiding insight is that there's collective responsibility. Once you walk out of the cabinet room, you adopt the position of the cabinet.

There is a protection around deliberation of cabinet, but there's also a ruling—again, in the civil jurisdiction—that deliberations are strictly the discussions that take place between ministers around the cabinet table. The cabinet rules—and I have looked into this in great detail—do not permit the deliberations of cabinet to be recorded on the minutes of cabinet. They can only be recorded by the note-takers, who then take the notebooks and lock them up. They send them to the archives, and we find out later what has been said. It is not possible for any minute from the cabinet or any decision of the cabinet to contain a deliberation, because that's not permitted under our cabinet rules. So claims that we see quite regularly thrown around—actually, I've got some challenges with the Information Commissioner in relation to some of these cavalier claims that these are deliberations of cabinet—are simply false because the only place deliberations of cabinet are recorded are in the notebooks.

Of course, there are accepted principles behind the keeping secret of cabinet decisions and cabinet ministers, but, again, understand what the law of this land is. I invite you to go and have a look at the case of Sankey v Whitlam in the High Court, where the High Court determined it is not for the cabinet to decide whether or not to keep cabinet documents secret in court proceedings; it is a matter for the court to do so. No-one in this country is immune from handing over documents or entitled to complete secrecy. If the interests of justice demand or require the adducing of cabinet documents then the High Court has said that is what will happen.

Bret Walker SC—and I know the Attorney respects Bret Walker SC; he's engaged him in his matter that he's just initiated—gave a presentation here a couple of years ago that said the High Court has said that cabinet documents can be adduced in a court if the burden had been met or the interests of justice demand it. He also indicated that the same threshold test can be applied and the Senate has the ability to demand those documents as well.

One of the problems we've got here is that the government is simply very cavalier in all of its claims. I have brought into this chamber on at least one occasion and certainly have brought to a committee room a document that is cabinet in confidence according to a response to an order for production but that I got under FOI. You make the claims in such a cavalier manner, and they get overturned. My current score has gone up since the last time I spoke about this in the chamber. The current score on FOI appeals is Rex 7, governments 0. It's gone up by one. It is because you make all these claims that are not properly grounded in law that they get overturned. What happens is everyone understands now what you're doing. You're crying wolf. You cry wolf every time someone wants a piece of information. You inappropriately and unlawfully withhold that document. Again I say that transparency, to the Prime Minister, is like kryptonite to Superman.

Question agreed to.

Senator URQUHART (Tasmania—Opposition Whip in the Senate) (16:41): At the request of Senator Kitching, I move:

That the following matter be referred to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee for inquiry and report by 5 August 2021:

Opportunities for advancing Australia's strategic interests through existing regional architecture, with particular reference to:

(a) the suitability of existing regional architecture and country-groupings to address key human security issues in the Indo-Pacific, including health security, the impacts of climate change, human rights and labour rights;

(b) the interactions between and complementarity of regional security groupings- including the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum and the Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Initiative - and other regional cooperation mechanisms such as Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and the East Asia Summit;

(c) using existing regional architecture to deepen Australia's defence engagement and strategic cooperation across the Indo-Pacific;

(d) how regional security groupings deliver Australia's objectives of promoting a stable, resilient and inclusive Indo-Pacific, including:

(i) progress on thematic focus areas already identified (maritime security, cyber and critical technology, critical minerals, counter-terrorism, and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief) and potential for additional thematic focus areas,

(ii) the feasibility of institutionalising certain regional security groupings and the potential for expansion, and

(iii) deepening cooperation between regional security partners on economic and development issues in the Indo-Pacific; and

(e) any related matters.

Question agreed to.

Senator DUNIAM (Tasmania—Assistant Minister for Forestry and Fisheries and Assistant Minister for Industry Development) (16:42): by leave—I indicate to the Senate that these bills are being introduced together. After debate on the motion for the second reading has been adjourned, I will be moving a motion to have the bills listed on the Notice Paper as indicated on today's Order of Business. At the request of Senator Colbeck in relation to the National Health Amendment (Pharmaceutical Benefits Transparency and Cost Recovery) Bill 2021, and at the request of Senator Stoker in relation to the Royal Commissions Amendment (Protection of Information) Bill 2021, I move:

That the following bills be introduced: A Bill for an Act to amend the National Health Act 1953, and for related purposes, and A Bill for an Act to amend the Royal Commissions Act 1902, and for related purposes.

Question agreed to.

Senator DUNIAM: I present the bills and move:

That these bills may proceed without formalities, may be taken together and be now read a first time.

Question agreed to.

Bills read a first time.

Senator DUNIAM (Tasmania—Assistant Minister for Forestry and Fisheries and Assistant Minister for Industry Development) (16:42): I table the explanatory memoranda relating to the bills and move:

That these bills be now read a second time.

I seek leave to have the second reading speeches incorporated in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The speeches read as follows—

NATIONAL HEALTH AMENDMENT (PHARMACEUTICAL BENEFITS TRANSPARENCY AND COST RECOVERY) BILL 2021

I am pleased to introduce the National Health Amendment (Pharmaceutical Benefits Transparency and Cost Recovery) Bill 2021.

The Government has a clear and unwavering commitment to Australian patients to list new medicines on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) that have been recommended by the medical experts on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC).

Since October 2013, the Government has made over 2,590 new or amended medicines listings on the PBS through an overall investment of around $12.9 billion.

This Bill amends the National Health Act 1953 to improve the administration of the PBS, and consists of two separate measures related to increasing transparency and simplifying the administrative processes associated with the PBS.

The first measure provides the Department of Health with the statutory authority to publish information in relation to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) and its subcommittees, and creates a regulation making power to allow subsequent amendments to the National Health (Pharmaceutical Benefits) Regulations 2017.

Information is currently published by the Department using public interest certificates. The changes will replace the need for public interest certificates, reducing the administrative burden on the Department.

These amendments will not change the nature of the information that is currently published. Subsequent amendments to the regulations will provide greater transparency for industry by defining the types of information published.

The second measure provides for cost recovery arrangements, including specifying fees for services and costs incurred to be set out in a disallowable legislative instrument, replacing the existing regulations. This includes a power to make separate fee categories to recover the costs incurred by the Commonwealth when entering into and managing deeds at the request of an applicant.

Current cost recovery arrangements including fees for service provided in relation to the PBAC and the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation are specified in the National Health (Pharmaceuticals and Vaccines – Cost Recovery) Regulations 2009. These regulations are updated annually to ensure they reflect the true efficient costs of providing services.

The changes will reduce the administrative burden on the Department by replacing the existing regulations with a disallowable legislative instrument and provide greater transparency for industry by allowing for the separation of deed-related fees. Deed related fees could then be charged at the time these costs are incurred by the Commonwealth.

The Department of Health has consulted extensively with the pharmaceutical industry on the proposed changes and in particular I must acknowledge the input and collaboration from Medicines Australia and the Generic and Biosimilar Medicines Association on these and other important reforms that are supporting patient access to medicines.

Since 2019, the Department has consulted extensively with the pharmaceutical industry on the recent transparency reforms developed under the 2017 Strategic Agreement with Medicines Australia, as part of the broader package of PBS process improvements.

The Department will continue to consult with industry about the intended legislative changes to formalise the transparency measure over the next few months.

ROYAL COMMISSIONS AMENDMENT (PROTECTION OF INFORMATION) BILL 2021

The Australian Government takes the violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of people with disability very seriously.

All forms of violence against, and abuse, neglect and exploitation of, people with disability are abhorrent.

This is why the Government committed $527.9 million for this Royal Commission, which includes funding to support people with disability to participate in the Royal Commission. The success of this Commission is important for ensuring better outcomes for people with disability now and into the future.

The Royal Commissions Amendment (Protection of Information) Bill 2021 introduces explicit confidentiality protections for sensitive information being given to the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability.

It implements the changes which have been requested by the Chair of the Disability Royal Commission, the Hon Ronald Sackville AO QC. The protections have also been requested by people with disability, in support of the Chair's request, and a range of disability advocates.

When the Royal Commission ends, its records will be held by the Australian Government Attorney-General's Department. Upon transfer, those records may then be sought under court-issued subpoenas or other compulsory processes, or be the subject of freedom of information requests.

The Chair of the Royal Commission has said to the Government that people with disability, their families, supporters, or people who identify as whistleblowers do not feel confident that the information they provide to the Royal Commission can remain confidential after the Royal Commission ends. These amendments will strengthen the existing protections in the Act, and remove any doubt about the safeguarding of confidential information beyond the life of the inquiry.

This shortfall of confidence in the community affects the Royal Commission's ability to fulfil its obligations under the Letters Patent by undertaking a comprehensive inquiry which ensures appropriate arrangements are in place for people with disability, their carers and families can engage with the inquiry, provide evidence and share information about their experiences.

The Letters Patent stipulate that people with disability are central to processes that inform best practice decision-making on what all Australian Governments and others can do to prevent and respond to violence against, and abuse, neglect and exploitation of, people with disability. Ensuring they are heard in this inquiry is key.

The Government has listened to the Royal Commission, and people with disability, their families and carers, and the broader Australian public, about the importance of ensuring people have the confidence to come forward and tell their story.

Existing protections in the Royal Commissions Act

For many people with disability, and their families and carers, telling their story to the Royal Commission may be the first time in their lives they have disclosed their experiences of violence, abuse, neglect or exploitation.

For others, it is the first time their story has been heard by someone in a position of authority.

People telling their stories to the Royal Commission need to know there are existing protections in the Act, and that the Government is doing more to expressly set out these comprehensive protections for personal information both during the life of the Royal Commission and after the inquiry has concluded.

The amendments will build upon the strong protections that already apply to Royal Commissions whilst the inquiry is underway. This includes providing for private sessions, the use of pseudonyms in public hearings and published material and through the making of non-publication directions. All of these allow for identities and other information to be protected.

This bill will ensure that people with disability have an extra layer of confidence to engage with the Royal Commission with certainty that their information will be protected.

We want people to come forward and tell the Royal Commission what has happened to them, and what they have seen.

Operation of confidentiality provisions

The bill amends the Act to ensure the confidentiality of certain information given by, or on behalf of individuals, to the Disability Royal Commission by applying limitations on the use and disclosure of information given by individuals to the Commission about their, or others, experiences of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation, where that information was given for purposes other than a private session and the information was treated as confidential by the Commission at all times.

Private sessions were first established for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (the Child Sexual Abuse Royal Commission) to enable individuals to tell their story about matters into which the Commission was inquiring in a trauma-informed and less formal setting than a hearing.

Private sessions are an important mechanism that enable individuals to share highly sensitive and personal information in confidence, which is why the Government is seeking to extend those protections to individuals engaging with the Disability Royal Commission providing accounts of violence, abuse, neglect or exploitation on a confidential basis.

Individuals have and will provide sensitive and highly personal information outside of a private sessions to the Disability Royal Commission, expecting that it will be kept confidential.

In practice, information about an individual's experience can be received and recorded by a Commission outside of a private session. For example, by providing confidential written submissions and accounts, or through interview processes where the Royal Commission needs to be satisfied that the matters fall within the terms of the inquiry or they need to discuss potential giving of evidence

This information should properly receive protections similar to private session information, and this is what this bill will achieve.

The proposed new clause 6OP would provide that confidential information is not admissible in evidence against a natural person in any civil or criminal proceedings in any court of the Commonwealth, of a State or of a Territory. Further, a provision of a law of the Commonwealth, a State or a Territory would have no effect to the extent that it would otherwise require or authorise a person to make a record of, use or disclose the information. The records will be held securely by the custodian, the Secretary of the Attorney-General's Department, when the inquiry ends. A court will not be able to compel the department to disclose this information and third parties will not be able to seek this information under the Freedom of Information regime.

Confidential information will only be able to be used in a report if it is de-identified or if the information is also given in evidence.

Flexible non-publication direction procedures

Subject to the passage of this bill, additional amendments will streamline existing arrangements in the Act to enable certain members of a Royal Commission to more efficiently make directions for the non-publication of information and identities.

Non-publication directions ensure that any evidence, documents or descriptions of any thing produced that might enable a person to be identified, shall not be published or shall not be published except in such a manner, and to such persons, as the Commission specifies.

Non-publication directions are an essential feature for protecting the identity of individuals, and other sensitive information such as locations or institutions, when giving evidence or providing information to a Royal Commission such as through a notice process.

The Chair of the Disability Royal Commission wrote to the Prime Minister, and requested an amendment to the Act that would overcome practical difficulties for Commissioners of a Royal Commission when making a non-publication direction.

Practical difficulties can arise particularly when an urgent direction is required, as Commissioners may fulfil their duties at different locations within Australia. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Commissioners have been required to undertake official duties remotely in different locations, which has heightened the need for simplified processes.

At an authorised member hearing, a direction may be made either by the Chair alone, provided the Chair is present at the hearing, or all members of that hearing.

In circumstances other than an authorised member hearing the Chair may give the direction, or a majority of the members of the Commission may give the direction. This resolves the practical issue whereby a majority of Commissioners have been required to collectively make a direction when a hearing is not occurring.

This bill will provide greater flexibility for the Disability Royal Commission, and Commissioners of future Royal Commissions, to make non-publication directions.

Efficient information sharing

The bill would also act on a request by the Chair of the Disability Royal Commission, to improve arrangements for Commonwealth Royal Commissions to communicate information and evidence obtained during the course of its inquiry with a Royal Commission, and a commission of inquiry, of a State or Territory.

This is an important and essential mechanism for this inquiry which has been set up as a joint Commonwealth and state Royal Commission, established through the issue of concurrent Letters Patent under the respective Royal Commissions legislation. Streamlining these information sharing arrangements will create important efficiencies for the Disability Royal Commission, and future Royal Commissions. Currently, most evidence tendered before a Commonwealth Royal Commission, must also be tendered in a separate procedural hearing for each concurrent state Royal Commission. This ensures it can be relied upon in a single report, including the Final Report. Current arrangements are impractical and time consuming. The amendments will streamline the process enabling information and evidence tendered before a Commonwealth Royal Commission to be easily shared with all concurrent State Royal Commissions.

Improved processes for receiving and handling evidence will assist the Commission to efficiently prepare a single and comprehensive final report drawing on all the evidence before Commonwealth and state Commissions established under each jurisdictions respective legislation.

This amendment would also remove onerous administrative requirements for the tendering of large volumes of evidence in each jurisdiction, in particular where it has been obtained under compulsion pursuant to different state Royal Commission laws.

Concluding remarks

The Government has given careful consideration to the development of this bill to ensure that it provides comprehensive protections to sensitive information.

The drafting of our bill takes into account the specific circumstances in which people have given information to the Royal Commission. Royal Commissions determine their own operating procedures, which includes the way that they invite people to make submissions and engage with it.

It is important that the Government has a proper understanding of these procedures so that the legislation can be drafted in a way that captures the information the Chair of the Royal Commission has identified as needing protection.

This is why the Disability Royal Commission has been consulted closely on the development of the bill.

The outcomes of the Disability Royal Commission will be guided by people's lived experiences, and its outcomes must be based on a true reflection of those experiences.

In order for the Royal Commission to fully realise the scope of its inquiry, it is important that the Australian community feels comfortable and supported in fully engaging with the Royal Commission.

It is critical that people sharing their lived experiences with the Royal Commission feel respected, and that survivors of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation have their experiences appropriately acknowledged, recognised and validated.

Ordered that further consideration of the second reading of these bills be adjourned to the first sitting day of the next period of sittings, in accordance with standing order 111.

Ordered that the bills be listed on the Notice Paper as separate orders of the day.

Senator HANSON (Queensland—Leader of Pauline Hanson's One Nation) (16:44): I move:

That the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Benefit to Australia) Bill 2020 be referred to the Economics Legislation Committee for inquiry and report by 6 May 2021, with particular reference to retention leases, decommissioning costs and offshore domestic gas reserve obligations.

Question agreed to.

Senator CICCONE (Victoria—Deputy Opposition Whip in the Senate) (18:08): On behalf of Senator Polley, I present Scrutiny Digest No. 5 of 2021.

Ordered that the report be printed.

Senator DAVEY (New South Wales—Nationals Whip in the Senate) (18:09): On behalf of the Chair of the Senate Standing Committee on Regulations and Ordinances, I present the Delegated Legislation Monitor No. 5 of 2021.

Senator SIEWERT (Western Australia—Australian Greens Whip) (18:09): I rise to table a document, Mr Acting Deputy President Griff, in which I think you will be taking a great interest. I present the report of the Community Affairs References Committee on fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, together with the Hansard record of the proceedings and documents presented to the committee. I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

This report makes 32 recommendations. This issue was referred to the Community Affairs References Committee more than 12 months ago, actually. It's an issue that the committee have long taken an interest in, and we took longer than we expected, obviously, because of the COVID pandemic.

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, otherwise known as FASD, is an entirely preventable permanent disability. FASD includes a range of physical and neurological impairments occurring due to brain damage caused by exposing a fetus to alcohol during pregnancy. As a spectrum disorder, FASD manifests in a range of ways, and conditions can range from very mild to severe.

The committee found that FASD is still not well understood or recognised in Australia. I'll come back to that, because that's particularly important. It is frequently called an invisible epidemic. The evidence indicates that the human, social and economic costs of FASD are immense. There is no safe level of alcohol that can be consumed during pregnancy. You'd think that by now in Australia we would get this, but we still have significant problems in that particular area, which is why we say that this is an entirely preventable disability. There are many myths regarding the so-called 'safe' use of alcohol during pregnancy that have been circulated in the community for a long time, including, I must say, by some health professionals and, most notably, the alcohol industry.

Prevention efforts must fundamentally aim to shift societal attitudes and behaviour around alcohol consumption in the broader Australian community. The committee recommends a long-term strategy and funding for FASD awareness and education, including in secondary school curriculums. In other words, we have to start making sure that people understand the harms caused by alcohol but also, specifically, the harms caused by alcohol in pregnancy. The evidence we received is that this doesn't just affect the fetus in utero. In other words, it's not just a message that's relevant to women but also an important message for men because it affects sperm as well.

It is very important that we raise awareness around alcohol consumption and FASD. The announcement of mandatory pregnancy warning labels on alcohol products and packaging during this inquiry was a long time coming, and we were pleased to see it. The committee urges alcohol companies to promptly implement the mandatory labels before the deadline in July 2023. It's not as if the industry don't know that they should have been doing this a long time ago.

Health professionals play a key role in prevention, diagnosis, and support for people with FASD and their families. Interactions with pregnant women and women of child-bearing age provide opportunities to educate women and their partners about the risks of maternal alcohol consumption and influence behaviour change. However, for a range of reasons, including stigma and a lack of understanding, health professionals do not always discuss alcohol with women or provide accurate advice or referrals. The committee is of the view that building the capacity of health professionals to identify and prevent harmful alcohol consumption during pregnancy must be prioritised.

I was especially alarmed by the evidence the committee received around online marketing of alcohol being used to microtarget particular cohorts. FARE commented that during the COVID-19 pandemic their analysis of Facebook and Instagram during a one-hour period showed an alcohol ad every 35 seconds. Almost a quarter of these referred specifically to the pandemic. What's happening is people are ordering alcohol online. This data is being collected and enabling this microtargeting. It's a very significant issue. There are serious conflicts of interest which mean industry managed processes could not properly restrict alcohol marketing in an effective manner. We need to be doing a lot more than just having a regulatory code, which has so many loopholes in alcohol advertising. It's clear we need a new approach to controlling alcohol marketing, especially online marketing. This, in fact, is to address not just FASD but also other, broader issues related to alcohol and its harm.

FASD is often not identified early in life. In fact, sometimes it's not identified at all. As a result, many people do not receive recognition of their disability or, very, very importantly, access to the support that they will need, and that needs to be lifelong support. Diagnosing FASD is complex and involves a multidisciplinary team. The committee heard that there are limited multidisciplinary FASD diagnostic services in Australia and waiting lists are very long. There's a clear need to ensure FASD diagnosis is more widely available across Australia. This includes building and training the health workforce involved in FASD diagnosis and exploring alternative models of assessment and the use of technology. Supports for a person with FASD will necessarily be, as I just indicated, over the entire life course. Unfortunately, support services in Australia are limited and can be cost prohibitive. Throughout the inquiry, the committee was made aware of the difficulties in accessing support through the education system, the NDIS and the social security system.

The committee agrees with submitters that FASD must be specifically recognised as a disability by the Australian government and the social security system. Access to assistance must be urgently improved to help people with FASD and their families to meet the extensive costs of FASD supports. The committee report also talks about the interaction of people with FASD with the justice system and also with the child protection system. It's very clear that we need to improve those interactions. As I indicated, we made 32 recommendations, but we also touched on the need to improve interactions between the justice system and the child protection system and the need to screen people—young people in particular—going into the justice system and also into the child protection system. We heard some very moving and emotional evidence from the carers of young children who have gone into the care system. They have not been screened and they are not getting adequate support for, in some cases, babies and young children whom they are providing care for. They weren't even given an indication that children potentially going into care in fact had FASD.

We saw some outstanding examples of work that's being done, including in the Marulu Strategy in Fitzroy Crossing, which has done an outstanding job of identifying issues around FASD. I personally will be fascinated to see the outcome of their 10-year follow-up study that we've just heard is occurring. I'm sure the people who were involved in the inquiry will be watching that very closely. We need much more data on FASD. We need a prevalence study. We still don't have an understanding of the prevalence of FASD in this country and we have a lack of data. It's absolutely essential that we address that issue.

This is, I think, a very important committee report. In fact, I thank the Acting Deputy Chair, Senator Griff, who initiated this inquiry by the Senate Community Affairs References Committee. I'd particularly like to thank all the witnesses and those who gave us submissions. They provided us with absolutely essential information. I apologise to the people in both Alice Springs and Fitzroy Crossing; because of COVID, we didn't actually make it up there for the site visits that we were so looking forward to. There are a number of committee members who still want to come up. I particularly want to thank the secretariat, who, once again, have gone above and beyond. They have produced an outstanding report and supported us very, very well. If no-one else wants to speak, I'll seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

Senator DAVEY (New South Wales—Nationals Whip in the Senate) (18:20): On behalf of the Joint Standing Committee on Trade and Investment Growth, I present the report of the committee, Diversifying Australia's trade and investment profile, together with the minutes of proceedings of the committee and the transcript of evidence.

Senator HUME (Victoria—Minister for Superannuation, Financial Services and the Digital Economy) (18:20): In response to the order for production of documents agreed to on 15 March 2021, I table the government's response to the report of the Select Committee on the Aboriginal Flag.

Senator SIEWERT (Western Australia—Australian Greens Whip) (18:20): I move:

That the Senate take note to the government's response.

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Griff ) (18:21): Order! The President has received a letter requesting changes in the membership of various committees.

Senator HUME (Victoria—Minister for Superannuation, Financial Services and the Digital Economy) (18:21): by leave—I move:

That Senator Chisholm be discharged from and Senator Ciccone appointed to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation and References Committees, and Senator Chisholm be appointed as a participating member.

Question agreed to.

Senator HUME (Victoria—Minister for Superannuation, Financial Services and the Digital Economy) (18:22): I move:

That these bills may proceed without formalities, may be taken together and be now read a first time.

Question agreed to.

Bills read a first time.

Senator HUME (Victoria—Minister for Superannuation, Financial Services and the Digital Economy) (18:22): I move:

That these bills be now read a second time.

I seek leave to have the second reading speeches incorporated in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The speeches read as follows—

Online Safety Bill 2021

The internet has brought extraordinary economic, social and educational benefits, which each of us enjoy each day. However, these benefits will only be fully realised if Australians can engage confidently and safely in the online world.

In 2015, our Government established the Children's eSafety Commissioner to support Australian children experiencing cyber-bullying harm. In 2017, we expanded the Commissioner's remit to include all Australians and introduced a strong scheme to support victims of image-based abuse and the role became the eSafety Commissioner. Over its six years of operation the eSafety Commissioner has established a strong reputation as an effective regulator providing swift, practical assistance to people who have been exposed to harm online.

This Bill strengthens Australia's world-leading online safety framework by adopting and building on the effective elements of the Enhancing Online Safety Act 2015 and Schedules 5 and 7 of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992. This Bill also provides new powers for the eSafety Commissioner to tackle a range of emerging online harms, within a flexible and adaptive framework.

This Bill will establish a world first cyber-abuse take down scheme for Australian adults, based on the success of our cyber-bullying scheme for children. This new scheme provides a pathway for those experiencing the most seriously harmful online abuse to have this material removed from the internet.

The scheme will operate on the basis of complaints made to the eSafety Commissioner, where services have failed to remove abusive content. The scheme applies to the full range of online services used by Australians. The eSafety Commissioner will have the power to issue take-down notices directly to the services, and also to end-users responsible for the abusive content.

This new scheme does not override or supplant existing criminal provisions for abuse and harassment. Victims will still be able to go to the police. The eSafety Commissioner will work closely with law enforcement and hand over any evidence for criminal prosecutions.

The Bill will expand our cyber-bullying scheme for children. The eSafety Commissioner will now have the power to order the removal of material from the full range of online services where children are now spending time - such as games, websites, messaging and hosting services - and not just social media platforms.

The sharing of intimate images without consent is a terrible thing to do and causes great distress to victims. The Government moved quickly to deal with this behaviour through legislation in 2018. We recognise that overwhelmingly victims simply want these images removed from the internet as quickly as possible.

The Bill reduces the timeframe within which intimate images must be removed following a notice from the eSafety Commissioner. The Commissioner will retain the ability to issue notices to social media services, relevant electronic services, designated internet services and hosting services. The Commissioner will also retain the ability to issue notices to end-users - those responsible for uploading intimate images - and will have access to infringement notices, enforceable undertakings and injunctions. Civil penalties of up to $111,000 will continue to apply to individuals who post or threaten to post images, or who fail to comply with a removal notice issued by the eSafety Commissioner.

To have a safer online environment, we need to change the law. But that in itself is not enough. The digital sector must also step up. So this Bill introduces a clear statement of what the Australian Government - on behalf of all Australians - expects of business in the digital sector. We call this statement the 'Basic Online Safety Expectations'. They will apply to service providers, including social media services; relevant electronic services such as messaging apps and games; and designated internet services such as websites.

The Bill allows the Minister to determine the detail of these expectations by legislative instrument. The Minister may also determine that the expectations apply to specific services. Here are some of the things we expect. We expect that service providers will take reasonable steps to ensure that Australians are able to use their services in a safe manner; we expect that services are not able to be used to bully, abuse or humiliate Australians.; and we expect that service providers will provide clear and readily identifiable mechanisms for users to report and lodge complaints about unacceptable use.

The Bill provides for the Commissioner to publish statements about the performance of digital platforms in meeting the Government's expectations. The intent is to drive an improvement in the online safety practices of digital platforms. Where they fall short, the statements will provide advice to the public to inform their use of these services.

The Australian Government believes the digital industry must step up and do more to keep their users safe. That belief underpins the provisions of the Bill. The Bill will require new and updated industry codes to be developed. The Bill includes examples of the matters that the Government intends these new industry codes to address. These include preventing children from setting up online accounts without the consent of an adult; ensuring that customers have access to a filtered internet service should they choose to take it up; and providing information about online safety and procedures for dealing with prohibited and illegal online content. We expect that each section of the online industry will produce updated and strengthened industry codes within six months of commencement of this Bill. The Bill empowers the eSafety Commissioner to impose industry standards for those parts of the industry where this may be the best approach to improve online safety.

Australians continue to be concerned with the ease with which age-inappropriate or harmful content, such as pornography or violent material, can be accessed online. Online content is regulated in Australia through our Online Content Scheme. The scheme has successfully applied a complaints-based mechanism, managed by the eSafety Commissioner, with supporting industry codes to prevent prohibited online content from being hosted in Australia. The new legislation will retain all these elements. Because it is working effectively, changes to the Online Content Scheme in the new legislation are minimal.

The Bill also empowers the eSafety Commissioner to act quickly in response to the 'worst of the worst' types of online content. The Bill reforms the Online Content Scheme so that class one material, or material which is so abhorrent that it would be refused classification, will no longer need to be reviewed and classified by the Classification Board before the eSafety Commissioner can order its removal. This includes child sexual exploitation material. In addition, the Bill provides the eSafety Commissioner with the power to issue take-down notices to providers of particularly egregious illegal content such as child sexual exploitation material which is hosted outside of Australia, and which can be accessed by end-users in Australia. The Bill provides for civil penalties where services fail to remove this content within 24 hours of the receipt of such a notice.

This strengthened power for the eSafety Commissioner will complement existing international work underway through the WePROTECT Global Alliance which is targeting and removing child sexual exploitation material no matter where it is hosted.

The Bill also provides the eSafety Commissioner with the capability to prevent search engines from being the conduit to illegal online content. In the event that a search engine can be used by Australian end-users to access class one material, the Bill empowers the Commissioner to issue a link deletion notice. The notice requests that the search engine cease providing a link to the material within 24 hours, and inform the eSafety Commissioner when this has occurred.

Further, the Bill allows the eSafety Commissioner to issue app removal notices that will request that online app stores remove apps that facilitate the posting of class one material. Once again, the notices will request that app stores remove these within 24 hours, and to inform the eSafety Commissioner when this has been completed.

The shocking live-streamed terrorist attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019 warranted a comprehensive response from government and industry. In the days following the attacks, the Prime Minister established the Australian taskforce to combat terrorist and extreme violent material online. This taskforce - made up of digital platforms, internet service providers and government representatives, delivered a consensus report with recommendations to deny terrorists the ability to spread their propaganda and to incite further violence and acts of hate.

This Bill delivers on one of the taskforce's a key recommendations. It provides the eSafety Commissioner with a rapid website blocking power that may be used during an online crisis event. The Commissioner would need to consider the nature and likely reach of the material depicting, promoting, inciting or instructing in abhorrent violent conduct, and be satisfied that it would likely cause significant harm to the Australian community and that an urgent response is required. The notice power will only be used in these specific circumstances, to limit the exposure of Australians to terrorist or abhorrent violent material.

The Government anticipates that a protocol already in place between the eSafety Commissioner and internet service providers will be updated to guide a swift response from industry in response to a blocking notice issued by the eSafety Commissioner. The Government appreciates the support of internet service providers in this effort.

For too long, malicious actors have used anonymous online accounts to abuse, bully, or humiliate others. All too frequently, this anonymous abuse is directed at women, victims of family violence or minority groups. Anonymous accounts are also used to exchange the 'worst of the worst' images and content.

The Bill clarifies and strengthens the information gathering and investigative powers of the eSafety Commissioner to unmask the identities behind these anonymous accounts. The Bill allows the eSafety Commissioner to require that social media services, relevant electronic services and designated internet services provide identity and contact information about end-users in relation to cyber-bullying, cyber-abuse, image-based abuse or prohibited online content. Civil penalties will apply to services who fail to comply with a written notice from the eSafety Commissioner.

We all enjoy standards of behaviour and civility in the town square that keep us safe, and there are appropriate mechanisms and sanctions for those who break these rules. The Australian Government believes that the digital town square should also be a safe place, and that there should be consequences for those who use the internet to cause others harm. This Bill contains a comprehensive set of measures designed in accordance with this belief. I commend the Bill to the House.

Online Safety (Transitional Provisions and Consequential Amendments) Bill 2021

This Bill operates in conjunction with the Online Safety Bill 2021, which I have just introduced. Together, these Bills will strengthen and extend Australia's world-leading online safety framework by adopting and building on the effective elements of the Enhancing Online Safety Act 2015 and Schedules 5 and 7 of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992.

This Bill repeals the Enhancing Online Safety Act 2015 upon commencement of the new Online Safety Act. The Online Safety Bill will become the new enabling legislation for Australia's eSafety Commissioner, and will strengthen and extend the Commissioner's powers to keep Australians safe online.

The Bill will repeal Schedule 5 and some sections of Schedule 7 of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 which is the enabling legislation for regulation of online content, known as the Online Content Scheme. These functions will be transitioned to the new Online Safety Act. This will create a single Act containing comprehensive measures.

The Bill will give effect to the Government's election commitment, made in the lead up to the 2019 election, to strengthen maximum penalties for use of a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence. Accordingly, the Bill increases the maximum penalty under section 474.17 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 from three years' imprisonment to five years' imprisonment.

The Bill will also makes changes to section 474.17A and 474.17B of the Criminal Code Act 1995 to ensure that offenders who show a pattern of causing online harm through dissemination of private sexual material continue to be given a higher penalty than first time offenders. These changes reflect the Australian public's expectation that the punishment for this type of conduct should be commensurate with the seriousness of the offence.

The Bill makes general amendments consequential to the enactment of the Online Safety Act. These include repealing redundant provisions, updating definitions and omitting and substituting references in other legislation that refers to the original legislation.

The Bill also provides transitional provisions and consequential amendments for other Acts arising from the enactment of this Act to provide continuity for the operation of the eSafety Commissioner, associated administrative arrangements, legal proceedings, schemes and processes.

Both of the Online Safety Bills have been developed following election commitments and substantial public and stakeholder consultation, including stakeholder workshops and an analysis of over 370 submissions received in response to an exposure draft of the Online Safety Bill that I released in December 2020.

This Bill, together with the Online Safety Bill, will extend and strengthen Australia's already world leading online safety arrangements.

Debate adjourned.

Senator HUME: I move:

That the resumption of the debate be an order of the day for a later hour.

Question agreed to.

Senator HUME (Victoria—Minister for Superannuation, Financial Services and the Digital Economy) (18:23): I move:

That this bill may proceed without formalities and be now read a first time.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a first time.

Senator HUME (Victoria—Minister for Superannuation, Financial Services and the Digital Economy) (18:24): I move:

That this bill now be read a second time.

I seek leave to have the second reading speech incorporated in Hansard.

The speech read as follows—

Social Services Legislation Amendment (Strengthening Income Support) Bill 2021

Australia has experienced the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic.

The Government has acted decisively, in the national interest to cushion the blow for households and businesses. We have provided $251 billion in direct support to households and businesses.

The Government has been successful at containing the Coronavirus. The economy and labour market are recovering and the vaccine rollout has begun.

The Reserve Bank Australia has forecast that the unemployment rate will fall to 6 per cent by the end of 2021, to fall further to 5.5 per cent by the end of 2022, and fall again to 5.25 per cent by mid-2023.

The key to improving people's living standards and reducing welfare dependency is job creation and having the right incentives to ensure there is a workforce ready to take those jobs.

Australia's social security system has served Australians very well and will continue to do so into the future. Prior to the Coronavirus crisis, the proportion of working age Australians reliant on working age payments was at the lowest levels in more than 30 years at 13.5 per cent. Unemployment was down to 5.1 per cent with more than 1.5 million jobs created over six years.

This Bill responds to our economic recovery and balances the need to ensure income support payments encourage and enable workforce participation with the need for the welfare system to be fiscally sustainable for future generations by increasing the rate of working age payments by $50 per fortnight, commencing on 1 April 2021. This rate increase is in addition to the usual indexation of payments taking effect on 20 March 2021.

The $50 per fortnight increase will apply to JobSeeker Payment, Youth Allowance, Youth Disability Support Pension, Parenting Payment, Austudy, Special Benefit, Partner Allowance and Widow Allowance.

This increase will flow on to ABSTUDY (Living Allowance), Farm Household Allowance and payments made under the Department of Veterans' Affairs Education Scheme.

The Bill also permanently increases the income free area to $150 per fortnight for JobSeeker Payment and Youth Allowance (other) from 1 April 2021, allowing people to keep more of what they earn as they reconnect with the labour market.

The Bill extends the waiver of the Ordinary Waiting Period for Parenting Payment, JobSeeker Payment and Youth Allowance, for a further three months until 30 June 2021.

The Bill also extends to 30 June 2021, expanded access to JobSeeker Payment and Youth Allowance (other) for persons who find themselves having to self-isolate or care for someone who is self-isolating due to the pandemic.

It also extends the portability period for certain Age Pensioners and recipients of the Disability Support Pension (for severely disabled persons) until 30 June 2021. This means pensioners unable to return to, or depart from, Australia within 26 weeks due to travel restrictions resulting from COVID-19 will have their entitlement maintained until 30 June 2021, as if they had been able to return home as planned.

The policy delivered by this Bill carries a cost of approximately $9 billion to 2024-25, including approximately $700 million in 2020-21.

Debate adjourned.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Griff ) (18:24): The President has received a message from the House of Representatives informing the Senate of appointments to the Joint Select Committee on Road Safety.

Senator McKIM (Tasmania—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens in the Senate) (18:25): As I was saying before we ran into a hard marker earlier today, when I was just getting warmed up, it's no surprise at all to see, under the cover of a pandemic, that the ideologically driven neoliberals have come in here to do the bidding of their corporate masters, and of course the people who are going to wear the pain for this are Australian workers. Before I go to the detail of the bill, let's have a look at where four or five decades of turbocharged neoliberalism has brought us to today. We are cooking the planet. The climate is breaking down around us. We are in the sixth mass extinction event in the history of the Earth. An entire generation of young Australians are being priced out of the great Australian dream of owning their own home. Millions of Australians are unemployed, underemployed or in insecure work, with women, young people and migrant workers bearing the brunt. And instead of working to increase job security, to create more jobs, to lift wages—which is what the government should be doing—they are pushing through a bill that will further entrench insecure work, will suppress wages, will give more power to businesses at the expense of workers and will undermine the role of unions. The neoliberals have an awful lot to answer for.

The pandemic has highlighted the inequality that's been allowed to flourish as a result of neoliberalism and as a result of insecure work in Australia. Casual workers were hit hardest during the pandemic, accounting for about two-thirds of the people who lost their jobs in early 2020. Those casuals who still had a job were amongst the lowest-paid and most-insecure workers, with no access to paid leave entitlements. And we can't forget the role that insecure and casual workers played in spreading COVID-19 across the country, as workers without paid sick leave were forced to choose between their health and their income. Many employers have built insecure work into their business models. While they turn a profit, workers have had no work or income security. The changes in this bill will further entrench insecure work in Australia. They will exacerbate wealth inequality in our country and in our industrial relations system.

I want to quote from Alison Pennington, from the Centre for Future Work, regarding the bill. She says:

Casual work has dominated employment growth in our post-COVID recovery. Between May and November, 62 per cent of all jobs created were casual. That's 400,000 jobs in six months, or 2,200 every day. It's the fastest growth in casual work in our history. What that shows is, first of all, that claims that there is a lack of confidence among employers to engage in hiring casual work is not credible. It also shows that the pandemic is intensifying and entrenching the use of insecure and casual work in the economy.

Instead of passing a bill that will entrench insecure work, reduce wages and increase the power of employers, we need to outlaw insecure work and ensure the right of all workers to a safe, meaningful, well-paid and secure job with good conditions. Those are the things that we should be doing.

I also want to make the point that during the pandemic Australia's billionaires did very, very well indeed, increasing their wealth on average by over 20 per cent in the year that we've been living in a global pandemic, increasing their wealth on average by over 20 per cent when hundreds of thousands of Australian workers lost their jobs, increasing their wealth on average by over 20 per cent while most of the rest of the country had to tighten our belts and do it tough. It's about time that billionaires were forced to make a bigger contribution to government funds so that we can fund the public services, the extent of public services and the quality of public services that Australian people expect from their government. We should be making the billionaires and the big corporations pay their fair share of tax so that we can provide more Australians with a dignified life and with safe and secure work and lift people out of poverty. That's what we should be doing, not bringing legislation like this one into the house.

The definition of 'casual' in this bill will give employers all the power to determine whether a worker is casual and will allow businesses to classify workers as casual at the start of their employment regardless of the number of hours they actually end up working. The bill clarifies that, to avoid any doubt, the question of whether a person is a casual employee is to be assessed on the basis of the offer of employment and the acceptance of that offer, not on the basis of any subsequent conduct of either party. There it is, colleagues: it's in black and white. Not only does this new definition do nothing to prevent the continued abuse of casual workers; it actually facilitates it by allowing businesses to hire workers as casual and give them full-time hours without requiring them to pay entitlements or provide any job security.

This is one of the great challenges facing our country today. But what do you get in this place when the agents of the big corporations and the super wealthy in the Liberal and National parties come into this place? They move legislation like this which will entrench insecure work, suppress wages and continue to ensure that millions of Australians live in poverty, in rental stress or in mortgage stress.

What we should be doing is making sure—and we do have the capacity to do this—that we put in place public policies that lift wages and that reduce and ultimately eliminate the number of Australians in casual and insecure work. We are a rich enough country to make sure that every Australian who wants a decent job can have a decent, safe and dignified job. These are not pipe dreams. These are not pie-in-the-sky philosophies. We are a wealthy enough country to generate full employment.

The number of times I hear the Liberal and National parties come into this place and talk about jobs—well, I've got to say, on their own test they are abject and epic failures. They come in here every day and talk about the importance of jobs. I've been in politics for nearly 20 years, and I've never seen the unemployment rate significantly under five per cent. We know there are large numbers of Australians who simply don't participate in the labour market because they've given up all hope of ever landing a job. We should be aiming unabashedly for full employment, where every Australian who wants to work has a job. Yet we get these hypocrites in here. They come in here every day, thump the tub and talk about jobs.

I say to the government: you've failed your own test. And why have you done that? Because you've deliberately chosen to put in place policies where the number of people who are looking for work far exceeds the number of jobs available, and you've done that in order to drive down wages. It's a simple supply-and-demand equation, and you've done it deliberately. Yet you come in here and you hypocritically bang on about how important jobs are and how jobs are your No. 1 focus. I tell you what: if jobs are your No. 1 focus, I'd hate to see what your No. 5, No. 10 or No. 20 focus issues are, because you've abjectly failed at what you describe as your No. 1 focus—that is, generating jobs in this country.

This legislation will create a new class of de facto casual workers by robbing part-time workers of hours and income security by allowing businesses to effectively treat them like casuals, with the power to increase and decrease workers' hours. The bill introduces simplified additional-hours agreements, which allow part-time workers in industries that have been hardest hit by the pandemic, such as hospitality and retail, to be employed on contracts that offer a guarantee of only 16 hours a week, with their employer able to increase their hours without paying overtime. This applies to 12 modern awards. However, the minister will have the power to make regulations to include or exclude modern awards. Workers will be forced into a false choice: to accept a contract with minimal guaranteed hours and agree to additional hours at lower pay or risk losing the job offer or additional hours to one of the over two million people who are currently unemployed or underemployed. This push from government turns what should be secure, well-paid jobs into insecure work with no guarantee of regular hours or take-home pay.

While we're cooking the planet, while the climate is breaking down around us, while a million species are on the road to extinction in the sixth mass extinction event in the history of our planet, while there is a war on nature, while an entire generation of young Australians is being priced out of the housing market because this government allows the RBA to print hundreds of millions of dollars at a time and bung it into the banks—who, instead of lending it to productive businesses, lend it to housing speculators—while we have millions of Australians in insecure work who are underemployed, many of whom are unemployed, and while all these absolutely solvable social and environmental issues exist, what do the government do? They come in here to do the bidding of their corporate masters. And why do they do that? Because they benefit from the institutionalised bribery of dirty political donations. They know that when their time is up in this place many of them will roll out the revolving door and into cushy, well-paid jobs as CEOs, senior managers and board members of those very same corporations. It is nothing other than blatant corruption; that's what it is. What we're seeing here today is yet another example of the old adage, 'If you want to know what's going on, follow the money,' and of the other adage, 'If you scratch most things in politics, the first thing you will expose is self-interest.'

Senator CAROL BROWN (Tasmania) (18:40): I rise to speak on the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021 on behalf of the many hardworking Tasmanians who are worried about the impact this legislation will have on them and their rights at work. I also wish to highlight the impact this legislation will have on the heroes in our fight against COVID-19: the aged-care and disability-care workers and other frontline health workers. This bill, which has been amply addressed through some of the contributions to this debate, does absolutely nothing to address issues around job security and exploitation—in fact, it does quite the opposite. This bill does nothing to address wage insecurity. This bill seems to assume that employers are not already casualising permanent work. This bill assumes that employers need even more flexibility with rosters. It says nothing about the certainty and security our key health and social services workers need and deserve. And all this is being done by this government, who, every time they have an opportunity, attack workers' rights, entitlements and security. They've done it before. They do it every time they get the opportunity. This time it's even worse, because they're doing it under the guise of a recovery from COVID-19. Under the guise of a recovery from COVID-19, this government is looking to increase casualisation, enable more job insecurity and cut take-home pay. That is what this bill that we are debating here today will do. If it is passed into law, it will make wages less secure, jobs less secure and take-home pay less.

As the Health Services Union said at the Senate inquiry:

When health and care workers don't have secure work, our most vulnerable community members miss out—people with a disability, older Australians and those with mental illness.

We know that is the case. It's the case now, and this bill seeks to make that position worse, exacerbate that position. What will happen is that those most vulnerable in the community will again miss out. We need look no further than the devastating evidence given to the aged-care royal commission to understand the impact that current employment practices are having on older Australians. Aged-care workers are already ending shifts in tears because they are short-staffed and overworked and haven't been able to provide the care that aged-care residents need. What is the government's answer to this? This is after the aged-care royal commission and all the evidence that has been taken and completely ignored by this government. What's the answer? To introduce legislation that will give employers even more flexibility, that will deliver increased job and wage insecurity. Our most vulnerable Australians and the hardworking Australians who care for them deserve so much better than this.

It is estimated that, currently, 40 per cent of workers are in insecure work, while more than one million of our fellow Australians are underemployed and want more work. Surely the cornerstone of any workplace relations legislation should be that workers are entitled to a fair opportunity to provide for themselves and their families. How does this bill do that? The short answer is: it doesn't. Instead, if this bill is passed, the number of people trapped in insecure work will increase. This bill further erodes the rights of casual workers and will broaden the use of casual workers throughout our economy.

This bill has come along after years of advocates and employment spokespeople talking about the casualisation of the workforce. The casualisation of the workforce is even greater, and insecurity in work is growing. It's really quite unbelievable that those on that side think this is an opportunity for them to erode those rights even more and to make casual work even greater in Australia. I'm sure that they would know how difficult it is to care for your family when you're a casual worker, how you're not able to rely on a regular pay cheque, how you're not able to access loans and how difficult it is to secure rental housing. This is the reality. This is what people are dealing with. And your answer is to make it even harder for them. I'm not really sure that you've talked to casuals and long-term casual workers who work the same hours as a permanent part-time position or even, indeed, a full-time position.

People take these jobs and accept those conditions because they need to take care of themselves and their families and to pay their bills. Let's not think that it is easy for these people. They do have issues around being able to secure rental housing and loans. This bill further erodes the rights of those casual workers and will broaden the use of casual workers throughout our economy. Casual and insecure workers experience unpredictable and fluctuating pay, limited or no access to paid leave, and insecurity over the length of their employment. It's at the whim of their employer. Wage increases are irrelevant for insecure workers if they don't have a shift the next day, week or month.

Creating and protecting secure jobs and decent working conditions should and must be our collective top priority. I don't understand why it isn't for this government—or maybe I actually do. Every time the government have had an opportunity to cut workers' entitlements, to cut workers' conditions and to cut workers' pay, they've taken it. Work Choices was the opportunity that they took. That was wholesale destruction of the industrial relations system at the time.

What we're seeing now is the government taking this opportunity under the cover of the COVID-19 recovery; they seem to think this situation should be borne by those least able to afford it. Seriously, get out there and talk to casual workers and talk to employers, because there are plenty of employers that are doing the right thing. What the government is doing is making it harder for these employees and harder for those employers that want to do the right thing by their employees. That's what you're doing right here, right now.

Instead of protecting secure jobs and decent working conditions, this bill is about the growth of casualisation, particularly in industries like hospitality. It is now clear that insecure work is not a stepping stone to permanent employment. Work practices like labour hire, sham contracting, casualisation, gig platforms and more have all thrived under this government and will now become entrenched if this bill is passed. I really hope that that is not the case, but I fear it will happen. It will be the casual workers and their families who will bear the brunt of this legislation. Just look at sham contracting: it's used by employers to disguise employment relationships as independent contracting arrangements. This is usually done so the employer can avoid responsibility for employee entitlements. These contracts are rife in the horticultural, security and cleaning sectors and in the trades. Sham contracting shifts all the additional employment costs, like insurance, onto the worker.

During COVID, Australians got to learn about the employment arrangements and conditions of private security guards. Many of the employees in this sector are overseas students. They were particularly vulnerable during the pandemic as they were excluded from the government's JobKeeper and JobSeeker arrangements—another hard-hearted action by this government. The private security sector has seen increased profitability and growing rates of employment, but that employment comes at a cost. It is a sector littered with extremely poor job and income security. Employees pay up to $1,700 to qualify as a security guard and then earn as little as $13 to $15 per hour. Little wonder they take as many shifts as they can and work across more than one location and for more than one company. I don't think anybody here would like having to bring up a family on that sort of money, or even to keep body and soul together on that sort of money. There's no superannuation, no long-service leave, no sick leave, no overtime loading, no penalty rates for working on weekends or public holidays; it's just a flat rate of $15 an hour. These workers were at the forefront of keeping our communities safe by restricting the spread of COVID.

At the heart of insecure work is the issue of power. Employers know that insecure workers have limited power to speak up and assert their rights. Without job security, workers cannot speak up without risking their job. The legislation before us today makes bargaining for better wages and conditions harder. Make no mistake; that's an actual fact. There won't be any bargaining. The legislation will allow cuts to wages. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it brutally clear that the paid work of women in sectors such as aged care and disability services is fundamental to our economic and social survival. Over 90 per cent of aged-care sector workers are female, and they will bear the brunt of this piece of legislation. That's what's going to happen. It's written to affect this group. The government knows that that is what's going to happen if this legislation is passed into law. This bill marks a return to the us-versus-them mentality that was at the heart of Work Choices. If passed, it will further entrench low wages growth. It represents a return to the let-the-market-rip approach to workplace relations that lies deep in the heart of the Liberal Party. For these reasons and for many more, this bill should be and needs to be rejected.

Senator PATRICK (South Australia) (18:55): I rise to speak in debate on the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2021. I cannot support this bill in the form in which it has been presented. I do note that in the last probably three or four minutes One Nation have circulated a number of amendments. What I would say is, even though I'm always open-minded about amendments and will have a look at things, there is no time to look at them properly. That's the tragedy of the way in which the government has managed this legislation. They'd only really secured two crossbench votes this afternoon to the point where amendments had been circulated, giving no-one any time to consider what those amendments do. I know many people have spoken before me on some of the defects in the current bill, and I'm not going to repeat what those defects are because they've been covered quite significantly by other speakers. What I do want to talk about is alternatives.

I'm going to start by talking about the Governor-General's speech on the first day of the 46th Parliament. I'm going to be careful not to breach standing orders, so I'll have to say that the Governor-General's speech is, in fact, the Prime Minister's speech and so I'm not being critical of the Governor-General when I criticise what was said. I will say that that speech was quite uninspiring. It was about carving up the current economic pie, rather than growing it. There could have been a Labor election win and I might have heard the same sorts of things: talk about education, talk about social housing, talk about Defence—a whole range of different portfolio conversations, but none of them inspirational. I found it quite troubling that there was no vision in that particular speech. Then we got hit by a pandemic. We saw threat to life, we saw threat to basic supplies, we saw loss of jobs. But we all came together to get through COVID. Now we're almost out and on the other side of the pandemic, although I won't say we're completely out.

We're almost out and just starting to come back from some of the most dramatic health, economic and social events of recent times, caused by a global pandemic with massive consequences, disruption and dislocation, and what does the coalition do? What's the first item on their agenda? They immediately reach into their bottom drawer, or maybe it's the drawer of the Business Council of Australia, and pull out—surprise, surprise—an industrial relations package, a so-called reform package that would, if enacted in full as originally proposed, be to the very considerable disadvantage of many workers and their families. Instead of learning from COVID, instead of growing the pie, instead of building in resilience, they went back to the traditional battlegrounds that they typically have with the Labor Party. I guess it's a case of 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks' or perhaps, in the case of the Liberal Party, 'old dogs only know one trick'.

When I look at the big picture of what is happening in Australia at the moment, I can see that companies are faring pretty well. Certainly, if the ASX200 index is anything to go by, some of that wellness has been fuelled by taxpayer funded JobKeeper allowances or subsidies that have been used contrary to their legitimate intent. We've seen some businesses behaving quite poorly throughout all of this. On the other side of the ledger, we have seen stagnant wage growth. The wage growth index has been plummeting over the last decade, and that has to be of concern. Now, I'm not a person who says we don't let businesses profit. I actually am a strong believer in those taking a lead in business and taking a risk doing well from that; good on them. But there needs to be some sharing of wealth and prosperity; that's the way it has to be. That does not appear to be happening.

I can listen to people talk about trickle-down economics over and over again, but then I look at the data and it's not working. So I think to myself, 'Where are the policies that talk about how we assist business to grow?' Rather than trying to take the current pie that we have and carve it up in a different way, how do we make this pie bigger? How do we make it tastier? That's missing. There are a number of things we could do. Government procurement is an example. We could give some emphasis to Australian businesses in government procurement. I remember that one of the first things we did as we were dealing with COVID was to give our COVIDSafe application to a foreign entity. Rather than injecting that money into a local capability that would help retain jobs, we put ourselves in a situation where we gave it to an overseas entity. Indeed, that created some problems because of the US CLOUD Act. But when you do that, when you don't support Australian industry, not only do you give the foreign entity money, which they then reinvest in their own company to be better able to compete against Australian companies; you end up giving a double negative whammy to Australian companies.

We need to think about the way in which we do procurement. Clause 4.7 of the Commonwealth Procurement Rules allows government officials to take account of the economic benefit of contracting with a particular party. That doesn't mean it has to be an Australian party, but you look at the party and you say, 'How many jobs are they creating? What capital investment are they making? What's the supply chain effect of the procurement?' We can use that to inject government money back into our own economy, stimulating jobs, helping with the wealth that we want to see here in Australia and doing other things like helping in relation to national resilience—something that, as a result of the pandemic, we have learnt we need to have regard of.

Now, the government says we can't do this. There's a whole bunch of people who are fanatics in relation to free trade and they say, 'Well, we've got to have free trade,' and I get that we're a trading nation. I'm not discouraging us from being a trade nation, but when we procure things we can't look at a foreign entity and try to compare them with the Australian entity, because the Australian entity may have to pay minimum wages, they may have to pay a leave loading, they may have to pay long service leave, they may have to comply with occupational health and safety requirements and they may have to comply with environmental requirements. All of those are good things, but they drive up the cost of the business. The government basically mandates those things, but then doesn't recognise it when it compares a product that comes from another jurisdiction where they don't have all of those things that make our society what it is today. So the government needs to stop pretending that there is a level playing field or that it likes to have a level playing field in procurement, because it simply doesn't. There is no level playing field.

Where are the plans to support value-adding? We need to stop just exporting our rocks. We need to stop just exporting lithium and, rather, export batteries. Where's the government's plan on doing that? Where's the legislation that has been brought forward that allows and permits us to do that sort of activity? Don't just export iron ore; export steel. Value-add. Grow the jobs. Develop intellectual property. That's what happens when you do that value-adding. Again, the government doesn't want to do it, because they think they're going to skew the market. Well, let's look at what's happening in Whyalla at the moment. Because we're not backing Australian companies, Australian industry, we've got the situation where Whyalla may well face a company going into administration. I don't blame the government for that, but having the policies that enable us to stand up and support our industries is extremely important. Again, it's growing the pie, not carving up the existing pie.

With respect to infrastructure policies: we had a $10 billion boost in infrastructure programs, but what most people don't understand is that the government places requirements on infrastructure contractors that mean only tier 1s can get the big jobs. Here's the sad news: there are no Australian tier 1s. We actually have a policy, implemented by this government, that mandates the use of foreign companies. Those foreign companies, of course, subcontract here in Australia because the work has to be done here, but they squeeze the supply chain. They squeeze the profit out and it goes back to the head company. They get rid of it overseas, by way of transfer pricing, licensing—a whole range of different accounting tricks—to low-tax jurisdictions. Why aren't we fixing that?

Indeed, while I'm on tax, we know there are so many companies that are paying no tax at all, not contributing. It's money that could come into consolidated revenue and be employed to assist small businesses, doing much more than this legislation would do, but it's all missing. As some senators will be aware, together with Senator Lambie I have circulated amendments to the bill which effectively block almost everything in the bill, except for the wage theft and enforcement provisions. Those would remedy situations where we have wage theft, and we do have to deal with that wage theft. Will my amendments be acceptable to government? I don't know. I don't think so. Unfortunately, the Attorney-General and Minister for Industrial Relations is still on leave, so we probably won't have any authoritative response from him in respect of whether or not the amendments are palatable. Again, I don't think they will be, because they really do gut the bill. But it's the only way that I can see that the bill can be supported at this point in time.

It is clear that One Nation are on board. We've now had Senator Roberts circulate amendments, so one presumes that they are on board. Again, they're very late and it's almost impossible to do the analysis to work out whether or not you can support them. We also don't know how those amendments might interact with the other player who's left, Centre Alliance's Senator Griff. I won't speak for Senator Lambie but, noting that she has co-sponsored my amendments, we're in a situation where ultimately this will come down to Senator Griff—informed, of course, by his colleague in the other place, Ms Rebekha Sharkie. They have all the cards. The government have time pressure here because they want to deal with this between now and tomorrow, so Centre Alliance are in the box seat. They'd better use that position well. They'd better use it to get some really good amendments that strike the right balance between business and workers, because right now the bill doesn't do that.

Unfortunately, we don't actually know what Senator Griff is doing and what Ms Sharkie's views are because Senator Griff is not on the speakers list. That, to me, is in some sense disrespectful. He has the casting vote on this but is not prepared to come into the chamber and explain to the people of South Australia, whom he represents, exactly what his position is. In all of the bills I get involved in where there's controversy and I might have a casting vote or a significant say in what happens, I stand in this chamber and tell people what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. I think that needs to happen. In closing, my message to Senator Griff is: come into the chamber and explain yourself. You clearly feel a particular way about this bill, but you need to stand up in the second reading debate and explain to the people of South Australia what your position is and why.

Senator LINES (Western Australia—Deputy President and Chair of Committees) (19:10): For most of my working life, I've worked in the trade union movement, and I've proudly worked for United Workers Union. It went through a number of amalgamations in all the time that I worked there. But there are some things that have never changed. It is the union which represents some of the lowest-paid workers in this country—cleaners, security officers, aged-care workers, childcare workers, hospitality workers and so on. These are people who don't have the luxury of flexible working hours. These are people who were the heroes of our pandemic. These are the aged-care workers who were in this place yesterday begging those few on the other side who actually met with them to do something about the royal commission into aged care, to start to really lift the lives of people who find themselves in aged care. These are workers who earn around $22 or $23 an hour. They work part time. But, these days, they work in insecure work. Most of them are at the beck and call of their current employer. Most of them have to work two and three jobs to survive. And that's the story of my working life as a proud trade union official at United Workers Union.

Of course, as a trade union official, I've seen these sorts of bills be presented by conservative governments over and over and over again. I have never seen a conservative government put forward an industrial relations bill which benefits workers in this country—never. And I would challenge those opposite to stand up and prove me wrong, because that has been my life's work. I worked for United Workers Union for more than 20 years. I'm very proud to be in the Senate. But to suggest somehow that, in 2013, when I left United Voice, as it was called then, I forgot about those workers, that I left those workers behind—that I forgot about the 20 years that I worked alongside, acted on behalf of and advocated for these workers and stood in picket lines in the rain and the heat with them—you are sadly mistaken. They are in my veins and they're in my heart, and I will defend the rights of workers until I take my last breath, because that is ultimately who I am.

During the Court Liberal government days in Western Australia, I saw the first wave, the second wave, the third wave of industrial relations reform. I saw a Liberal government reduce the wages of low-paid women—low-paid cleaners, low-paid early childhood educators, low-paid aged-care workers. I watched as their award rates tumbled down. And what happened to that Court government? Workers will only take so much. They rose up and voted that government out of office. As bad as the Barnett government was when it came into power in Western Australia, it didn't go near workers, because it had learnt its lesson—that, when you start to reduce the take-home pay of low-paid workers, you will wear the consequences of that at the ballot box. Of course, while I was standing alongside workers at the rallies and in workplaces and everywhere else, we were also fighting under Mr Howard's regimes, under his individual workplace agreements. And, gee, I wish someone would get those old ads out and play them. Remember those ads? Workers were going to be better off. Workers were going to be able to directly negotiate with their boss. Who could forget the individual contracts? What did we see?

Once again the casualties of those individual contracts, the workers with the least power in this country, were the low-paid workers; women workers; insecure workers. We saw them, once again, suffer the indignity of losing more money. This time it was their penalty rates. Suddenly, their penalty rates were gone because they had to sign an individual contract.

I remember Mr Howard and Mr Reith saying over and over again, 'No-one will be forced to sign these contracts.' What a load of rubbish! We all know how it works in the workplace when the boss has got all the power. You get called in and you get told, 'Sue, if you want a shift next week, here's your new agreement.' It's a one-on-one conversation. And of course there was no recourse to the Industrial Relations Commission for any worker who signed an individual contract, no recourse at all. And they were secret agreements, so if you were a 16-year-old worker, guess what? You couldn't even take that home and show it to mum and dad. That was outrageous legislation. And, whilst Mr Howard might have tinkered at the edges, it eventually cost him his seat and it eventually cost the Howard coalition government in Australia. As we saw in Victoria at the time, when similar legislation was put into place there to what we saw in Western Australia, those Liberals were voted out of office. In Western Australia, those Liberals were voted out of office. Federally, Mr Howard, the first sitting Prime Minister since Stanley Bruce to lose his seat, was voted out of office. Make no mistake: you will be voted out of office for this legislation because, despite what you say, this legislation will cut workers' wages at a time in this country when we have industrial relations legislation—yes, it absolutely needs to be reformed. You stood over there, and Mr Porter stood in the other place and said, 'We accept workers need more protection.' Well, this legislation doesn't deliver it.

In fact, the working lives of low-paid workers are much worse since I left the union in 2013. We've got the gig economy. We've got the Uber drivers. We've got all of those workers who deliver meals or who you can get to fix your tap by using an app and negotiating how much you pay them. It's disgraceful. These are human beings trying to earn a living. They should be entitled to some basic protections. They should be entitled to an hourly rate that gives them the ability to live a good and decent life. They should know, from week to week, how many hours of work they have. They should not receive a text from their boss telling them, 'Come in tomorrow,' or 'Don't come in tomorrow.' And that doesn't just happen in the gig economy. That happens to workers in the disability sector looking after some of the most vulnerable people in our community. That's how they get their work, via their mobile phone. 'Oh, there's a two-hour shift available for you tomorrow.' That is not a dignified existence. It's not a dignified existence for the person who's subjected to that kind of summonsing to work, and, in my view, it's certainly not the dignified way for the person with a disability to receive the care that they are absolutely entitled to, but that's what we're seeing in this country.

Right across Australia—even in the public service—we have casualised, contracted, insecure work. It used to just be the domain of members of the United Workers Union and the SDA—shop assistants and so on—who were seen as low paid, not very well trained and poorly educated, so therefore you could treat them with disrespect. Well, they are some of the most honourable people I've ever had the privilege to meet in my life, and many of them are friends of mine. Jude Clarke was here yesterday. She's an aged-care worker that I signed up to the union a long time ago—too long ago to remember! Jude and I have been through a lot together. The first industrial action that Jude took was when she was working in a nursing home in Geraldton. If you met or saw Jude yesterday, she was the aged-care worker with the pink hair; that's Jude. Why did she go on strike? Not for pay. Not for conditions. Not because some bully union official like me told her to. She went on strike because the residents in that nursing home—I still remember it as if it was yesterday, but it was a long time ago—had disgraceful beds.