Lilley Budget Submission

Lilley Budget Submission

Ms WELLS (Lilley) (11:27): The Morrison government stands today in the midst of a political storm led by outdated ideology and a broken moral compass. They are frantically trying to avoid jagged rocks of scrutiny whilst looking for a passage back to calmer waters. Now that they're desperately paddling against the tides themselves what the Morrison government are failing to do in their basic duty as the government for Australian people is to realise that for too many Australians the water was never calm and there isn't any way back and it has been like that for years.

Insecure work and low wages have created the perfect storm for workers. The nature of Australia's workforce has been shifting for a decade. Wages are flatlining whilst the cost of living continues to climb. Job insecurity is rampant, directly impacting many workers ability to provide for families and to plan for their future. Combined with the chaos of COVID-19, these trends have manifested into a volatile environment for too many Northsiders in my electorate of Lilley who are now struggling to find their feet at all. Ill-designed policies have only exacerbated this reality. Schemes like the government's out of control childcare policy hurt Northsiders who want to work.

The Morrison government's contrived optimism about the economic and budgetary forecasts betrays the granular reality of an economy that doesn't work for too many in my northside community. What LNP governments never seem to be able to wrap their heads around is that budgets are about much more than numbers. They are about priorities. They are about your vision for Australia. They should be about people, the people that we are elected here to represent. The economy is supposed to work for the people, not the other way around. A slight improvement in budget and economic forecasts is pointless if people are still struggling to get by.

Labor has been arguing for some time now that we cannot allow the economy to snap back to business as usual, meaning how it was before. Instead the reconstruction of our economy should be used to fix what structural flaws that COVID has exposed. When talking to aged-care workers about the impacts of COVID in the suburb of Chermside, in my electorate, we talked about how COVID has actually been like an X-ray, in that has it has thrown up what was already there structurally and has exacerbated those problems.

When COVID hit, northside workers in insecure work-people who were casuals, contract workers, gig economy workers, labour hire workers-suddenly saw their hours slashed or taken away altogether overnight. Despite what the Attorney-General said at the time about casual workers earning more money to get them through hard times, the pandemic exposed the darker side of casual work. On those first few days when the COVID impacts were starting to hit our communities, I walked the lines of constituents of Lilley standing outside the Centrelink centres at Nundah and Chermside. I talked to them about why they were there and what they were hoping their government would do in this time of crisis. Those queues of jobseekers snaking down Sandgate Road in Nundah Village stretched for hundreds of metres. It laid bare the consequences of a casualised workforce. I spoke to one lady who was five months pregnant. She was a childcare worker, and because she was the last in she was the first out of the system because of the changes to childcare payments put in by the government. She was genuinely at a loss for what to do. I thought: 'You are doing such important work for us in our community. You are an early educator. You are five months pregnant, and, as a community, we have abandoned you right at your hour of most need.'

Over one-third of the workforce is insecure or non-standard forms of work, and the majority instantly fell through a trapdoor into financial abyss, without sick pay, holiday pay, family leave or annual leave. Initially they were left with no options and no support from the Morrison government, and many of them were forced to access their superannuation to tide them over. In fact, 14 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women used their super to pay down debt, and 13 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women used their super to buy food. Think of that-having to access your superannuation, your savings for your retirement, in order to put food on your family table that evening.

Low wages are only adding fuel to the fire. For too long Australian workers have seen their wages flatline while the cost of living continues to skyrocket. This isn't by accident. Last year the then Minister for Finance declared that wages were low by design as part of the Morrison government's deliberate economic strategy. Unsurprisingly, those same tactics have not been applied to corporate interests. While wages have hit the wall, company profits crashed through it pre-COVID. By August 2019 over 60 per cent of listed Australian companies had seen their profit margins grow in the previous 12 months. Corporate profits were growing at five times the rate of wages, and instead of profits going to the workers-the people who put in the work to make those companies grow-they were being privatised in returns to shareholders. Instead of getting their fair share, the workers were told to be grateful because the only way they were going to be able to keep their jobs at all was to settle for whatever was going.

Decent pay is in everybody's interest. Workers with money in their pockets to spend are the engine rooms of economic growth and our local community economies. Sixty per cent of our economy is domestic spending. That money is spent in small business, in our local shopping strips and in shopping centres, and that creates the demand our economy needs to generate more jobs. But, instead of addressing low wages or taking action to combat the rising cost of living, the Morrison government is telling Northsiders, 'It is what it is.' They're being told that spending on average 10,560 childcare subsidy cap, which often sees women losing more money from an extra day's work. We will lift the maximum childcare subsidy rate to 90 per cent, and we will increase childcare subsidy rates and taper them for every family that is together earning less than 2.7 million a week in support of the Lilley economy. The extended period of economic turbulence experienced by businesses and workers in Lilley is in no small part due to a result of the unique characteristics of our electorate. We are home to the Brisbane domestic and international airports as well as the 6,600 aviation workers who work there. The tourism economy is critical to the economic recovery of the north side of Brisbane, with approximately 23.8 million passengers travelling through those airports each year. One in 70 Queensland jobs are enabled by Brisbane Airport. Over 425 local businesses are located in the Brisbane Airport precinct, employing nearly 24,000 people. With international passenger numbers down by 98 per cent, terminal retailers have been forced to close, and thousands of workers who support international and domestic movements have been stood down or made redundant. The mass job loss experienced at the Brisbane Airport has had severe flow-on effects for jobseekers outside of the sector as aviation workers have flooded the job market.

I know Northsiders have aspirations and they want a government that invests in them but this government has phoned in any real plan by turning a blind eye to the plight of our workers and electing to parade failed policy. As elected representatives, this is our moment. We have been asked to meet a challenge we could not have foreseen and with no road map. I want a pathway forward for the north side.