Question to the Treasurer - IR Reform - 29 November 2023

29/11/23

This is a question for the treasurer. In the employment white paper, the government says productivity growth must be the key driver of living standards over the long-term. We have an extremely complex industrial relations system made more complex by today's passage of the Closing the Loopholes Bill. How could adding this complexity possibly improve our productivity?

Give a call to the treasurer.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and I'm very grateful to the Member for Curtin for her question and also for her interest and her engagement in the employment white paper that the government released not that long ago. I do believe that the lift in living standards that we desperately need as a country in the coming years will come from a more productive, more competitive, more dynamic economy. And I believe that the overwhelming majority of employers and employees and communities want to find a way to strike better agreements, to get stronger wages growth and stronger productivity growth and less conflict so that we can prosper together. I don't believe that the path to productivity in this country is to make people work longer and harder for less, and here is where I depart, Mr Speaker, from those opposite in their approach to industrial relations. And if you think about the Closing the Loopholes Bill that was before the house and which I'm proud to say passed through this place earlier today and I pay tribute to the Minister and to the Cabinet and the government for the effort that went into that, is that we will not get more productivity in our economy by letting wage theft go scot-free. We won't get more productivity in our economy if we make it easy for people to undermine agreements in our economy. Agreements that are struck in good faith. We can't see those undermined. Undermining those agreements or letting wage theft go unpunished won't boost productivity in our economy. We won't get productivity growth by treating workers as some kind of easily discarded input. Into the prosperity that we want to create together as a nation. We know from the last decade, Mr Speaker, of deliberate wage suppression and deliberate wage stagnation that that is not the path to better productivity outcomes. We know that because a decade of wage stagnation and suppression came hand-in-hand with the worst decade for productivity growth in the 60 years that these records have been kept. So we won't get productivity growth through harsh industrial relations but I will tell the house and the member how we will get productivity growth in our economy after a wasted decade. We will get productivity growth in our economy by making it more competitive. That is why we have the process around competition. We will get productivity in our economy if we invest in our human capital, in our skills base we make it easier to adapt technology, make it more effective to deliver care in our economy. We will get a more productive economy if we get the energy transformation right. These are the ways that a forward-looking modern economy delivers productivity growth which has been absent for too long because our vision has been unnecessarily narrowed by those opposite to industrial relations.

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Amendments to the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill 2023 - 29 November 2023