MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Ms BRISKEY (Maribyrnong) (15:34): Before entering this place, I worked closely with those in sectors and services that had been outsourced, where contracting companies were competing in a race to the bottom on wages and conditions. I fought alongside these workers—school cleaners and security guards—to help raise the standards and bring about the reversal of this outsourcing, to bring about the insourcing of these essential services.
Let's be clear about what privatisation can look like and those who are directly affected by it. There were school cleaning contracts in New South Wales under the former Liberal government there, where work plans gave one cleaner 10 minutes to clean 36 toilets. That's 17 seconds a toilet.
The part I would ask this House to sit with is not that a company agreed to do it—of course they did—but that it was a Liberal government who allowed it to happen. This is an example of outsourcing where not just the work went out the door but the duty of care went with it. One of the cleaners working under these contracts was a single mum who was doing 14 classrooms and six toilets on her own.
She was putting in an unpaid hour every time because it was the only way to finish the job. When you write a price that low, you've already decided who is going to absorb it. But whilst the member seeks to—I would argue—overpoliticise this issue, I'm proud to be a member of a government who has never been shy about public ownership.
We legislated to keep the NBN in public hands when those opposite voted against it. We are building public early learning centres in the places the market has never bothered to go. This is not the only way a government takes responsibility for these workers or services.
The trouble with a motion that treats it as the only way is that it fails to recognise the role of good, responsible governments who act where we must and who partner when it is good to do so. I'm proud to be a member of a government that recognises when to invest more in the public service, when to invest in the public good and when to partner with the private sector for community benefit.
We should be clear that our government wants businesses to succeed and to succeed by competing fairly, innovating and delivering something worth buying, not by abusing market power and not by exploiting Australians. A company that wins a public contract by costing a toilet at 17 seconds to clean has not innovated anything; it has found someone they can underpay and has been rewarded for it.
There are areas where government has to lead, and there are areas where partnership with business can deliver real results. But partnership is not who you hire; it is what you require of them and what you are still answerable for after you have signed. Good governments do not withdraw from their responsibilities, and Labor has never withdrawn from ours, whether it be here in Canberra or across the country.
And look at what is being delivered. In my community, aged-care workers have had the value of their work recognised, and this government has paid for it. Wage theft is now a crime because we made it so.
Where Labor governments across the country have taken work back inhouse, cleaners have gone on long service leave that they never had in their working lives been entitled to. Those are wage cases, public building, a law that did not exist until we made it so and work taken back inhouse across the country. People doing this work can't afford to wait for purity politics.
Governments, businesses and workers each have a part to play. That is our position, and I would only add that the third one is the part that keeps getting left out of the sentence. In every contract I have described today, the worker was the part that was costed down.
Our job is to set the rules, to protect the people relying on the service and to invest where the market will not. This government has done all three, and we've not let businesses off the hook—not at the check-out and not at the school gate.