Director of the Center for Future Work, Jim Stanford, who authored the ACTU’s jobs summit discussion paper, which is being published on Wednesday, said the RBA could easily drive the country into a recession as it used the “sledgehammer” of interest rates to drive down inflation.
“They are willing to cause a recession and throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work,” he said.
The ACTU believes the key focus of the Reserve Bank must change to full employment.Credit:Louie Douvis
Apart from changing the RBA’s role in the economy, the ACTU is pressing for a more active government role in the economy.
In what looms as a direct challenge to the new Labor government, unions believe there is a case for prices of key goods and services to be regulated to prevent “price gouging” and to reduce inflationary pressures. This would include the energy sector but could also extend to telecommunications or transport, which the ACTU says are “heavily concentrated” industries.
The ACTU believes all governments could do more to relieve pressure on the housing sector. It wants the RBA to end price speculation around property and policy changes such as an expansion of public housing, controls on rent and regulating housing credit to “more affordable” projects.
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It is pressing for the government to abandon the already legislated stage-three tax cuts, due to start in mid-2024, which will deliver large benefits to high-income earners.
An excess profits tax should be imposed on businesses enjoying windfall gains due to current high inflation while businesses that channel profits back to shareholders instead of re-investing the cash into infrastructure or productivity-enhancing technology should face financial penalties.
Unions will also use the summit to press the government to revitalize enterprise bargaining, arguing the industrial relations system is now “entirely broken”. It believes this re-regulation of the system would lift real wages in tandem with productivity.
ACTU secretary Sally McManus said working Australians had endured almost a decade of insecure work and stagnant wages. They were now facing high inflation that was contributing to real wage reductions.
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She said the nation’s top economic goal should be to give all people the chance of gaining secure and fairly paid employment.
“At the summit we have an opportunity to address the big problems that have remained unaddressed for a decade to kick-start wage growth, deliver secure jobs for Australian workers and see living standards rise again,” she said.
“Achieving this will require more than fiddling around the edges, it requires new ways of thinking about how our system is managed, who benefits from it and how to change it for the better.”
Unions are expected to have a strong presence at the summit, which has been dismissed by the Coalition as a “Labor talkfest”.
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But Liberal leader Dutton will be formally invited to attend by Treasurer Jim Chalmers who said the government was serious about bringing people together to find common ground on the nation’s economic challenges.
“There’s plenty of goodwill out there and a real appetite for co-operation. That spirit of co-operation can extend to the opposition if they are willing to accept it, and I hope they will,” he said.
“This is a working summit, not a soiree. We want participants to roll up their sleeves and bring fresh ideas to the table.”
Chalmers said the government wanted to also ensure independent MPs also had a presence at the summit, to be held on September 1 and 2.
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