Once again, the ASX has taken a bath.
The S&P/ASX200 closed sharply lower Thursday, dropping 141.20 points or 2.02% to 6,845.60 and setting a new 20-day low. Over the last five days, the index has lost 2.87% and 9.05% over the last 52 weeks.
The bottom performing stocks in this index were Pointsbet Holdings Ltd down 15.86% and Sandfire Resources Ltd down 12.12%.
Of the sectors, only Consumer Staples was higher today, up 1.11%.
Materials took the biggest hit falling 4.86%. Information Technology dropped 1.67%, Consumer Discretionary fell 1.52% and Energy copped a whack of 2.2%.
What’s making news today
Job Summit resolutions ... can we reach them?
The Jobs and Skills Summit kicked off today, with Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers saying Australia’s economy was at a critical juncture.
Chalmers’ opening address had a fair amount of doom and gloom about it, with the Treasurer warning Australians could be $13,000 worse off a year over the next 40 years unless major issues were addressed.
The numbers suggest that should productivity growth average only 1.2% instead of rising to the 1.5% rate assumed in the Intergenerational report, real wages will dramatically decline.
“We must make productivity growth an urgent task, a national task, a task for all of us,” he said.
“Not just because higher profits depend on it, but because higher wages depend on it. An economy capable of sustaining full employment depends on it.”
The Prime Minister has implored industry groups to make compromises to steer the economic ship straight.
Multi-employer bargaining is one of the key points of contention, along with changes to the better off overall test (BOOT) and a lift to the migration cap.
“Compromises will need to be negotiated, sacrifices will need to be made. If we can get it right, if we can seek out points of consensus … the results will certainly be worth it,” Albanese said.
“Let all of us, as leaders and representatives, rise to this moment.
“Let’s work together. Let’s listen to be read to make every effort to turn agreement into action for the benefit of all Australians.”
Full employment has been a major topic of discussion.
Grattan Institute chief Danielle Wood said this should be a top priority, particularly women in the workforce.
“Women are often excluded from fulltime work and from the most prestigious high-paid roles because these so-called ‘greedy jobs’ are incompatible with the load of unpaid care still disproportionately shouldered by women,” Wood said.
“I can’t help but reflect that if untapped women’s workforce participation was a massive ore deposit, we would have governments lining up to give tax concessions to get it out of the ground.”
The gender pay gap was another point of discussion along with the costs of childcare, which cost the Victorian economy alone $1.5 billion a year.
Employment Minister Tony Burke tackled sustainable wage growth and the future of bargaining.
Burke said the real test of the jobs and skills summit would be to come to agreement on how to bring workplace laws “up to date with the needs of the modern economy”.
Bargaining will no doubt be a robust discussion throughout the two days of the summit.
It was about “ensuring workers and businesses have flexible options for reaching agreements, including removing unnecessary limitations on access to single and multi-employer agreements”.
Burke also flagged “removing unnecessary complexity for workers and employers, including making the Better Off Overall Test simple, flexible and fair”.
“Giving the Fair Work Commission the capacity to proactively help workers and businesses reach agreements that benefit them, particularly new entrants and small and medium businesses.
“Providing proper support for employer bargaining representatives and union delegates and ensuring the process for agreement termination is fit for purpose, fair, and sunsets are so-called zombie agreements.”
Ai Group chief executive Innes Willox said multi-employer enterprise bargaining would concern employers who feared a “new front for disruptive and costly industrial action, potentially across a sector or broad parts of the economy.
“There is no detail around either the ACTU’s proposals or the government’s thinking on how multi-employer bargaining would operate in practice,” he said in a statement.
“Unknowns include what size businesses would be opened up to the ACTU’s proposal, what sectors of the economy would be covered, how those sectors would be defined and how businesses would be protected if they declined to participate.”
Innox believes any movement in this area, particularly in the pursuit of claims, could shut down key parts of the economy.
“Such a possibility has deeply alarmed industry and must be ruled out,” he said.
“If we move down this path, it represents a fundamental shift in how bargaining operates and there needs to be complete transparency around how such a system would work in conjunction with single enterprise bargaining.
“Enterprise-based bargaining should remain the cornerstone of our workplace relations system to raise productivity, wages and the competitiveness of industry.”
The summit continues tomorrow.
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