Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

This week we start to see how John Howard has betrayed the Australians who voted him into office. The termites are now at work, slowly eating away at the foundations of living standards for working Australians; slowly undermining foundations such as decent minimum wages, penalty rates, shift loadings, overtime, redundancy pay and rights against unfair dismissal; and slowly affecting agreements, workplaces and employees one by one over the next months and years, Americanising our industrial relations and, in the process, quietly destroying the Australian way of life. This is John Howard’s war on workers. It means lower wages, less job security and no penalty rates. It is all pain for families and no economic gain for the nation, all pain for those Victorian cabinet-makers and no economic gain, all pain for average workers and no economic gain.

Bad bosses have the green light to sack workers whenever they like for just about any reason that they like. Want to sack someone today because they are about to qualify for long service leave? Kevin Andrews says, ‘Absolutely, sack them.’ Want to sack someone because they stood up for a young worker who was getting rough treatment at the hands of a supervisor? Kevin Andrews says, ‘Absolutely, sack them.’ Want to sack someone because they are hardworking and a manager thinks they might threaten his job? Kevin Andrews says, ‘Absolutely, sack them.’ Want to wipe out any obligation to give them redundancy pay? Kevin Andrews says, ‘Absolutely—just put that in your agreement and make it a condition when they get the job.’

This is John Howard’s ideology unleashed on Australian workers, where the powerful get more power while ordinary working families have their rights rubbed out altogether. We saw the Prime Minister in question time today speak on that limited area of dismissal that remains unlawful, and the obvious logical point that any one of us would make when we took a look at that was: if there were a boss who was going to sack somebody from that limited area of discrimination and who wanted to do it and nevertheless make it lawful, why on earth would you expect him to say that he had a complaint about their gender or a complaint about their colour while he did it? It is a nonsense! Of course he would not say that. He would not say, ‘I’m going to terminate you because you’re an Aboriginal,’ ‘I’m going to terminate you because you’re an Italian,’ or, ‘I’m going to terminate you because you’re a woman.’ He would make some spurious claim against that person, and because that claim would fit within the definition of ‘lawful’ that person would be out on their ear.

Let us not forget that, when we put in place the unlawful dismissal legislation a decade or so ago, before that point of time many of the states had unlawful dismissal legislation in operation. Of course, it was largely subsumed by what the Commonwealth did, and it now has been totally subsumed by the Commonwealth’s determination to obliterate any capacity for Australian workers to deal with unfair dismissals in a reasonable way. We are learning now about the impacts on the rights of working people. Telstra is banning union officials from work sites even where there are union members who want to be represented. The workers at InstallEx in Williamstown were sacked and then offered their jobs back with a pay cut of $25,000 and no job security. We are hearing law firms report that dozens of employers are seeking advice on how to get away with sacking whoever they do not like.

In the past year we have had a lot of lawyer talk from the government and very little straight talk, but behind the scenes there has been a bit of straight talking in the government from one of the Prime Minister’s closest henchmen, Senator Nick Minchin. We only know about the straight talk because Senator Minchin did not think he was being recorded or reported, so he spoke honestly—something he would never do if he thought the Australian people were listening. And what did he say? He did not pretend the government had a mandate for these extremist laws, he did not pretend that the people believed these laws were good for working families and he did not pretend that the Howard henchmen had any real faith in Kevin Andrews. In fact, he said that Australians ‘violently disagree with what we are proposing’. He confessed, ‘Poll after poll demonstrates that the Australian people do not agree at all with anything we are doing on this. We have minority support for what we are doing.’

Finally, after a year of industrial relations lawyer talk, we hear a bit of straight talk. It is a pity that we only heard about it because he did not think anyone else was listening in, but what Senator Minchin said was right: Australians violently disagree with these extremist laws. They violently disagree with losing their penalty rates, shift loadings, overtime and redundancy pay. They violently disagree with the erosion of decent minimum wages. They violently disagree with a bad boss being given the power to sack a good worker for no good reason. They violently disagree with being forced to sign individual contracts against their will. They violently disagree with this attack on the Australian value of a fair go. They violently disagree with John Howard’s ideological obsession with making Australia more like America. Yes, Senator Minchin was honest: Australians do not agree with anything this out-of-control government is doing to take away their basic rights.

Senator Minchin had other things to say in the course of those remarks that he made, because those remarks also included an apology to the people of the HR Nicholls Society, who were portrayed as the noble battlers in the minority vineyard which he supported, the people who over the years had stood foursquare against the rights of ordinary Australians in the workplace. He said, ‘I’m sorry we haven’t been able to rip away every single right in this first tranche of our activities, but don’t worry—we will get the opportunity to do that subsequently.’ Senator Minchin set the clearest possible marker down as to why it is absolutely in the interests of the ordinary Australian to make certain this government is turned out at the next election: for fear that even worse is in line for them now.

What is the best argument they try to use in this whole debate, the only argument they are reduced to, the irreducible minimum? The argument is this: whatever pain you are experiencing, there is a gain here for the economy. The truth of the matter is this: this is all pain and there is no economic gain. They say that we should all take the medicine, be quiet and wait five years while they take away the basic rights and conditions of Aussie workers. I say to the Prime Minister: just because these IR laws have left a bitter taste in the mouths of Australian people doesn’t mean these laws are a good dose of medicine. These laws will not heal our economic problems; they are going to hurt us economically, because they are not a cure for problems, they are poison—poison to basic Australian values, poison to the tradition of giving everyone a fair go, poison to the egalitarian Australian values that say we should never give one person unrestrained power to push someone else around.

If the government really wanted to move Australia forward and make Australia competitive again, they would do something to tackle the collapse in productivity. They would invest in training Australian workers instead of making Australia the only industrialised nation in the world that has cut its public investment in education in the last decade. They would tackle our crumbling infrastructure and reverse the backward slide in innovation. They would do something about getting net exports moving again and about turning around a foreign debt that is now worth more than half the value of the nation’s output and that is roaring towards $500 billion. Instead of a real agenda for productivity and growth we get an ideological war on workers, a frontal assault on the values that Australians have held dear for generations, an attack on workers to camouflage the failure of the government to deal with the burgeoning foreign debt, to deal with collapsing productivity, to deal with the stalling of innovation in Australian business and to deal with the stalling of exports in manufactured goods and services. Their excuse: let us drive our competition with China, India and the countries in the region around us on the basis of a wage competition, not a skills competition.

This is a government with the arrogance of 10 years in power, a government that thinks it can get away with anything, a government that does not believe it can ever be voted out. John Howard thinks he is right and the Australian people have got it wrong; he is just not listening. Of course he tried to tell us we had to change our mind. He spent $55 million of Australian families’ tax money to ram a slick Liberal Party ad campaign down our throats and make us believe that somehow this is good for Australia. It did not work. Australians do not trust this government to look after working families, no matter whether they stuff their ads into every letterbox, onto every magazine page and across every TV channel. So the government’s best hope is just to get us to shut up, to stop talking about these industrial relations laws.

We saw it again when they released the next wave of their extremist changes—another 593 pages of complex regulations, making up a total of 2,557 pages of regulations and explanations. This simplification made the regulations twice their previous size. They are now a maze of barely decipherable legalese that gives Kevin Andrews, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, the power of a Soviet-era works minister to regulate in fine detail every aspect of Australian work arrangements. These regulations are meant to usher in the transformation of the Australian economy; they are meant to bring about John Howard’s 30-year-old dream for a right wing workplace revolution. But the government choose to release them at a time when they think they will get the least possible attention: on a Friday afternoon in the middle of the Commonwealth Games. That is belief in your product! That is a stern fight to make absolutely certain that everybody reads the regulations, that everybody looks forward to them in a welcoming sort of way! They have now realised that it does not matter what they say, the Australian people do not believe them and do not trust them to protect the rights of working families. The best they can do is get industrial relations out of the TV news bulletins and off the front pages.

The minister told us last night that we should all shut up and wait for five years before the laws live up to their promises. Ram through the regulations, get the dullest drone in the Liberal Party as your IR spokesman and hope like hell you can kill the issue off. Whenever you are asked about it, you just say, ‘Wait and see.’ First they told us to wait and see the details of the system. Then they said we had to wait and see for the legislation. Six months ago, last October, in an interview with John McKenzie on Radio Easy Mix in Cairns the Prime Minister said:

... I believe that in six months time, eight months time people will look back on this period and say what was all the fuss about?

Almost six months has passed since that interview, and they shift the goalposts again. They say, ‘No, wait for five years and then you will see what it is all about.’ Of course they claim that Labor runs a fear campaign. Let me make this clear, and I have said it all along: not everyone is going to lose out from these laws. Many highly paid employees have never relied on the industrial relations laws to set their pay rates. Things will not change for them. They will continue to do fine. For many people, while the resources boom continues, wages will keep growing. But, as soon as the commodity boom ends and our economy weakens, this law ensures that workers will be in the front line to take the brunt. Even while some employees will continue to do well, they will see things get tougher for their kids, their wives or their husbands, their nephews and their nieces, because the government never want to have a serious debate about industrial relations. In those smoky back rooms of the Howard government, Crosby Textor have been telling them the reality: Australians do not believe them. They do not trust them. They do not accept the Prime Minister’s extremist workplace agenda.

I want to give this commitment to every Australian: Labor will not forget you. We will not ignore what you think. We will listen to what Australians want and we will not let some extremist ideology drive what we do. We will fight for your standard of living and your rights every waking hour on every street corner, in every workplace and in this parliament until you get your rights back. I will rip up this law. We will rip up these laws and put in place a fair system for all Australians. We will put Australian values of fairness and decency back into our industrial laws so that every Australian has a fair go at work. We will get rid of the new Soviet style dictator who has been established in the industrial relations system, the obsessive complexity which has now doubled the size of the IR act in the same way as they doubled the size of the tax act. We will send to Siberia the motives and ideology that underpinned this legislation from the government. On this they will lose.

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