Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

The resurgent member for Hotham says, ‘I hope so’. I congratulate him on being back after the gutless campaign against him which would have tossed him out. It would have been the first time that a former leader of the Labor Party was tossed out.

We have seen an increase in the number of people that are employed in Australia. Over 10 million Australians are employed. Not only have we got more people employed; people’s wages have gone up. Real wages have gone up by over 16 per cent over the last decade. Yet we were told a decade ago, when we wanted to bring some further reform to industrial relations, that this was going to drive down wages, drive down employment and drive down the living conditions of Australians. The opposite has happened. More people are in work and those people in work are being paid more in real terms—as a result, partly, of those industrial relations reforms that we put in place.

To come back to Mr Blair: in 1996-97 when we were introducing these reforms there was a change of government in the UK. And what did Mr Blair say when he turned up to the Trade Union Congress as the newly elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? In relation to the pressure from the trade unions in the United Kingdom to roll back—or, to use the words of the Leader of the Opposition here, to ‘rip up’—the laws which Margaret Thatcher had passed in the United Kingdom, what did the Rt Hon. Tony Blair say when he turned up to the Trade Union Congress in September 1997? He said:

We are not going back to the days of industrial warfare—strikes without ballots; mass and flying pickets and secondary action. We will keep the flexibility of the present labour market. And it may make some shiver but, in the end, it is warmer in the real world.

He went on to say to the Trade Union Congress on 9 September 1997 at Brighton:

The old ways of the Labor Party were the revolutionists, the committee rooms, the fixing and the small groups trying to run the show. That has no future.

His words could equally be applied to the Australian Labor Party today, who are in their backrooms, fixing up deals and buying and selling seats as to who is going to represent which union in this federal parliament, as if it is some matter of trade—and, of course, the member for Hotham knows all about that.

Mr Blair had the guts to stand up to the trade union movement and say, ‘The future of this country will be better off if we actually embrace these reforms and move forward.’ In stark contrast—and this is what newspaper editorials and commentators are reflecting upon today—the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Beazley, does not stand up in that way and does not have a progressive policy to move forward.

The contrast between New Labour in Great Britain—which has an unemployment rate lower than that in Australia, yet has a more deregulated labour market than we have today even after these reforms—could not be more stark. It is a contrast between a new, progressive, modern leader in Mr Blair—who was prepared to take the country forward and prepared to say, ‘I’m not going to just act out of the 100-year ideology of the union bosses who want to run the show; I am prepared to do what is in the best interests of the working men and women of Britain’—and the Leader of the Opposition in Australia, who is a captive of the Labor Party, which in turn is a captive of the unions in this country.

Why is the Labor Party in this country not prepared to embrace change? The reality is that it is because the majority of members who sit in this parliament—members of the Labor Party—are put there by the various union bosses around this country. They are not only put there; the unions paid some $50 million over the last 10 years to fund the campaign of the Labor Party here. This is not about the Labor Party supporting the men and women who work in this country; it is about supporting the union bosses who control the affairs of the Labor Party.

This MPI is about conditions for working families and families in Australia. The motion refers to ‘the working and living conditions of Australian workers and their families well into the future’. Let me take a couple of examples of working conditions for Australian families in relation to the flexibility in the system prior to yesterday and under the new Work Choices system. After this system was announced, there was an article in the Australian newspaper on Monday, 10 October 2005. It referred to a Sandra Xuereb, who is a single parent who works 25 hours a week for a food company, ‘stocking supermarket shelves with coffee, sauce, gravy, salt, herbs and spices’. The newspaper article says:

She normally works three days a week in western Sydney, but condenses this to two longer days in school holidays to spend time with her children, aged five, seven and nine. She has had the job since March last year and has rarely taken sick or personal leave because the AWA allows her to make up the hours lost when the needs of her children force her to leave work early.

So long as she completes her weekly workload, she says that she can ‘leave in the middle of the day’ and ‘do what I have to do’. She says, ‘It’s really good having that option, being a single mother.’ If this is about families in Australia, here is a family in Australia, in Western Sydney, a single mum with three kids, balancing her work and her family responsibilities. She is saying, as a real person in Western Sydney, ‘This option that I’ve got under a workplace agreement which gives me flexibility to be able to balance those work and family responsibilities is something which is highly desirable.’ It is that sort of flexibility for employees as well as employers that these changes are all about.

Let me take another example. Recently I presented the 2005 Work and Family Awards for family friendly workplaces. The winner of the award in the small business employer of the year category was Austral Tree and Stump Service of Adelaide. It also has Australian workplace agreements which contain a number of family friendly provisions. These include flexible start and finish times, flexible working days, paid time off during school holidays for employees with children, employee nominated hours of work, and the ability for employees to bank additional hours worked for paid or unpaid leave. These flexibilities are things that would not be available in the relevant award that covered that work. In the relevant award there is a rigid one size fits all system which has to apply to every workplace and every employee regardless of the particular needs of either the employee or the employer.

One of the employees at Austral who received this award for 2005 was a Mr Chris Grigg. Through his workplace agreement, Mr Grigg was able to enter into fortnightly working arrangements where he worked five days one week and two days the next. As a result of this flexibility, after he had separated from his wife, he was able to have custody of his children every second week. If it had not been for flexibility in the workplace agreement he would not have been able to retain custody for a week at a time. He would have had the opportunity to see his children only every second weekend.

An important thing about this is the outcome of having this flexibility in the workplace for this particular gentleman. He told the audience at these awards—he was quite emotional about this and quite proud of it—that, as a result of this workplace arrangement, he was able to reconcile with his wife. He reported that they were back together. I had the opportunity of talking to both of them. This was a couple who had had problems in their relationship. There were pressures around previous working relationships because of inflexibility in those relationships. Chris Grigg was able to structure an employment arrangement with his employer where he was able to have more time with and care more for his children, and that led to reconciliation in his relationship.

Will we hear stories like that from the ACTU over the coming weeks? I will die waiting to hear a story that is positive from the ACTU. This is what Chris Grigg said in his acceptance speech:

My story is testimony to the benefits of having a workplace agreement. The freedom to negotiate flexible hours has given me the opportunity to build a closer relationship with my kids.

This MPI is about the working and living conditions of Australian workers and their families. I have given just two of many examples right around this country where flexibility at the workplace has been to the distinct advantage of the employees and their families. There is a single mum in Western Sydney who is able to structure her hours so that she can look after her kids. She can be there when they go to school and pick them up after school. She can work more on one day if she needs to and less on another day. And there is this man who was able to structure his working hours so that he could have custody of his children one week out of two rather than be forced to simply have custody of his children on every second weekend. This is the sort of flexibility that employees in Australia want today. This is the sort of flexibility that this government is about trying to achieve.

And there is another benefit, and I finish on this note. Recently the Productivity Commission looked at what further economic reform in Australia would mean for Australians. They said that, if we continue this further reform, of which Work Choices is a part, then the gross average household income of Australians could be 20 per cent, or some $22,000 a year, higher than it is now. Australians would like to see an improvement of some $22,000 in their gross household income. These sorts of reforms will take us in the direction of achieving those sorts of outcomes for Australians. The reality is this: are we going to be modern, open and progressive, and are we going to move forward to sustain the economic growth of this country, or are we going to be backward, narrow and blinkered, as the Leader of the Opposition is? We have made our choice. It is a choice for the benefit of all Australians.

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