John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for La Trobe. As he and many will know, last Thursday was a great day for the workers of Australia. Last Thursday saw the unemployment rate in this country fall below five per cent for the first time since 1976. We recorded a magnificently low unemployment rate of 4.9 per cent—and this despite the fact that the workforce participation rate had increased. This was a fall in unemployment in the face of a greater number of people looking for work and being more confident about getting work than virtually at any time over the last 40 or 50 years. This is a reminder that good economic policy reforms over a period of time ultimately produce great economic dividends. The low unemployment of today is a product of yesterday’s reforms. The still lower unemployment of tomorrow will be a product of today’s reforms. There is not much doubt that in Australian politics at the present time only one party stands for reform, and that is the coalition parties. Only the Liberal and National parties have the courage to make the reforms that are necessary to guarantee that, as the years go by, unemployment not only will remain where it is now but hopefully will go even lower.

When I heard the ABS figures, my mind went back almost 10 years to a speech made by the then opposition spokesman on industrial relations, the then member for Canberra, now the member for Fraser. When the message conveying to the House that the industrial relations legislation of 1996, in its amended form, had come back from the Senate, the then member for Canberra, speaking on behalf of the opposition, criticised the legislation. He called it ‘flawed and unfair’ and said that it left many bad features intact. He said it left a bill that undermined the three pillars of the Australian industrial relations system. But, interestingly, he asked a series of questions. No doubt he intended those questions, 10 years ago, to be rhetorical, but nonetheless he asked them. The first question he asked, in November 1996, was:

Will there be fewer industrial disputes over this three-year term under this regime than there were in the last three years under the old regime?

The second question he asked was:

Perhaps more importantly, will there be more jobs created in this parliamentary term under this regime than there were in the last term of the parliament? Particularly, will there be more jobs created in small business?

Everybody remembers the doomsday talk by the then Leader of the Opposition—he is still the Leader of the Opposition—and the then industrial relations spokesman. They said that the world was going to come to an end and the sky would fall in. We all know that the only thing that has fallen in the last 10 years is the level of unemployment; it has more than halved under this government. I can also inform the member that not only has the unemployment rate more than halved under this government but the ABS figures released last week for the March quarter show that 81 per cent fewer working days were lost in the March quarter of 2006 than in the March quarter of 1996.

So that is the answer to the question posed by the then member for Canberra almost 10 years ago, when he was trying to whip the House into a frenzy. He was saying that if we passed the legislation Armageddon would come, the world would suffer great pestilence and desolation, there would be riots in the streets and murders in the homes and you would have to maintain the barricades—and so he went on. Isn’t that all very familiar?

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