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

I thank the House. What does the government have against the nans of Australia? What does it have against the grandmas, the granddads, the mums, the dads and the kids? What has the Prime Minister got against them that he wants their wages slashed and their conditions overturned? What has he got against them that he wants to produce fear and uncertainty in the workforce instead of decency and fairness? What has this government got against the Australian people? These Australian workplace agreements are purely and simply about slashing wages and conditions and have nothing at all to do with boosting productivity. They are all about pitting kids, in the first instance, against multinationals and businessmen with years of experience and regarding those kids as potential serious bargaining partners. The government’s plan for the future is to cut wages, cut conditions and take penalty rates away.

We in the Labor Party stand for a modern, flexible industrial relations system with collective agreements to boast pay and productivity. There is no doubt that Australia’s relatively good productivity performance in the nineties was, by and large, related to the flexible enterprise agreement system put in place by the Labor Party. That is why we had substantial growth in productivity, whereas New Zealand, which previously had productivity rates roughly the same as Australia’s but instead moved away from collective agreements to individual contracts, found its productivity effectively halved. The gap between Australian and New Zealand productivity rates, which had been nonexistent, became quite dramatic. That is why an enterprise agreement—it is not centralised wage fixing we are dealing with here—when put in place for employees and employers to sit down and work out how they can do things better in order to justify a pay rise produces productivity whereas an AWA produces just any old thing. It certainly can increase profitability for the employer, but it has nothing to do with productivity.

The experience of AWAs is that they have nothing to do with productivity. They are all about slashing wages. They are a lazy route to profit. They give employers the wrong incentives. Cutting workers’ wages does not increase productivity. Cutting pay and slashing conditions does not prepare the Australian workforce for the future. The government is dumping Australian workers on a low-wage, low-skill treadmill and condemning our kids—our youngest and most vulnerable workers—to compete with India and China in a race we can never win. It is a race to the bottom. This is about exploiting our youngest and most vulnerable workers and expecting them to take on multinationals and giant corporations in a no-win contest for wages and conditions.

The worst time we are going to have between now and the next election on the issue of AWAs will be January and February next year. That is when the kids will complete their training courses of this year. Many of them have been in traineeships, or what used to be described as traineeships, and some of them in apprenticeships. They are going to experience next year for the first time, as they go for their first jobs, AWAs without a no-disadvantage test applying. We will see horror cases day in, day out all next year arising from the sorts of AWAs that will be thrust upon these kids.

As I go around the business community and the broader Australian community, I am surprised at the commonality of views. Over the last 12 months I have talked to hundreds of businessmen and thousands of people in this country. Amongst the hundreds of businessmen to whom I have talked I have not found one who has said that they support unreservedly the policy this government has put in place in its industrial relations legislation. Every one of them says that John Howard has gone too far. None of them—not one of them—argued for what the Prime Minister calls the ‘flexibility’ that has been placed in the system. They understand completely the absurdity of the proposition that a businessman would sit down and seriously discuss each year with 1,000 workers the internal content of the AWA, as they would just about anything else. Employers would, of course, talk about a collective agreement. That is, a simplified, simple process. They don’t mind doing that. But the notion that they would sit down with every one of their employees is absurd. I remember one fellow telling me that he had signed off his AWA, which had a provision in it for maternity leave. When he raised a question about that the employer said: ‘I don’t care about it; just sign the blasted thing. This is the template that we have.’

There is a material difference, however, between the AWAs now and those that were first introduced by this government. We have not liked them at any point of time. Despite what the Prime Minister says, he has to concede that they are not a heavily utilised instrument. AWAs have been in place for seven years and they have achieved the magnificent distinction of being only 2.4 per cent of the total number of agreements put in place covering working conditions in this country. That is not much progress, considering that the federal government has been effectively levering in AWAs by forcing its own employees to take them. It has also been forcing state governments to take AWAs when those state governments enter into agreements with it. Anyone who contracts to the federal government for road building or whatever else is also forced to take an AWA—

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