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

On the weekend the Leader of the Opposition showed once and for all why he is unfit to ever be the Prime Minister of Australia. The reason is that what he showed on the weekend was that, in return for $50 million from the unions in Australia, he was prepared to cave in to their demands. He was prepared to cave in to their demands to keep his job. As the Sydney Morning Herald said in its editorial headline: ‘Beazley’s real agenda: his job. Cynical backflip on AWAs’. And almost every major newspaper in Australia over the last day or two has had a similar headline in relation to the announcement by the Leader of the Opposition. The Herald Sun in Melbourne: ‘Beazley steps backwards’. The West Australian: ‘Beazley plans return to an unwanted past. The Adelaide Advertiser: ‘Beazley fires wide of a sitting duck’. The Financial Review: ‘Beazley goes back to the ’50s’. The Australian: ‘BEAZLEY’S BACKFLIP’. The Daily Telegraph, from Sydney: ‘Sop to the unions’. And it goes on and on. The small business writer in the Australian: ‘Beazley backs wrong horse in the industrial stakes’. Again, a comment in the Australian: ‘Beazley bombs as economic manager’. On and on it goes—the Courier Mail: ‘Backflip a risky move in IR world’. Steve Lewis: ‘Beazley’s backflip on AWAs will undermine the ALP’s quest to be seen as economically responsible’.

Why is it that almost every major newspaper, almost every major news outlet in this country, has said over the last 48 hours that not only is this a backflip on the part of the Leader of the Opposition; it is one that is irresponsible in terms of taking Australia and Australians’ prosperity forward. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that what the Leader of the Opposition proposes is to rip up the wages and conditions of hundreds and thousands of Australians. That is what he proposes to do. The reality is, as the Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows—not my data, not some false data manufactured by the Leader of the Opposition—those who are employed under Australian workplace agreements are on average paid 13 per cent more than those who are under collective agreements. And if you compare individual Australian workplace agreements with awards in Australia then the differential is that 100 per cent are generally better off under individual agreements than those people who are employed under awards in Australia. The policy of the Australian Labor Party is essentially to take us back to having an award as the core of every workplace arrangement in this country. So the first point about what the Leader of the Opposition has been condemned for is that he wants to rip away the wages and conditions of hundreds and thousands of Australians who have made use of individual agreements.

The second point is that he wants to tear down the economic structure that has delivered economic prosperity in this country. The Leader of the Opposition wants to rip up—to use his expression—not just what was put in place in this parliament at the end of last year, and came into operation on 27 March this year, but Australian workplace agreements in their entirety. He wants to rip up those provisions put in place in this country almost a decade ago. What have those provisions done for the economic prosperity of this country? We saw last week in this country for the first time in 30 years an unemployment rate starting with the figure ‘4’. For the first time in 30 years in this country the unemployment rate fell below five per cent. We have the Leader of the Opposition complaining in this place and elsewhere about examples. I do not hear him saying one word about the fact that 55,000 jobs were created in the month of May in Australia.

I do not know who the Leader of the Opposition is talking to, but as I have gone around this country I have had small and medium business operator after business operator come up to me and say, ‘Because of the changes that you’ve made to the industrial relations laws in this country, I’m going to or I have employed somebody else.’ On television just a few weeks ago, there was an employer from Darwin who said that she had employed an additional seven people as a result of getting rid of the unfair dismissal laws in this country. Those sorts of anecdotal experiences, which are related to me day after day and week after week by employers around this country, are revealed in part I believe in those 55,000 additional jobs created in this country in the month of May alone. A 4.9 per cent unemployment rate, something we have not seen in a generation or two in this country, is a result of the economic prosperity that reforms undertaken in 1996 and again last year have led to. That is what the Leader of the Opposition wants to rip away.

No wonder once again editorial writers at every major newspaper in Australia have condemned the announcement made at the weekend by the Leader of the Opposition. Why have they condemned it? They have done so because they know that this has helped to not only drive down unemployment in this country but drive up real wages. Let us make a comparison. What do Australians think real wages went up by under 13 years of a Labor government? During the time that Labor was in government and the Leader of the Opposition was the minister for employment, real wages went up by just 1.2 per cent. In the 10 years that this government has been in office, real wages for Australians have gone up by 16.8 per cent. They went up by 1.2 per cent when the Leader of the Opposition was responsible for employment in this country and have gone up by 16.8 per cent since we have been in government. That is the comparison that Australians understand—a 4.9 per cent unemployment rate, a 16.8 per cent increase in real wages. That is what the Leader of the Opposition wants to tear down. He wants to tear down the edifice that has brought about these changes and these benefits for real Australians.

There is something more significant in the criticism of the Leader of the Opposition for the announcement he made at the weekend. He announced, ‘I am going to abolish, if I win government, individual workplace agreements in Australia.’ The real significance of that announcement was that it showed the weak and vacillating character of the Leader of the Opposition. That is what Australians know about Mr Beazley, the Leader of the Opposition. They know he is a weak man, and this just showed it in spades again at the weekend. It reinforced in the minds of Australians what a weak Leader of the Opposition we have in this country. He did not even consult his backbench. He did not consult his caucus. He apparently did not even consult the shadow ministry. The member for Perth conceded this morning in the media that he did not consult him about it, that he just told him that it was a fait accompli.

The Leader of the Opposition could have made a choice at the weekend. The choice can be summed up in two personalities. One of them is a successful Labour Prime Minister, namely Tony Blair, the Labour Prime Minister of Great Britain. Mr Blair had a similar choice to make when he became Prime Minister of Britain. When he became Prime Minister, it was widely expected—indeed, it was being pressed upon him by the trade unions in the United Kingdom—that he would undo, that he would wind back, that he would rip up the reforms which Margaret Thatcher and the previous Conservative government put in place in the labour market and industrial relations in the UK. When Mr Blair, shortly after becoming the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, went to the Trades Union Congress he told his comrades that he was not going to cave in to them. The Leader of the Opposition in Australia could have made that decision when he went to the New South Wales conference of the Labor Party and the unions at the weekend. Back then, Mr Blair said:

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 ...

If we had a Leader of the Opposition who had some strength of character, who was prepared to stand up to those who were seeking to destabilise his leadership of the Labor Party, as John Robertson and his mates in Unions NSW were doing—and the member opposite, the member for Perth, knows better perhaps than many others in this place that that is what was going on—and who had some real guts and decency and the courage to stand up for his convictions, he would have said what Mr Blair said to the trade unions in the UK when he became the leader. We do not have a Tony Blair insofar as the Leader of the Opposition in Australia is concerned.

This is a man who did not have the courage to stand up for his convictions, who did not have the courage to say, ‘We’re going to do something to continue to drive down the unemployment rate in Australia.’ This is a man who has no concept of and no concern about unemployment in Australia, who presided over almost 11 per cent unemployment and who said when he was the minister for employment and a question about the long-term unemployed was put to him that they might as well stay on the scrap heap. This is a man who does not have any concern for jobs in Australia. As the editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald said, the Leader of the Opposition is not concerned about jobs for Australians. He is concerned about one job and one job only—that is, his job. Instead of doing a Tony Blair at the weekend, the Leader of the Opposition gave a Mark Latham performance. Mr Latham has been widely criticised.

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