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

Members opposite are laughing now. They were not laughing when the former Leader of the Opposition did not consult them. The two members at the table, the member for Perth and the member for Lilley, know that better than anybody else in this place. We had in Mr Latham a man who did not consult, who just went off and made decisions by himself. He made a decision, for example, about having the troops home by Christmas. We have had a similar response from the Leader of the Opposition: ‘We’ll get rid of AWAs by the following Christmas.’ Instead of a Tony Blair performance, we had a Mark Latham type performance from the Leader of the Opposition at the weekend.

And what is this going to do as far as workplaces in Australia are concerned? This gives a green light to certain sorts of activities. It says to the mining, resources and other industries in Australia: ‘We don’t care about what circumstances have actually helped you to make this economy thrive the way it is thriving at the present time. We don’t care about that.’ The fact is there was a mass migration of workers in Western Australia from the state system into the national system when the state Labor government in Western Australia effectively abolished individual agreements, which the Leader of the Opposition plans on doing. What happened in the mining industry? Not just the employers, but thousands of employees in the mining industry in Western Australia went from the state system over to the federal system so that they could take advantage of individual Australian workplace agreements.

The Leader of the Opposition’s home state has about 10 per cent of the Australian workforce yet some 30 per cent of the AWAs which are utilised in this country. But has the Leader of the Opposition learned anything from that lesson at all? None whatsoever. He just says to the mining industry in Australia, producing billions of dollars of profit and income for this country, ‘Oh, we’re going to rip up the arrangements that have enabled you to be profitable in the way you are and that have ensured that this country has thrived in the way it has.’ No wonder we have this massive condemnation from the media in Australia.

But worse than that, this gives a green light in a couple of ways. As reported in the Australian today, ‘Unions push ALP for more’. I say this to the member opposite, the member for Lilley: once you start to appease people, as the Leader of the Opposition has done, once you start to appease the thugs in the union movement, as the Leader of the Opposition has done, once you say, ‘I’ll cave in to you, because that’s the only way I’ll keep my job,’ the reality is there is no end to it. What do we see in the newspapers today? ‘Unions push ALP for more’. This is just the start, as far as the unions are concerned, because they know what we know, which is what every Australian knows: you have a weak Leader of the Opposition. If he is prepared to cave in once, he is going to cave in again, and again, and again. I predict that in the coming weeks and months, what we will see from the Leader of the Opposition is not just this first cave-in, but a series of cave-ins, because essentially he is weak, he is known to be weak, and that is what the unions know.

But worse than that, he will obviously give a green light to the sort of the thuggery we have seen in workplaces in Australia—a green light to the CFMEU and their mates to go back into the mining sites, to the construction and building sites in Melbourne and Sydney, and push up the cost of building and housing in this country. That is what this sort of decision is going to do. It has happened because the Leader of the Opposition is weak. The Leader of the Opposition could not stand by a decision which he made some eight months ago, and we are going to see the consequence of that played out not just this week, but in the weeks and months ahead in Australia. As the leader writers in the newspapers around Australia said, this is a backward step taken by a backward Leader of the Opposition.

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