Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am glad you said that, my Tasmanian colleague. I note that many of these letters are almost straight lifts from the press releases, statements and commentary of Labor politicians and union leaders. Apart from the dishonesty of plagiarism, I must say I am surprised, with the wealth of information sources available today—television, radio, newspapers and the internet—and the fact that the unions have paid the Labor Party over recent campaigns $50 million in donations, that such a pitiful performance was mounted in the media. That the unions are still falling back on these practices I find very sad. I have said in my own paper in Gladstone, where it is most prevalent, that if I were a paid-up union member and that was the best that a state organiser could dish up in this campaign, I would be disappointed. I recognise some Labor members and some union members find this campaign important. I do not diminish that and I respect their point of view. But if the people carrying their argument have to stoop to these measures, that says very little about the sincerity or the depth of the campaign.

I am sure that most of my constituents will take the time to decide for themselves what they think of the Work Choices changes. On that point, Gladstone is a very interesting place because the employees of a lot of firms are already on AWAs, and I think that a lot of people in Gladstone would find the Leader of the Opposition’s latest statement, at the weekend, quite horrific. Gladstone is a very focused town: people come there to work very hard and earn a good living. The town has a good standard of living. Of all the industrial towns in Australia, Gladstone is probably the one with the best aesthetics and the best community facilities, and I compliment the city council and the community at large on that. So those people have not come to Gladstone to be pushed around by unions. I remember when one particular plant was moving over to a system—not the AWA system that is now proposed but a forerunner of that—there was a great campaign at this particular plant. A tent was put up at the gate by the Electrical Trades Union and people were handed pamphlets and told, ‘Come on, brother, when we hold the referendum, stay on the award; don’t go onto these AWAs’—or whatever they were at the time, whatever they were called in those days. We eventually had referendum day. The plant voted 83 per cent to 17 per cent to go onto AWAs, despite this huge union campaign. I think that says it all: people do not like to be pushed around; they are intelligent and they can make decisions for themselves.

The other thing that we should recognise is that the fact that unemployment is at this 30-year low of 4.9 per cent stands in stark contrast to what it was when Mr Beazley was in government. He had an unemployment rate that at the time topped 10.9 per cent. I am sure that people like the people of Gladstone will note that since the first raft of workplace reforms in 1996 we have created 1.8 million jobs and that they have seen their real wages increase by 16.8 per cent, after inflation and all the other bits and pieces, as against a rise of 0.3 per cent during the 13 years of the previous government. I am sure they will consider themselves to be better off under the coalition than they ever were under Labor. What Labor and their union puppet masters fail to acknowledge is that these changes are actually about creating jobs in Australia. A case in point is Spotlight. While I might not agree that it is the greatest of all AWA offers—I am not saying that for a minute—if you look beyond the bluster what does this case illustrate? Spotlight’s new store at Mount Druitt, in Sydney’s west, has employed 40 people, many of them previously unemployed. Thirty-eight of the 40 were previously unemployed.

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