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

I thank the member for Fadden for his question and his interest in workplace reform in Australia. The record shows that workplace reform over the last decade, and the flexibility that that has brought to the labour market, has indeed strengthened the Australian economy to the benefit of all Australians. The record quite clearly speaks for itself: the 30-year-low unemployment rate in Australia of 4.9 per cent, the 1.8 million extra jobs that have been created in the last decade and the 16.8 per cent increase in real wages. Ongoing reform is part of the move to strengthen the economy significantly and importantly to create more jobs for Australians so that more and more of our fellow men and women can share in the national prosperity.

The member for Fadden asked me whether there were any proposals for change. Indeed, there are. We have the Leader of the Opposition adopting a Mark Latham economic stance on policy, wanting to take us back to the pre-Keating reform era. Why is this? Simply because the unions are demanding that they do so. The unions are right about one thing. They have realised what other Australians have realised and that is that the Leader of the Opposition when it comes to public policy is weak. He does not have the spine to stand up to them. He buckles under, as he did at the weekend at the New South Wales Labor conference, no matter how extreme the proposals and the demands from the unions are.

Having buckled under once, what are the other demands that we are now getting from the union movement insofar as the workplace is concerned? First of all, they have demanded that AWAs go. He buckled under to that and in the process hung out to dry some hundreds of thousands of Australian workers. On top of that, we now have Mr Combet, the Secretary of the ACTU, demanding compulsory collective bargaining in Australia. That would mean that you would have the union involved in every negotiation at the workplace—something the Prime Minister quoted the workers in Western Australia as being opposed to. We have on top of that Bill Shorten, the next great hope of the Australian Labor Party, demanding that non-union workers be slugged with compulsory union bargaining agents fees. That is code for compulsory unionism in Australia.

But that is not the end of it. Let us look at the other demands. These are the sorts of demands that Mark Latham caved into, and we can see the new Leader of the Opposition caving into them as well. They want to squeeze the casual and part-time labour market in Australia dry. They want to whack small and medium sized businesses by reimposing the unfair dismissal regime. They want to give unions automatic right of entry into more workplaces and they want to allow secondary union boycotts and industry-wide strikes. The list goes on and on. This weakness from the Leader of the Opposition has led in the last couple of days to increasing demands from the unions as to what the Labor Party should do in their policy.

What was found with respect to this policy when the previous Leader of the Opposition, Mr Latham, was there? Access Economics had a look at the Labor Party’s policy with all these changes in it. This is what they concluded. It would diminish the capacity of business to create jobs for older people, for young Australians and for women; it would have a significant impact on manufacturing, on retail, on farming and on the mining industry in Australia; it would lessen productivity; and it would put pressure on unemployment. Here we have a repeat from the Leader of the Opposition. He is now adopting the economically irresponsible policies of the previous Leader of the Opposition which would take the Australian economy backwards by allowing the unions to dictate an extreme workplace relations policy. This would involve the unions in Australia having a seat at the cabinet table, should the Leader of the Opposition ever be elected to the prime ministership of this country. It would take Australia backwards, it would destroy employment, it would push unemployment up and it would diminish the prosperity of this nation.

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