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

Not only do we have this extraordinary attack on the Business Council of Australia; also we have an extraordinary attack on the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, an organisation that represents the employers of some four million Australian people, saying that it was only interested in pushing down for lower wages. In fact, the member for Perth said in his doorstop, about the ACCI, ‘Maybe it’s about a lazy, easy way of increasing your profit.’ This is an outrageous thing for a senior member of the opposition to be saying about a business organisation, the members of which employ some four million Australians. But the member for Perth went on and said, ‘You should go and ask the business community this question: what flexibility do you get from statutory individual contracts that you can’t get from common-law individual contracts?’

If the member for Perth and the opposition do not know the difference between common-law contracts and individual AWAs then they are deeply in trouble, because the reality is that, as has been the law in Australia for some 90 years, common-law contracts do not replace awards. In fact, the ACCI pointed this out today in a press release. They said:

Common law agreements do not deliver changes to working arrangements that are prohibited by awards or union agreements. They cannot do so because they are not allowed to alter (in any way) any of the terms of an award or a union agreement, no matter how inflexible, restrictive, inefficient, costly or inappropriate those terms might be to the situation of that employer and that employee.

So the reality, when you decode what members of the opposition are saying, is that they are saying, ‘Let’s rip away the entitlements of hundreds of thousands of Australian workers on individual Australian workplace agreements.’ The proposition from the Leader of the Opposition is to replace them with common-law contracts. In effect, he is saying to those hundreds of thousands of Australians and their families: ‘We’re going to take you back to the award conditions. We’re going to take you back to conditions that pay 100 per cent less, on average, than do individual Australian workplace agreements.’

As I said, if the opposition, the Leader of the Opposition and the member for Perth do not know the difference between common-law contracts and Australian workplace agreements then they are in deep trouble. The member for Perth ought to apologise to the business organisations in Australia for his outrageous statements this morning. If he does not do so then the Leader of the Opposition should sack him. He has already repudiated him in any case.

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