Stephen Smith (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry, Infrastructure and Industrial Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I will match your Liberal Party fistful of dollars any day of the week, Sunshine! So we have drawn attention to that, and today in question time we drew attention to the Esselte AWA, where for $1.25 extra per hour you lose all those things and you end up being, on the examples that we gave, $60 or $65 a week worse off and there is no wage increase in that AWA for a three-year period. So it effectively means that, if you are a full-time employee and you work a Saturday shift, you lose 65 bucks a week, or $10,140 over three years, for the princely sum of $1.25 an hour—and I might just happen to have $1.25 here. If you work overtime for two hours and a Saturday shift, you will be 60 bucks a week worse off, or $9,360 worse off over a three-year period—double the amount that the ACCI would see the minimum wage reduced by and nearly four times the amount that the government would see the minimum wage reduced by. That is all for the princely sum of $1.25 an hour—and I will not table that money because Mr Liberal Fistful of Dollars might just reach across the table. Knowing the Liberal Party, as I do, if they had the chance they would round the 2c and the $1.25 down.

The Prime Minister was presented with not just the Spotlight AWA but the Esselte AWA and he had his attention drawn to the fact that his own government man, the Employment Advocate, said that we had had about 6,200 AWAs signed since the introduction of the government’s legislation. We drew attention, as a result of good work in Senate estimates, to the fact that, of the AWAs sampled, 100 per cent excluded at least one protected award condition, 64 per cent removed leave loadings, 63 per cent removed penalty rates, 52 per cent removed shiftwork loadings, 41 per cent did not contain gazetted holidays, 22 per cent did not provide for a pay increase over the life of the agreement—like this one I have here—and 16 per cent excluded all award conditions and replaced them with government legislated minimum standards. The Prime Minister said that 78 per cent of them will give ‘very significant wage increases’.

This followed on from the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations who, after the Spotlight AWA was revealed in the parliament a couple of weeks ago, on a Friday morning said that the vast majority of protected award conditions have remained in AWAs since the government’s legislation was changed—and three days and three nights later the OEA blew him out of the water. The Prime Minister has no evidence for the claim that there have been ‘very significant wage increases’. If he has any evidence of that, he should produce it for the parliament and for the community. He is also out there asserting that somehow there are significant increases in wages under AWAs rather than collective bargaining. All the studies by Professor Peetz and by Freehills—the government’s hired gun—show that that is not the case.

As a result of that, the Leader of the Opposition decided that we would adopt a policy of abolishing AWAs, which just happens to be consistent with our election platform and our public policy. I want to make a couple of remarks about the business reaction to that. Let us very clearly understand what AWAs represent. We have the business community out there, we have the BCA, the Business Council of Australia, who say that their employers represent one million employees; we have ACCI, who say their employers employ four million employees; and we have AiG, who say their employers employ two million employees. So seven million employees from those business groups have expressed their views about our commitment to abolish AWAs. How many AWAs do we have? We have 538,000—half a million. So there are half a million AWAs for the seven million employees represented by those organisations. And what do we know from the government’s own stats? About 20 per cent of people are on awards; about 40 per cent of people are on enterprise bargains, where the big productivity boosts have come; about 30 per cent of people are on common law contracts, which have been in existence for a long period of time; and anywhere from 2.5 per cent to five per cent are on AWAs. But, if we abolish AWAs, despite the fact we have committed ourselves to flexibility through variations to collective agreements and to an overall advantage approach so far as common law contracts are concerned—despite the fact that we have promised that flexibility—the economy as we know it will crumble if AWAs are abolished.

In the face of 15 years of continuous economic growth, set up by the last Labor government, a resources boom to China, a current account deficit of six per cent which has the benefit of record high favourable terms of trade and record high commodity prices, 49 consecutive monthly trade deficits, an infrastructure crisis, a half-trillion dollar foreign debt, a collapse in research and development, a collapse in innovation, a collapse in skills, education and training, the single biggest threat to the Western world as we know it is the abolition of a 10-year-old statutory instrument, of which there are about half a million in a workforce of 10.1 million. And guess what? When my friend and state colleague Geoff Gallop said he was going to do the same thing in Western Australia, the business community and the Liberal Party said exactly the same thing. They said: ‘Gallop’s in the hands of the unions. The Western Australian economy as we know it will collapse. This is a regressive approach; it is back to the 18th century of employment relations.’ Last time I looked, off the back of 15 years of continuous economic growth and a resources boom to China, Western Australia had 10 per cent growth. But, if we take away an employment instrument that half a million people out of 10 million have, the Western world as we know it will collapse. It is no longer the reds under the beds; it is not having the AWA under the bed. That is the problem.

My complaint with Mr Chaney is that the Business Council writes a letter, which it describes as a personal letter to the Leader of the Opposition, which journalists get at the same time or in advance, and says: ‘Unless you do AWAs, everything else you do has no credibility.’ I say a couple of things to Mr Chaney publicly and privately. Firstly, Mr Chaney is on record as saying that fairness is not a requirement of industrial relations legislation, that fairness is not a criterion required in the employment relations area—

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