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

They were put onto AWAs, and now the vast majority of those workers have a permanent job. What that means for them and their families—and I believe the member for Lyons will be sympathetic to this—is that they have a permanent job. It means that they can go to the bank and get a loan. It means they can do something about a mortgage on a house that they want to buy. It gives them a degree of security which they did not have in the past.

In the member for Lyons’s own electorate, there is the example of the famous Banjo’s Bakehouse in Strahan where AWAs enable workers to be employed not just for six months of the year when the tourists come and then not have a job for the rest of the year; it enables the smoothing out of their employment with different hours in different seasons and different months. It enables those workers to have a permanent job, although with a variation of hours across a period of time. These sorts of examples of the flexibility which is being offered and which has been grasped eagerly by workers in Australia show why we have people using AWAs.

But the problem with the Leader of the Opposition and member for Perth is that the rhetoric that we have heard today is no different to the mantra and the rhetoric we have heard for the last 10 years in this place. The sky was going to fall in when the workplace relations changes were made in 1996. We have seen 1.8 million extra jobs in Australia, a 16.8 per cent increase in real wages for Australians over the last decade compared to just a 1.2 per cent increase for the previous 13 years of the Labor government. We have seen something like an extra 315,000 Australians in work, because of being able to drive down the unemployment rate. If we had not made these changes, according to Access Economics—the economic modelling firm of choice for the Australian Labor Party—the unemployment rate in Australia would be closer to eight per cent rather than the 4.9 per cent it is today. There are more than 300,000 extra jobs that Australians have today because of these changes.

We have seen the IMF and other international organisations saying that the Australian economy is one of the powerhouse economies of the world. I was at the ILO meeting in Geneva last week and had a series of meetings with employment ministers from around the world. One of the most interesting was the meeting with the German employment minister. Germany, of course, still has an unemployment rate of well over 10 per cent—as has France, for that matter. The German employment minister said to me, ‘If we had the unemployment conditions that you’ve got in Australia, if we had the economy of Australia, it’d be like we’re celebrating the World Cup every month, and not just the World Cup that we’re celebrating at the present time.’ All of this is because of the changes and the economic conditions that this government has overseen over the last 10 years.

This was a serious misjudgment on the part of the Leader of the Opposition, and now we have headlines like the one in the Australian today, ‘Beazley another Latham: business’. And why are businesses saying that? Because we had ‘troops home by Christmas’ from Mr Latham and we have ‘AWAs out by Christmas’ from Mr Beazley. Without consultation with his caucus, without consultation with his shadow minister, without consultation, apparently, with his shadow ministry, he just rolls along to the conference on the weekend and repudiates the policy that had been in place prior to that, and repudiates what he had even said himself prior to this.

This is a foolish policy. The reason for it is that the Leader of the Opposition’s leadership was being destabilised, in particular by Unions New South Wales and Mr Robertson and co, who were sending out quite clear messages that they were unimpressed with the way in which the Leader of the Opposition was conducting himself. They pulled him into line. He buckled under, and he changed this policy, because that is what the paymasters in the unions in Australia, which have paid $50 million to the ALP over the last 10 years, wanted with regard to this.

The question is where this goes from here, because the long list of union demands goes on and on and on. There is no secret about the other things that the unions want. They want to do things like reimpose the unfair dismissal laws that cost jobs, have compulsory union bargaining fees, have a payroll tax added to businesses in Australia, have mandated good-faith bargaining  et cetera. The list goes on and on and on, and the Leader of the Opposition, having buckled under and appeased the unions in the first place, is in a position where they know he is weak, like every other Australian does, and know that he will buckle under to all the other proposals. That will drive Australia backwards.

Tony Blair had the courage to stand up to the unions in Great Britain and say, ‘They may not like it, but the real world would be much warmer than the one which they are proposing, because it would be better for the employment prospects and the prosperity of the men and women of Britain.’ Unfortunately, and quite regrettably for Australia, the Leader of the Opposition in this country, the Labor leader in this country, does not have the courage of Mr Blair to stand up to this sort of nonsense. (Time expired)

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