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

The only thing that has been unravelling over the past week is the Leader of the Opposition’s foolish policy to rip up Australian workplace agreements. That is the collective judgment that has been made over the past week of the Leader of the Opposition and that policy. You would hardly think that you were looking at the same report as the member for Lilley if you were listening to his remarks and actually reading the report from the OECD. One thing which is quite clear from the OECD Employment Outlook 2006 is that it paints a highly favourable picture of Australia.

The member for Lilley said, ‘We want to see some decent labour market programs.’ I ask him, members opposite and the Australian public: what better decent labour market program is there than one that has driven down unemployment to 4.9 per cent? That is the lowest unemployment rate in this country for three decades. What sort of labour market program did we have under the Labor Party when unemployment in this country was in double digit figures? Unemployment was at well over 10 per cent, and yet over the past decade the economic management of this country by this government has seen a substantial fall in unemployment to 4.9 per cent. For the first time in 30 years in this country and the first time in the lifetime of many Australians there has been a 4 in front of the unemployment figure in this country.

Look at what the Labor Party proposed in its re-regulation of the labour market. Take not my views about this but the views of the Labor Party’s preferred economic modeller, Access Economics. Their analysis of the Labor Party’s proposals to re-regulate the Australian workforce was that the unemployment rate today would be closer to eight per cent—that is, some 315,000 Australians who have a job today, or who had jobs at the time of that analysis when the unemployment rate was still 5½ per cent, would not have a job. Yet the member for Lilley comes in here with his overblown rhetoric and talks about wanting to see some decent labour market programs. I think ordinary Australians understand that such programs have driven down unemployment to 4.9 per cent in this country and have seen more Australians employed than in any other period in our history. They have brought about real wage increases of 16.8 per cent into the bargain. Tax rates and inflation rates have fallen. Interest rates are a far cry from the double-digit interest rates I can remember when the Labor Party was in government, when small business was paying interest rates of over 20 per cent. This government’s programs of the last 10 years have delivered real and tangible benefits for the men and women of Australia and their families, yet we hear this rhetoric from the member for Lilley today.

Go back to the OECD report, because it points to Australia’s experiencing significant reductions in its unemployment rate—currently at a 30-year low of 4.9 per cent. The report also notes that the employment rates in Australia have risen markedly over the past decade, with more than 10 million Australians in work. We have more Australians employed in this country than at any other time in our history. It was not that long ago, when the Leader of the Opposition was the employment minister in the Hawke-Keating governments, that the number of unemployed in this country measured one million. When asked about that back then, the Leader of the Opposition conceded that the long-term unemployed were being left on the scrapheap. When asked about his job as employment minister, he also conceded that, of all the responsibilities he had when he was in government, that was the job in which he had the least interest. So it is a stark contrast to what we saw when the Leader of the Opposition was responsible for some of the economic management of Australia.

We can also see from the OECD report that Australia is one of the few countries that have combined stronger productivity growth performance with stronger job creation. We know something about productivity growth from the experience of the last 10 years, and it can be simply stated. Those businesses, industries and sectors of the Australian economy that have most embraced the flexibility of the workplace relations system introduced in Australia 10 years ago are also the businesses and sectors of the Australian economy that have had the highest productivity growth.

One of the stand-out examples of this is the mining and resources sector of Australia. I mention this sector because it is the wont of the member for Perth, the Leader of the Opposition and others opposite, when pointing to Australia’s current economic prosperity, to say that this is largely a result of the mining and resources sector. It is true that the mining and resources sector has contributed greatly to the prosperity we are enjoying, but here lies the internal contradiction of the Labor Party’s argument: you cannot say on the one hand that this sector of the Australian economy has led to this prosperity and that it is the reason we are enjoying prosperity today—with low unemployment, high employment, low interest rates, low inflation et cetera—yet say on the other hand that we want to rip away from the Australian mining and resources sector one of the very mechanisms that have helped it to achieve the prosperity and to thrive in the way it is today.

This was the central nub of the argument advanced last week by the chairman of Business Council of Australia, Mr Michael Chaney. The Business Council of Australia, along with virtually every other business organisation in this country, backed up by the editorial writers of almost every major newspaper in Australia, condemned as a retrograde step the decision of the Leader of the Opposition last weekend to rip up Australian workplace agreements and rip up in the process the advantages that more than half a million Australians and their families have derived from Australian workplace agreements. In his criticism of the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Chaney said:

AWAs have played a significant part in improving productivity, particularly in sectors that are critical to Australia’s current and future growth, notably mining and resources.

The nub of the argument being advanced by the business community, by Mr Chaney amongst others, is that Australian workplace agreements—the thing that the Leader of the Opposition wants to rip up—have been critical in improving the productivity of the mining and resources sector in Australia.

If at any time in future somebody hears Kim Beazley, the Leader of the Opposition, or Stephen Smith, the member for Perth, saying, ‘Our prosperity is a consequence of the mining and resources sector in Australia,’ they must ask the logical question, ‘Why would you want to rip away from that sector one of the things which the leaders of that sector say have led to that prosperity, which we all enjoy—not just the mining companies—in Australia?’ Over the past week we have not heard a single word from the Leader of the Opposition about this.

The reality is that the union movement—particularly in New South Wales, led by Mr Robertson—which has this implacable hatred of individual contracts in Australia, demanded of the Leader of the Opposition that he go to their conference and say that he will rip up AWAs. Cheered on by the comrades in the Sydney Town Hall, he thought this would be a popular move that the rest of Australia would congratulate him on. And they did not. The business community of Australia immediately said, ‘This will take Australia backwards.’ The editorial writers in Australia came out and said that this would take Australia backwards. No wonder there was a headline in the Australian on Thursday of last week: ‘Beazley another Latham: business’. What is the illusion? The troops out by Christmas, and AWAs out by Christmas. It was a foolish statement by the former Leader of the Opposition and an equally foolish one on these matters by this Leader of the Opposition.

The OECD report paints a favourable picture of Australia. It paints a picture similar to that which the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, painted on his visit to Canberra about a week ago. He said:

... Australia has taken important steps to become more flexible and at the same time keep its safety net structures, but this is an on-going movement, the world is changing, competition is shifting and labour laws have to reflect that fact.

…     …         …

... the labour laws, of not only the 1970s, but even the 1990s, are probably not the ones we need in the 21^st century.

That was the Managing Director of the IMF commenting on changes in labour laws in Australia, saying that, let alone going back to the 1970s, which is what the Leader of the Opposition is promising to do, even the labour laws of 10 years ago are not going to drive an economy like Australia’s in this century. This is the great divide in Australian politics at the present time. There is a government that is prepared to tackle the challenges of the future in Australia. That is what this government is prepared to do and that is the record of the last 10 years.

Preparedness and courage to tackle the future are not necessarily isolated to one side of politics or the other. Indeed, I think it is a fair concession to make that the Labor Party under Mr Hawke was prepared to tackle some of the challenges that Australia faced during the 1980s. This side of politics largely supported the then Labor government to tackle the challenges facing Australia. That stands in marked contrast to almost every reform that has been advanced by this government over the last 10 years, where we have seen implacable opposition from the Australian Labor Party to measures that will meet the challenges of Australia’s future. Industrial relations is just one more example of that today.

No wonder, according to media reports this morning, the Leader of the Opposition suggested to his comrades in caucus that Labor MPs should stop reading the opinion pages and start reading the letters pages. There are two things which are important about that. I know he does not want anybody to read the opinion pages because we have seen these sorts of headlines: the Daily Telegraph, ‘Sop to the unions’; the Australian, ‘Beazley bombs as economic manager’; a similar one from the Australian; the Advertiser in Adelaide, ‘Beazley fires wide of a sitting duck’; the West Australian, ‘Beazley plans return to an unwanted past’; the Herald Sun in Melbourne, ‘Beazley steps backwards’; and Gerard Henderson in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Beazley ties his future to the unions’. Probably the most apt one of all was in the Sydney Morning Herald editorial itself on Tuesday of last week, ‘Beazley’s real agenda: his job’.

So I can understand why the Leader of the Opposition would not want his colleagues in the Labor Party to be reading the opinion pages of the papers. He would not even want them to be reading the news pages today, because in the Australian, for example, there is the headline ‘Beazley’s gamble puts Labor behind’. Here is another one: ‘Workers lose $27 a week’. This refers to the proposal of the Leader of the Opposition. Another headline in the papers today reads ‘Beazley tears up his own contract’. This shows that Australians understand that the Leader of the Opposition is not prepared to have the courage to stand up for the future of Australia.

I also note why he wants them to read the letters pages rather than the opinion pages. The ACTU on its website has a media guide. It talks about writing letters to the editors of newspapers and jamming the phone lines of radio talkback and the like. Indeed, in one campaign, which involved emails, something like half the emails had actually come from people overseas and not in Australia. So this orchestrated campaign from the union movement is what he wants rather than some objective assessment of his foolish policy to rip up AWAs and to rip up the changes that Australians are enjoying at the present time.

The reality is that these changes over the last 10 years have been good for Australia. They have driven down unemployment. But the reality is also that there are still many hundreds of thousands of Australians who do not have a job, and I for one believe that we ought to create the conditions under which as many Australians as possible can get a job. That is what we are on about on this side of the House—not putting up the white flag, as the Leader of the Opposition has done in the past, and not surrendering to the union heavies at Sussex Street in Sydney who want to dictate policy to him. He needs to have the courage to do what Tony Blair did, and that was to stand up to the union movement and say, ‘These changes are good, because they are good for the ordinary men and women of this country.’ Had the Leader of the Opposition done that last weekend he would be in a significantly different position today from that which he is in with all the condemnation of his backflip over the last week.

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