Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

This disallowance motion represents the last chance in this parliament to rip up these laws. If the parliament does not do it today, however, we will rip up these laws when we get into government in around 12 to 18 months time. The hardworking families of middle Australia, the people raising their kids, paying their mortgages and balancing the family budgets, demand to be heard in this place on this matter. They are the ones who entrusted this government with their future, only to become the victims in this legislation of an all-out assault on their security and their dreams for a better future for their kids. This is a government that cannot any longer manage the economy in the interests of working Australians. It is a government that turns on its own people. This is a Prime Minister who says that anyone who has any difficulty with these unfair laws is a phoney. All those mums and dads fearful of this legislation are phoneys, according to the Prime Minister.

How out of touch is the government becoming? Interest rates are up, petrol prices are up, the cost of living is up, and it puts in place, in the face of all this, a mechanism to slash wages and conditions. When middle Australia can least afford it, it acts to undermine the position of ordinary Australian families and it says those who oppose it are phoneys. The expression used by the Prime Minister referred to a lot of people, but among the people it referred to were those who had been victims of this law already who had made their complaints sufficiently clear. They placed advertisements with the ACTU—advertisements paid for by workers, as opposed to the corrupt theft of taxpayers’ money to pay for blatantly political advertising by this government in defence of its own legislation.

Public servants have been turned into de facto secret police and political operatives by Minister Andrews, who is exiting the chamber. Public servants have been turned into illicit political operatives by him in order to undermine and discredit the various people who have made complaints about this—adding intimidation to the bullying. They did not even bother, in most cases, to interview at all the workers who had a grievance. They had a chat to a few of the employers. This was their investigation, on the basis of which they describe the propositions as phoney. It is in keeping with the indecent dishonesty which has come to mark this government as they defend themselves in most areas—but in this area above all because their extreme ideology is so actively engaged by these laws. They do not care what they do to ordinary Australians; they have developed their right to rule ideology to a fine cutting edge and they turn that cutting edge on anyone who would dare be a critic of them in this place. They have no compunction about using taxpayer dollars to turn the Public Service away from its normal obligation of balance and service to the public into an arm of low-heel political operatives. That is basically what this government has managed to do in this regard.

The minister who spoke at the table, and who is personally complicit in all of this activity, always erects a series of straw men whenever he wants to address the arguments that we raise in opposition to this legislation. He said that when this legislation was passed we allegedly predicted the sky would fall in, people would be sacked en masse and there would be huge outbreaks of industrial mayhem all over the country. That was in his imagination; in his dreams. I think anyone in this place who recollects that debate will remember exactly what I said would be the consequence of the passage of this legislation. I said it would be like an infestation of termites; a slow crumbling from within. Indeed, it has been a very slow crumbling from within but nevertheless it has been a continuous process with an inevitable consequence.

The fact of the matter is, because we have stood so strong on this side of the House, there are indeed a number of employers who are saying, ‘Perhaps what we ought to do is wait this process out until after the next election. If the Labor Party wins, we will not have sullied ourselves by filthying our hands with the utilisation of this legislation.’ Many of them—as I have occasion to know, having discussed things with them—do not want to go down that path. I wish I had 10 bucks for every time an employer has said, ‘We did not like every feature of the industrial relations system, but none of us ever asked for this. This is not what any of us had in mind.’ If I had 10 bucks for every time someone said that, I would have a guaranteed poultice of money that would be all we would need for our advertising campaign in the next election.

The simple fact of the matter is that those employers have a major inhibition related to their own human decency. The second feature of it is that they know, like all employers, the moment a competitor acts, they act. They have no choice. They do not have an obligation in the first instance to the community, although they would like to have that obligation because they are members of the community and decent people. They know darn well that the legal constraint on them is that their obligation is to their shareholders. In the end, if a competitor acts in a particular way, they have to act.

However, particularly those who are associated with the Business Council of Australia are effectively deciding—and there has been enough publicity in the press on this for you to know it is true—to hold off a bit and see what happens in the next election, knowing full well that one of two things will happen. If we win, this law will be shredded and what will be put in place will be a balanced, fair and flexible system that represents the middle ground in Australian politics and the middle ground of industrial affairs. I know that will happen if we win. If the government wins, not only will there be these laws to implement but also there will be the additional laws that are being held in secret to be brought out to put the finishing touches on the destruction of any person’s effective rights in the workplace anywhere in this country.

So there is a fair bit at stake and it makes a bit of sense, if you are an employer seeing two outcomes so poles apart as likely to eventuate in the course of the next 18 months, that you would hold off for a bit. But having said that most sensible people would hold off, I know that does not mean that all people will hold off. What we have seen systematically is that crumbling way that I suggested with that analogy of an infestation of termites. You are beginning to see the cases pop up: the Spotlights, the Lufthansas and those meatworks in the bush, which are looking at all the opportunities particularly when these laws can be dovetailed with the illegitimate use of immigration visas, so particularly when you can dovetail the two of them together. What you are seeing now are the beginnings of the assault we predicted moving on much the timetable that we predicted it would occur.

The government makes great play of the assumption that the only people who think these laws are appalling and indecent are the Australian Labor Party and the trade union movement. I do not think anything that I have said, anything that I have heard Greg Combet say or anything that I have heard any of my colleagues in this place say can match the moral force of the comments of Bishop Kevin Manning, the Bishop of Parramatta, about these laws in the latest edition of the Catholic Weekly. He says that the Work Choices legislation is ‘manifestly unjust’ and unfair and that the government has ‘failed in its duty to promote the common good’. He goes on to say that this act breaches the conventions of the International Labour Organisation and the social teaching of the church. The article states:

He said employees cannot be treated as commodities and that in Catholic thinking, people are not valued according to their work, but rather work is valued because it is the free act of a human person.

He said the great injustice of Work Choice legislation is that “it obliterates the principal instrument of collection action which is collective bargaining”.

“The right of workers to act collectively is central to Catholic social teaching. It was stated explicitly in [the encyclical] Rerum Novarum,” he told a Work Choices seminar ...

I quote him again:

“Let us be very clear about this: there is no right to collective bargaining under the legislation ...

“Any collective bargaining that may take place is entirely at the whim of the employer.

“This is manifestly unjust!

“The removal of the right to collective bargaining places the new legislation in breach of the ILO’s Convention on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work 1998, which states that all member States, even if they have not ratified the Convention, are obligated to promote and realise in good faith, freedom of association and the right to collective-bargaining.”

He goes on to say:

“Work Choices violates Catholic Social Teaching on the Option for the Poor and, indeed, any reasonable notion of a ‘fair go’ ...

“The already unemployed, people in rural and regional Australia, women in casual and part-time jobs, the disabled, and young people will suffer disadvantage under this legislation.

“In the regulation of the labour market, governments have an obligation to protect the rights of the vulnerable. No fair-minded person could say that Work Choices does that.”

This is an extraordinary attack. This is not a slight, glancing reference. This is a hip and thigh assault on the fairness and decency underpinning this particular legislation, exposing it for what it absolutely is. He goes on about AWAs being weighted too heavily in favour of the employer. He says:

“There is nothing intrinsically wrong with an AWA provided that the worker is highly skilled and has a sophisticated capacity for negotiation ...

“In the workplace, some, but by no means all, workers will have skills of sufficient marketability, and the capacity to negotiate an AWA which suits them, but the fact remains that the majority will not.

There is a percentage of the Australian workforce—about 10 to 15 per cent of it—that sacks their employers; the other 85 per cent get sacked by them. That is the nature of the power realities in the industrial situation. But those 85 per cent who are vulnerable have mortgages, they are educating their children, they are paying for the cost of their health care—all the user-pays things that this government has effectively thrust on them over the years. They rely absolutely on the income they earn to be able to carry them. And the income they earn is crucially reinforced by the rewards for hard work, and the rewards for hard work go to the very essence of those conditions most explicitly attacked by this government’s legislation: the ability to get overtime payments, the ability to be rewarded if you work on holidays, the ability to access shift allowances and the ability to get a decent rate of pay when you work in any set of unusual circumstances. Those are what are under assault here.

There is not a person with a mortgage and certainly not a person with a new mortgage in the western suburbs of Sydney, in the equivalent suburbs of the major capital cities or in large parts of regional Australia—not one—who, when they are paying off their mortgage, are not reliant to some degree on some form of penalty rate. There would not be one of them out in the western suburbs of Sydney. In the last six weeks I have had an opportunity to meet many of them. I can stand up in any workplace or in any meeting place, make that claim and then ask for a show of hands, and what I get when I ask for the show of hands is unanimity. The interesting thing is that about half the people that I have been talking to are traditional Liberal voters, traditional Liberal working-class voters who understand exactly how they are being wrecked by this government. We will wreck these laws. We will put in place fair and balanced laws that represent the centrist thinking of the average Australian. Extremism is out when we are in, and these laws will go. (Time expired)

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