Phillip Barresi (Deakin, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I trust that the member will listen to my contribution, just as I listened to the contribution of the Leader of the Opposition. I would say to the member for Corio: take your unfair dismissal case to the union movement that will listen to it. I doubt whether there will be anyone there to listen to that case.

This disallowance motion, as the Leader of the Opposition said, is a last chance for the Labor Party to muscle up—to muscle up to the government. The member for Perth, in a desperate ploy, tried to tie where we are at with the entire Work Choices legislation to leadership issues. The only leadership implications from the Work Choices legislation and from this debate are the leadership implications for those on the other side. The ACTU has laid down the law: muscle up or get out of the way. Greg Combet has even lamented the fact that unions used to run this country. ‘Wouldn’t it be great to go back to those days,’ Greg Combet has been saying. He recognises that those on the other side have let the union movement down, and that is why they have picked up the pieces and are running the debate.

The extreme IR law changes that the ALP keeps referring to are nothing of the sort. I have had a good chance to look at them and to compare them with laws outside Australia. The language used by those on the other side has not changed over the years. It has been the same language, it has been extreme language and it continues. The Leader of the Opposition denies this, but in fact he has said out of his own mouth that these laws will create divorces, that they will create family breakdowns. It is the same language that we have heard for over 10 years, yet the facts do not stack up. Employment growth and wage increases have been incredibly strong under this government compared with what they were under the former Labor government.

In their extreme language, those opposite keep resorting to these claims. But the extreme claims and language are now no longer sufficient for the ALP and they are no longer sufficient for the ACTU. What they have now said is: ‘We have tried the extreme language; now what we are going to do is fabricate stories. We are going to get people on the TV commercials, surround it with nice glitzy things and fabricate these stories, because our extreme language has not cut through. We need these fabrications.’ After the Office of Workplace Services has investigated these claims, we have found in every single case that these stories have in fact been a fabrication. Today we have heard those opposite mention a couple of other examples. I daresay that, once they have been investigated in the next few days, we might get a bit closer to the truth of the situation.

The Work Choices legislation really is about choice. Members on the other side say, ‘But employers out there are not taking up the Work Choices legislation.’ They do not have to. That is a good thing about this legislation. Employers can keep their current conditions going. They can keep the current relationship going with their employees. This is about choice. This is about making sure that that small business has, and other businesses that are about to close their doors have, an opportunity to negotiate a situation where those doors can continue to remain open. More importantly, if those doors remain open, there is a job. There is someone out there who will continue to have a job. This legislation is providing that flexibility and those choices so that businesses are able to say, ‘There are other ways of doing this.’

See this speech in context