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

A socialist rant. I am being kind. But amongst this left-wing rant—amongst phrases disguised to hide true intentions, like ‘good faith bargaining’ and ‘workplace democracy’—what we know is that the Leader of the Opposition has been ordered by his union bosses to adopt union monopoly bargaining; a good faith bargaining which is really compulsory union bargaining.

People of Australia should understand what this actually means. When the rhetoric is stripped away, what this actually means is that unions will have an unqualified right to involve themselves in any workplace in Australia which they choose, regardless of whether or not that particular workplace has a union member. That is the purport of what was discussed by Mr Combet. In fact, employers will be forced by Labor to negotiate with the union regardless of whether or not the employees actually consent to this. Mr Combet made this absolutely clear today. He was asked a question by a journalist from the Financial Review about this particular article. What he did first of all was correct what Mr Beazley said on Friday and said, ‘No, that wasn’t actually what the Labor Party policy was.’ Then he stressed—and this is important—that you do not need a majority of employees to demand collective bargaining; that the union will simply be able to march in and demand union bargaining.

Secondly, he rejected the US model, which actually means you must have a majority. Further, in black-and-white terms, on page 18 in the document which the ACTU released today, it says:

A lack of majority employee support would not of itself be grounds for the Commission to refrain from making any good faith bargaining orders.

So what this means, and let us make no bones about this, is that whether or not you have got a union member in a workplace, and whether or not that union is otherwise represented in that workplace—as Mr Combet has pointed out in correcting the Leader of the Opposition, who last week did not even know the detail of the policy that has been forced upon him—the unions can walk into that place and demand compulsory collective bargaining. That is what their policy is about, and Mr Combet let the beans out today in relation to that.

We have seen over the last 10 years, as the Prime Minister indicated earlier, the lowest unemployment rates in 30 years. We have representatives of the tourism industry in Australia here today. They know from their experience that the reforms of the last 10 years have led to greater employment and greater business prosperity in this country. They are because of those reforms. And yet this weak Leader of the Opposition would rip up not only the most recent reforms; he would rip up the previous reforms and take us back where Mr Combet and the union movement want us, to the 1970s and the 1980s—to the days when the Leader of the Opposition presided over an unemployment rate of over 10 per cent and industrial disputation was 30 times what it is today. That would be economic vandalism.

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