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

I thank the member for Hughes for her question and, in answering it, I note that the unemployment rate in Hughes stands at 2.9 per cent. The constituents of Hughes are some of the many people throughout Australia who are getting the rewards and the benefits of changes to workplace laws. There have been 175,000 new jobs created in Australia since the introduction of Work Choices, real wages are continuing to grow and industrial disputes are at the lowest level in the history of this country.

It is true that Australian workplace agreements are being taken up in quite considerable numbers. Indeed, last week the Prime Minister and I had the opportunity of visiting a disability service in South Australia, in the member for Wakefield’s electorate, where the one millionth AWA had been signed. Mr Bob Raven was the employee who had signed the one millionth AWA. The one millionth AWA also coincided with the 100,000th AWA lodged under the Work Choices system.

Let us look at some of the advantages for Mr Raven and his fellow employees—about 30 staff at Comrec’s various disability support services in South Australia—under the AWA. They have, for example, the option of trading wage increases for additional leave. They have flexible start and finish times. They have the option of working from home and access to long service leave as single days. They have three days additional leave per year, accessible for any personal reason. They have things like study leave.

All of those are advantages that Mr Raven, as he said to us last week, found attractive in this Australian workplace agreement and for him to work in this particular business. This is an example of the flexibility and the choice that Australian workers now have that they did not have in the past. These choices and this flexibility arise from the changes that this government has put in place. It is nonsensical to be taking away these choices. I noted in the West Australian on the weekend—and if the member for Brand ever visited Western Australia these days he might have noted it himself—an article on a worker in that state titled: ‘Keep your hands off: miner tells union’, and by extension the miner was telling the Leader of the Opposition that as well.

The Leader of the Opposition has previously praised and acknowledged AWAs. Indeed, he previously acknowledged the sheer irresponsibility of abolishing AWAs when he said:

There’ll be a million of those things in place when we come into office and you can’t wander around cancelling contracts.

What happened? As soon as there was word of a challenge to the leadership of the member for Brand as the Leader of the Opposition of Australia, he raced into the ALP conference in Sydney and said, ‘Well, I’m going to rip up Australian workplace agreements.’ What he would do is to rip up the flexibility that the likes of Mr Raven have, the flexibility that up to a million Australians have already entered into with Australian workplace agreements. There is only one description for this, and that is economic vandalism.

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