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

I thank the member for Casey for his question. I note that the unemployment rate in Casey stands at 4.2 per cent; 4.2 per cent is very good news for the people who live in Croydon, Lilydale and the other suburbs that the member for Casey so well represents in this place. Indeed I can also inform him that, since the introduction of Work Choices on 27 March, we have seen the creation of 205,000 jobs in Australia and significantly 184,000 of those jobs are full-time jobs for Australians. Also in the last six months we have seen some other interesting developments—for example, the signing in Adelaide of the one millionth Australian workplace agreement and more than 2,000 employee and union collective agreements entered into.

What this does is contradict, with factual data, the false and misleading claim that the Leader of the Opposition makes that Australians cannot enter into a collective agreement. Two thousand collective agreements have been entered into. What this illustrates once again is what this government believes, and that is that Australian employers and employees should have choice in relation to their industrial arrangements in the workplace. This stands in stark contrast to what the Leader of the Opposition has reconfirmed as one of the central planks of the ALP’s workplace relations policy on the weekend: the no ticket, no start part of that policy. Indeed, one of the ALP stalwarts—in fact, one of the new ALP presidents—Mike Rann, the Premier of South Australia, was supporting the ban on non-union journalists from reporting on the Australian Labor Party conference. This is what Mr Rann said—

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