John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I can certainly inform the member for Wakefield that the economic strength of Australia has been dramatically displayed in the single most important marker of economic success of a nation, and that is the capacity of a nation to generate jobs. I have often said in recent months that the holy grail of economic management in this nation is how successful you are in reducing unemployment. We now have a 30-year low in unemployment in this country, and in large areas of Australia, for all practical purposes, we have full employment. Our unemployment rate is at an historic low of 4.8 per cent and, more importantly and more contemporaneously, we have seen 205,000 new jobs created since April this year—205,000 new jobs created since the introduction of the government’s new industrial relations legislation. So much for all the prophecies of the world coming to an end, the sky falling in, wages going down, unemployment going up and there being mass dismissals and employees being persecuted all around Australia. All of those predictions have proved to be absolutely baseless. Australian workers and businesses now have the flexibility to work out arrangements that best suit their needs.

More relevantly and more importantly for the different views of the two sides of politics in this place, a very significant thing happened yesterday in the South Australian parliament. The new senior vice-president of the Australian Labor Party and Premier of South Australia joined a gaggle of senior state Labor members in distancing himself from the Leader of the Opposition’s policy of ripping up AWAs.

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