Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I had a good laugh over the weekend, as I saw that the Leader of the Opposition was out there trying to paint the Australian Labor Party as the ‘future party’. Over the last 10 years we have seen absolutely nothing from this opposition, apart from a Labor Party that has consistently taken an entrenched position against any form of change. The motion before the House today is a symptom of a Labor Party that is unable to come to grips with the changing face of modern Australia. We are no longer a society with an ‘us and them’ mentality of boss versus worker. The average experience of an Australian in the workplace now shows that their employer is not out to force their conditions down, is not out to reduce their wages and is not out to sack them for no apparent reason. On the contrary—the experience of the average worker is that, if they work hard, they will be rewarded and valued by their employer This is now the reality in Australian workplaces .You can sit down with your employer and you can utilise the flexibility offered by Work Choices to come to new arrangements that are mutually beneficial to both yourself and your employer. This flexibility is most important for Australians with young families, particularly women. Yet the ALP would have you believe through this motion that what women really want is to turn back the clock to recreate the more rigid system that made it illegal to negotiate basic flexibilities between employer and employee. Surely the challenge of work/family balance is not going to be enhanced by turning the clock back to a more rigid system. Surely it is greater flexibility that will help Australians manage that balance more productively.

Work Choices is a continuation of the Howard government’s proud record on women and work. By any measure, women have prospered in the workforce since 1996. The number of women in the workforce has reached a record high. There are now over one million more women in the workforce than there were 10 years ago, which is a massive 28 per cent increase. Women have achieved higher wages and, very importantly, as the member for Moncrieff has outlined, the gap between men’s and women’s wages has closed. The number of mothers joining the labour force has also risen in the last 10 years. Approximately 60 per cent of single female parents and 66 per cent of coupled female parents are now participating in the labour force.

Work Choices continues the creation of a system that enhances the prospects of women in the workforce. ABS labour force data tell us that, in the eight months since Work Choices was introduced, women’s participation in the labour force has risen significantly. The female participation rate stood at a record high of almost 58 per cent in September 2006. Female unemployment has fallen to a 30-year low of 4.8 per cent. The number of women in employment has risen by 117,000. Both part-time and full-time employment for women have reached record highs.

The increased participation of women, particularly those with caring responsibilities, is supported by the range of flexible working arrangements that are now on offer in the workplace. Working mothers in particular are taking advantage of these new flexible and family friendly working arrangements that have been made available to them. The government’s workplace relations reforms make it much easier to negotiate family friendly workplace agreements that meet the needs of individual employees. A good example is Comrec, a small business in Adelaide that employs 22 people, 16 of whom are women. It has reported that, by introducing AWAs, it has been able to negotiate conditions for individual staff that help them with work/family balance, and this helps Comrec by enabling it to retain its skilled workforce in an extremely tight labour market.

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