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

We had this half-hearted performance today from the Leader of the Opposition. They do not support him but they do not support anybody else. That is the depth to which we have sunk as far as the Australian Labor Party are concerned here. Let us go to some of the data rather than to this overblown rhetoric that we got once again from the Leader of the Opposition. When you strip away that rhetoric, when you strip away all the exorbitant comments that were made, when you strip away this frenzied campaign that the labour movement is engaged in in Australia and when you strip away the lies, the distortions and the hysteria—when you strip all of that away—the reality today is that Work Choices is working. It is working for Australian workers and their families, it is working for Australian businesses and it is working for the economy.

I was amused to note that the Leader of the Opposition is now trying to rewrite his own history. He said just a few moments ago that he had not claimed the sky was going to fall in in Australia. Let us go to what claims were made. At a press conference on 10 October 2005, the Leader of the Opposition said:

This is about slashing wages; make absolutely no mistake about that.

You can hear him saying it in that overblown way—‘No, this is about slashing wages—make no doubt about that whatsoever.’ Of course he was saying the sky was going to fall in in Australia. So let us look at the claims that were made and let us look at a time eight months after Work Choices was introduced—not according to what I say but according to what the ABS economic data shows as a result of Work Choices being introduced on 27 March of this year. The first claim, to quote one of the well-known union officials in Australia, was that Work Choices would be ‘a green light for mass sackings’. Let us examine that claim. Since Work Choices was introduced, we have seen not mass sackings but the creation of 165,000 new jobs in Australia, of which 129,000 are full-time jobs. In the first six months alone, we saw an extremely significant increase in job growth in Australia. Let us put this in a historic context. The average job creation for the same six-month period after 27 March for the last 20 years in Australia was just 70,000 jobs. In other words, the long-term 20-year average job creation rate in Australia for the six-month period following the end of March was just over 70,000 jobs. Yet we have seen 165,000 new jobs created in this country since the end of March. A green light for mass sackings? Hardly!

We have an unemployment rate today in this country which stands at a 30-year low of 4.6 per cent. What were the unemployment figures when the Leader of the Opposition was the Minister for Employment, Education and Training—although probably more accurately described in those days as the ‘minister for unemployment’? There was double-digit unemployment in many parts of this country. It was the job the Leader of the Opposition said he was least interested in in his terms as a minister—the one he said he gave up having an interest in. Today we have a 4.6 per cent unemployment rate.

Mr Deputy Speaker, can I take you back to 1996, when the Workplace Relations Act was introduced in Australia. We had the same dire warnings about what would happen to the economy. We were told then that the sky was going to fall in. Yet since then we have seen 1.9 million jobs created in Australia. So the first claim that Work Choices is about mass sackings and that it would lead to greater unemployment in this country has been proved definitively and absolutely wrong—not according to what I say but according to the data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

The second claim is the one which the Leader of the Opposition now wants to run away from, saying, ‘I did not make these claims.’ But in October 2005 he did say:

This is about slashing wages; make absolutely no mistake about that.

What do we see in Australia? Tomorrow, one million of the lowest paid workers in Australia will receive a $27 a week pay rise by virtue of the first decision of the Australian Fair Pay Commission—a Fair Pay Commission that the Leader of the Opposition has promised to rip up and abolish. Tomorrow the one million lowest paid award reliant employees in this country will get a record $27 increase in their pay packets as a result of the Fair Pay Commission. Is this slashing the wages of Australians?

Wages are growing at about four per cent in Australia at the present time. Since the Howard government came to office, wages have grown in real terms by over 16 per cent. How do those 10 or 11 years compare with the previous 13 years of the Labor government when Kim Beazley had the financial and employment levers in his hands as the responsible minister? Real wages under the Labor government went backwards in this country. Real wages went backwards for the ordinary workers of Australia under the government of which the Leader of the Opposition was a senior member; yet real wages have risen in the last 10 years by 16.4 per cent. The claim that this was about slashing the wages of Australians is proved again, according to the economic data from the ABS and other sources, to be absolutely false.

The Leader of the Opposition said that there is no productivity agenda here—this will hurt the Australian economy. The last release of data in relation to labour productivity shows that that productivity factor is growing by 2.2 per cent in Australia. So the claim that this is going to drive down productivity in Australia has been proved once again, on the official data, to be absolutely wrong.

Then we were told, again by the Leader of the Opposition, that these extreme changes risked dragging us back into an era of heightened industrial conflict. Do you remember the Leader of the Opposition saying that the workers and the bosses of Australia would be at each other’s throats—there would be blood in the streets as a result of the Work Choices legislation coming into place?  Let us look at the data again. Let us look at the record of what has occurred and let us go back to when Mr Beazley, the Leader of the Opposition, was the minister for employment in Australia. At that time the official measure of disputation and strikes—that is, the number of working days lost per thousand employees—stood at 104 working days lost per thousand employees. I ask, rhetorically, what does the latest data show?

Kim Beazley said we would get an outbreak of strikes and industrial disputation. The latest ABS data for the June quarter of this year shows that we have just 3.1 working days lost per thousand employees in Australia. We have the lowest level of industrial disputation in this country since records have been kept—and those records go back before the time of Gallipoli. Records about industrial disputation in Australia have been kept, in one form or another, since 1913. We have the lowest level of industrial disputation in the history of record keeping in Australia. If you look also at what people are earning under this arrangement, you will see people on agreements are earning much more than people under the old award system. People on individual AWAs are earning something like 100 per cent more than the relevant award and 13 per cent more than the equivalent certified agreement.

The Leader of the Opposition cannot even come in here and get his story right when he makes these claims. In the last couple of days—and he repeated them in his contribution earlier—he was making claims about the Commonwealth Bank. What he and the member for Perth failed to disclose when they raised this matter in the parliament—things not being disclosed properly is a fairly common practice—is that the Commonwealth Bank has been offering individual AWAs since 1997, and 8,000 of some 35,000 employees are on individual AWAs and have been in many instances for years. In the certified agreement negotiated by the Financial Sector Union on behalf of Commonwealth Bank employees there is a clause which provides that the bank can offer individual AWAs and that they can be voluntarily taken up by employees. Commonwealth Bank employees obviously knew about and wanted to make use of the advantages of individual AWAs. But we hear nothing about this in the misleading claims brought into the House today.

Again, the Leader of the Opposition says that we have a 2002 certified agreement, but he has failed to disclose—and this is a common practice—that there has been a pay increase every year under that certified agreement from the Commonwealth Bank and that employees, whether new or existing, can make a choice between individual AWAs and certified agreements.

The Commonwealth Bank wants to provide more flexibility by meeting some of its competitors in the financial sector and by opening some Commonwealth Bank branches on a Saturday morning, which will no doubt be to the advantage of many families and individuals in Australia who would like to do some of their banking on a Saturday morning in person and not just at a hole in the wall. Seven hundred jobs are available in some 65 locations around Australia, and the Commonwealth Bank has had 2,300 applications from its employees to work on Saturday morning in those jobs. But, if the Leader of the Opposition had his way, absolutely none of this would occur. Whatever piece of economic data we like to take, the claims made in 1996 and again over the last 12 months by the Leader of the Opposition have proven to be absolutely wrong. The editorial of the Financial Review today says:

The band—

referring to the band at the MCG—

like the class-war rhetoric and ‘everybody out’ tactics, will be straight from the 1970s. Today’s union movement national day of protest against workplace reforms will generate a warm nostalgic glow in the bosoms of participating workers and supporters. But the vast majority of employees will continue on their merry way at work, oblivious to the retro fashions being paraded at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and other protest sites—

and that is the reality. That is the inconvenient truth for the opposition. The overwhelming majority of Australian workers were at work today. They told us that this was a rally to fill the G. I have been to the G a few times. It holds close to 100,000 people. According to the ABC report, they got 40,000 to 45,000 people at the G. This demonstrates the growing disconnect between what is happening for ordinary Australians and the scare campaign by the Leader of the Opposition. You have to ask: why would you engage in a campaign that is detrimental to prosperity in this country and detrimental to Australian workers and their families gaining the benefits over the last 10 years and the last six to eight months in particular under this legislation? The reality is that this is not about the jobs of Australians but about one job—that is, who sits in that seat opposite in the House of Representatives? The Leader of the Opposition is under attack and so he caves in weekly to anybody who might threaten his position.

John Robertson of Unions New South Wales came out and threatened his leadership a few months ago. He turned up a day or so later at the New South Wales union conference saying that he will do what they want and that is rip up Australian workplace agreements. Greg Combet, the Secretary of the ACTU, said, ‘Wouldn’t it be good if we got back to where the unions ran the country again.’ They are doing that through Mr Beazley, whom they support in the ongoing role of leader.

Two of the gentlemen sitting opposite are the greatest supporters in here for Mr Beazley continuing this leadership because they know—perhaps all four of them know—that if there were a change of leadership their jobs would be in danger as well. It is interesting that this morning colleagues of those sitting opposite were talking to the newspapers, saying that their tactics were appalling, that the member for Perth was a dud and that they were going nowhere with this. Why is that? Because they are concentrating on one thing only—that is, who is the Leader of the Opposition? In the meantime, we will get on with the job of governing this country, of managing the economy, so that we can grow more jobs, so wages can continue to grow, so that the prosperity which we enjoy today in this country can be the prosperity which the children of this generation will enjoy into the future.

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