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

I thank the member for Lindsay, whose constituents have certainly benefited over the last 10½ years from a strong economy. There were some documents released this morning called the national accounts. Amongst many other things, the national accounts showed that real wages have now risen by 17.9 per cent. Can I say that again, Mr Speaker: by 17.9 per cent since 1996, compared to a reduction of 1.7 per cent in real terms when Labor was last in government. In addition, there are nearly two million additional extra jobs since 1996. All of these results are good news for Australian families. Of course, there was introduction of Work Choices, which includes as a key element the introduction of Australian workplace agreements. Incidentally, in November the number of new workplace agreements signed was a record, at 33,927, and in the seven months that have gone by since Work Choices came in 181,671 AWAs have been entered into. In a year’s time there will be almost one million Australian workplace agreements. Yet this morning the Deputy Leader of the Opposition has indicated in an interview in the West Australian newspaper that the opposition will stick with the union demanded promise of abolishing AWAs if it is elected.

In other words, one million Australian families are going to have their working lives thrown into chaos by the decision of a Labor government, if it were elected, to abolish AWAs. This will hurt Australian families. It will not only hurt Australian families; it will hurt the industries of Western Australia. The mining industry of Western Australia dreads the idea of AWAs being abolished because AWAs lie at the heart of the success, the prosperity and the progress of the mining industry of Western Australia. We are constantly told by the current spokesman on industrial relations, the member for Perth, that all our economic prosperity comes out of the mining industry. That is not correct, but I certainly acknowledge that the mining industry has been a very important part of it. So far from AWAs being bad news for families, they provide families with higher incomes, the flexibility of working from home, the flexible use of annual leave and sick leave, job sharing, and flexible start and finish times. Yet because the unions want it, the Labor Party would sweep all of this away and throw the working lives of a million Australians into chaos.

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