Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I am the minister for jobs. Together with the Treasurer, every other member of the frontbench and all my colleagues in the coalition, I am focused on how we can help to build an economic infrastructure that encourages business to create jobs. In this area, perhaps more than any other, there is a clear difference between the Labor Party’s approach and our approach to economic policy. Our belief is that our laws are evolutionary, that they are responding to the changing workplace. With a flexible system, where people can enter into individual agreements, non-union collective agreements and union collective agreements, we can meet the challenge of a changing workplace in the 21st century.

The Labor Party’s proposal is simply to tear up Work Choices. Their total proposal is that all the ills of the world will be fixed by ripping up Work Choices and returning to the ACTU plan of centralised negotiations and centralised agreements. We reject that and so does the OECD. Interestingly, in its report last night the OECD said that, in countries such as France, Germany and Spain—with stringent employment protection legislation for permanent workers—youngsters and women are crowded out from employment and suffer from erratic career paths. What the OECD is saying is that the most vulnerable people in the community are the most disadvantaged by prescriptive laws that cut to the heart of workplace relations.

The reason why we are freeing up the marketplace and have put in place evolutionary laws is that there has been a comprehensive change in the workplace over the last 10 years—even before that. It was even recognised by Hawke in 1988 and Keating and Brereton in 1993 that the workplace was changing, that individuals were engaging more with bosses to come up with working solutions that were more practical, helped to improve productivity and embraced new technology.

The laws that the Labor Party was so proud of—the laws that governed the workplace in the eighties and early nineties—were so inflexible that they failed to recognise the development of job sharing. They failed to recognise the outsourcing of work to people working from home. They failed to recognise technological change, such as the internet, email, SMS and BlackBerries. They failed to recognise that the global marketplace had changed and that we now had competition in our time zone from China and most of Asia that was cutting to the heart of our economic prospects. And Labor failed to recognise that these laws, and the award system in particular, were so inflexible. And the OECD—not some whacked-up professor from Griffith University—last night again said that the award system is like a ball and chain on the freeing up of the marketplace and the ability of the marketplace to respond with productivity improvements.

The Deputy Leader of the Opposition talks about productivity. It is a fact that, with our workplace changes in 1996, what took five hours to deliver in goods and services now takes four hours. That productivity improvement is not solely linked, of course, to any workplace relations laws, but they are part of the fabric of it that allows people to engage individually. And the people most empowered by that are in many cases the most disadvantaged. That is how you get 4½ per cent unemployment. That is how you have an economy that creates two million jobs. That is how you end up with more people today in full-time employment than at any other time in Australia’s history. That is how you end up with real wages increasing under the coalition by 17.9 per cent compared to 1.7 per cent under the Labor Party for the previous 13 years. That is not by accident; that has come about because of hard work and economic reform, which includes workplace reform.

Yet the Labor Party wants to tear that all up. I know—I am not sure if the Deputy Leader of the Opposition knows—that her proposal to tear up AWAs is going to cut to the fabric of enterprise. On the one hand she says that a lot of the jobs growth is in the mining sector and on the other hand she says she is going to tear up AWAs, and of all the industries the mining sector has embraced AWAs more than any other. She is tearing up agreements that she believes have helped to create disharmony in the workplace, and yet the mining sector, in the belief of the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, is the only thing that is driving our strong economy. In fact, that is quite incorrect. Of the jobs growth that occurred over the February to November period in 2006, only 14,000 jobs were created in the mining sector, 46,400 in wholesale trade—

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