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

She laughs. She cites a quack of a professor from Griffith University as the absolute authority on these sorts of things. It comes back to this: there is no simple solution in the creation of jobs. If you want to talk about work and family, you need to have one thing—you need to have a job. The government helps to put in place infrastructure that creates jobs.

A lot of the reforms the government have put in place have helped to create jobs, and we recognise that the workplace is changing. Jobs that exist today were in many cases never thought of 10 years ago. The award system, even the collective agreement system that Labor had, was so inflexible that it did not recognise the changing workplace. I heard with interest the Deputy Leader of the Opposition say on Sunday, ‘We believe in having non-union collective agreements.’ Between 1993 and 1996, non-union collective agreements needed the approval of the unions. That is their law; that is what they want to reintroduce. They want the trade union movement front and centre of every piece of the industrial relations laws under the Rudd-Gillard-Combet combo. That is what it is: a combo; a hand-in-glove partnership. We are committed to jobs. We are committed to choice. We are committed to well-paying jobs. We are committed to helping people develop careers. Notwithstanding the changes in the workplace brought about by changing trading environments or anything else, we believe in creating a flexible environment. (Time expired)

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