Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

There is more than a creeping arrogance about this government when it is led by a Prime Minister and defended by a Treasurer who say the sorts of things we have heard in this parliament in recent days. This is a Prime Minister who told us all yesterday—and it is important that the House pay attention to what the Prime Minister said yesterday—that ‘working families in Australia have never been better off’. According to the Prime Minister, working families under financial pressure have never been better off; working families now struggling with four consecutive interest rate rises have never been better off; working families coping with the four interest rises that the Prime Minister promised at the last election would never happen have never been better off; working families coping with record housing non-affordability, according to recent reports, have never been better off; working families struggling with rising rates of home repossession have never been better off; and working families struggling with skyrocketing child-care bills have never been better off.

Well, I think that we on this side of the House have some news for the Prime Minister. When the Prime Minister starts telling the Australian people that they have never had it so good, you know one thing for certain: we have a Prime Minister who is arrogant and out of touch—arrogant and exceptionally out of touch. What we also know is that when a government is out of touch and is arrogant that is when we see governments going a bridge too far beyond what the Australian people can cope with. I refer, of course, to the industrial relations laws.

What we have with this Prime Minister and this remarkable statement that working families in Australia have never been better off is a Prime Minister who, after 11 long years, is himself out of touch, a Prime Minister who, after 11 long years in office, is now showing signs of arrogance, and a Prime Minister who, after 11 long years, has definitely gone too far when it comes to these industrial relations laws. This Prime Minister has changed. The Prime Minister of old would never have made a slip and said something like that in the past. The Prime Minister of 10 years ago would never have said that. If you go to the Hansard of 27 May 1997—10 years ago—what will you find? You will find the Prime Minister in his political prime lecturing and hectoring the then Leader of the Opposition. What did the Prime Minister then say? He said:

... you will never get from this Prime Minister an arrogant dismissal on the basis of ‘You have never had it so good’ ...

There we have the Prime Minister, 10 years ago, saying that he would never succumb to such hubris, that he would never succumb to such language—until yesterday when he said that Australian families had never been as well off. I have to say that it is reminiscent of the great criticism we had from their side of the House. It goes right back, I think, to the 1970s. Do you remember EG Whitlam saying to Australian farmers that they had never had it so good, and the Prime Minister saying in the mid-nineties that he would never, ever repeat a statement of such arrogance—that people had never had it so good? But, after 11 years in office, we have a Prime Minister so detached from the realities faced by working families across this country that he now says that they have never had it so good.

He did this in response to a dorothy dixer. It was a premeditated response, not a response to some provocation from the opposition and not a response to some loose comment on the run. When the Prime Minister told Australian families that they have never been better off, it was in response to a dorothy dixer, a question from the government’s own ranks. When he said to working families right across the country that they have never had it so good, these statements were delivered by the hubris of having been in high office now for 11 years. I have to say that when you match that remark against the pressures that working families are now under and will prospectively face with these unfair and un-Australian workplace laws, these industrial relations laws, they are words that will indeed come back to haunt the Prime Minister between now and election day.

One of the leading indicators that the government is experiencing a few political problems is when the lights burn late down at Crosby Textor. When the lights are burning late down at Crosby Textor, it is not just that they are increasing their carbon footprint; there are a few other things that are underway as well. It is a sure sign and symbol that life is not proceeding swimmingly in the government ranks, because the challenge being put to Crosby Textor of late has been along these lines: how do we convince the Australian people that these unfair and un-Australian workplace laws are in fact good for people? How do we convince Australian working families that black is white? How do we convince Australian working families that when they lose their penalty rates it is in fact good for them? How do we convince Australian working families that when they lose their overtime payments it is in fact good for them? How do we convince Australian families that when they lose their holiday leave loading that is in fact good for them? That is the challenge for the polling professionals—the Crosby Textor incorporated enterprise.

We now know the outcome of that research project. It is the Prime Minister’s five-part cunning plan for dealing with these unfair industrial relations laws between now and the next election. Part 1 is this: pretend you are Winston Churchill and that you assert that your industrial relations laws are a fundamental national economic reform, even when you have zero evidence to substantiate it. Part 2 is this: pretend that employment growth is the direct product of these IR laws and pretend equally that the mining boom’s impact on economic and employment growth does not exist. Part 3 is this: pretend that the industrial relations laws have generated unprecedented wages growth and pretend that contrary ABS data does not exist. Then there is part 4: claim that the IR laws have heralded unprecedented industrial harmony and ignore the fact that there has been a steady reduction in working days lost since the introduction of enterprise bargaining back in the first part of the 1990s. Part 5 of the five-part cunning plan is this: if parts 1 through 4 fail, then simply return to old faithful: blame the unions, blame the states and blame your Aunt Nellie, particularly if your Aunt Nellie happens to be a paid-up unionist, because at the end of the day the unions become the scapegoat for everything which this government claims is going wrong with Australia’s national economy.

That is the five-part script, and we are going to hear that script from now until polling day. What we know about it is that it is poll driven. It is driven by their market research company because they have concluded that these are the best political spin lines for them to convince Australian working families that black is white and white is black.

There is a problem with the five-part logical presentation and that is that there is no logic to it. When we go to the essence of it, the whole proposition collapses. The first argument the Prime Minister puts is that this is an essential element of national economic reform. That is his proposition. He has repeated it day in and day out. If you listened to the Fran Kelly interview this morning on Radio National, it did not matter what question was asked, you simply got the five-part response. The question could be: has the sun come up today? The answer will be part 3 of the five-part response: blame the unions. It is simply preprogrammed, and we will hear it day in day out from Minister Hockey, who is here at the dispatch box, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer. They will simply repeat key lines and themes from Crosby Textor.

On the first proposition, that this is essential for national economic reform, here are some basic questions: if it was such an essential element of national economic reform you would have thought this government would have taken it to the Australian people before the last election, but did they? It was not faintly in evidence in any proposition which the Liberal Party put to the Australian people prior to the last election. Why do we have this before us? Because they got lucky, got control of the Senate and said, ‘Bob’s your uncle’. They abused the whole doctrine of mandate. It was not any element of their pre-election program for national economic development. If it was an essential element of national economic reform, wouldn’t you have owned it with pride prior to the last election? But, no, it was hidden, because they knew that if they put it to the Australian people at that time, they would have been thumped on.

The second is this: if it was a serious piece of national economic reform, why is it that the government did not go through the basic test of submitting it to the Treasury to be modelled in terms of what productivity yield would be given to the Australian economy as a consequence of implementing this set of industrial relations changes? If it is not just an exercise in ideology; if it is not just an exercise in union bashing; if it is not just an exercise in transferring wealth from those who are employees to those who are employers; if it was a serious exercise in productivity enhancing reform, why was it not submitted to the Treasury for basic modelling? We have never had an answer to that.

The reason was that it was driven by ideology, and the data on productivity speak very clearly. Productivity growth between 1993 and 1998 was 3.2 per cent growth per annum. Then you get to the period 1998-99 to 2003-04—productivity growth starts to decline. One of the reasons why we see productivity growth coming off in that period is that this government went to sleep on the principal tasks of national economic reform during the first decade of its office. When you see the key reforms made by the Hawke and Keating government through the eighties and nineties, you realise this government effectively went to sleep, which is reflected in the fact that the productivity growth rate started to fall.

Then you have data on productivity growth, which extends across Australian jurisdictions. Look at Western Australia: when individual contracts were promoted in the 1990s under the Liberal-National government of Western Australia, labour productivity growth fell to less than four per cent a year. When Geoff Gallop’s Labor government abolished these contracts, productivity growth shot up again to over six per cent per year.

Look at the data for New Zealand: in 1991 New Zealand moved to individual contracts with the Employment Contracts Act. At the same time Australia moved to enterprise bargaining. While both nations had similar productivity growth before the early nineties, afterwards Australia’s productivity growth grew twice as fast. Australia’s embrace of collective enterprise bargaining from 1991 produced productivity growth of 29 per cent in the 1990s, while New Zealand’s embrace of a system based on individual contracts resulted in productivity growth of just 14 per cent in the same period. New Zealand professor of economics Paul Dalziel observed that the Employment Contracts Act:

... appears to have marked the end of a long period of strong comparability between New Zealand and Australian labour productivity growth, to New Zealand’s great disadvantage.

In 2004 in New Zealand, a Treasury report said that individual contracts discouraged employers from innovation and investment to the detriment of the country in general and to wage-earners in particular. Professor Mark Wooden, well known as a longstanding conservative advocate of industrial relations deregulation, stated in September 2005:

... the biggest gains for productivity still revolve around a system which is collectively based ...

The data is there. The whole proposition upon which this bogus argument is advanced is that it is essential to national economic reform to proceed with their Work Choices legislation simply falls over at every piece of evidence which exists. Again, it fails the basic test that when it comes to serious propositions of national economic reform, if you are serious about them, you would ask the Treasury for their advice.

Then there is a second argument that somehow employment growth of the last 10 months has been the exclusive product of their industrial relations legislation. Pigs might fly! This is the greatest put on that we have had in any serious debate of employment data since employment data was created. We all know the enormous impact that the mining boom has had, in Western Australia and in Queensland in particular, and the flow-on effects of the mining booms in terms of employment generation. For government ministers to stand here at the dispatch box and seriously tell the Australian people and serious economic commentators that this is a product of their industrial relations legislation of the last 10 months frankly defies belief.

Then we come to the next argument—that somehow these industrial relations laws have generated unprecedented wages growth. Go again to the ABS data: Australian women on AWAs who work full time earn on average $2.30 less per hour, or $87.40 less per week based on a standard 38-hour week, than those on collective agreements—that is a fact, Minister. Australian women on AWAs who work part time earn $3.70 less per hour, $85.10 less per week based on an average 23 hours per week, than those on collective agreements—that is a fact, Minister. And Australian women on AWAs who work as casuals earn $4.70 less per hour for every hour they work than those on collective agreements—another fact, Minister.

All these facts add up to one proposition: the argument that the government advanced, that somehow unprecedented wages growth has been the product of these industrial relations initiatives on their part, simply falls foul of the most basic survey of the ABS data. The same goes for their proposition on a reduction of industrial disputation, a trend line which has been in evidence since we introduced enterprise bargaining in the first half of the nineties. These four arguments driven by Crosby Textor are simply this: politics, pure and simple, crafted for a clever politician to try and advance an argument that black is white and white is black. The Australian people, led by Pru Goward, know that industrial relations legislation advanced by this government is a dog. It smells like a dog. It barks like a dog. It is a dog, and the reason it is a dog is that it undermines wages and conditions for working families right across this nation. The Australian people know it, and that is why they will condemn it at the next election.(Time expired)

See this speech in context