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

What the Labor Party do not understand—and it could have come about because the Leader and Deputy Leader of the Labor Party have not been in parliament for very long; they are quite inexperienced—is that the way you get economic prosperity is by competing with the challenges both within our own country and outside it. Australia has faced many challenges over the last 100 years. At each moment, leaders have sought to use industrial relations to improve the productivity of the nation. Sometimes they have failed. I note that Ben Chifley tried to refer industrial relations power from the states to the Commonwealth in 1946 and failed. Sometimes they are successful. We were successful in using the referred power of the Corporations Law to create a single national system—in the face of opposition from the Labor Party, ironically. About 50 years after Chifley, we were able to introduce a single system that gave business and workers some certainty. We did it not because it was an easy decision or necessary popular; we did it because it was in the best interests of the nation. That is what good government is about. It is about making hard decisions that are in the best interests of the nation. The reforms that you make today deliver the benefits that are enjoyed by our children and will be enjoyed by children tomorrow.

When we undertook the reform of the taxation system, the Labor Party opposed it. We undertook that reform not because it was easy; it was hard. We undertook it because it was in the best interests of Australia. And thank God we did. For example, how important was abolishing the wholesale sales tax on exports in the face of the ramifications of the Asian financial crisis, when seven out of our top 10 trading partners were in recession or depression? How important was that? How important was it for us to have industrial relations reform on the waterfront when our waterfront was completely dominated by union sectoral interest?

See this speech in context