Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Today I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2007-2008. This budget bill is full of the clever politics we have come to expect from a very clever politician in the form of our current Prime Minister. Finally there is something for our universities. Finally there are tax cuts for low- and middle-income earners. But there are some things which were left wanting in this budget. There was complete neglect on climate change. There was nothing to genuinely address the problems of hundreds of thousands of Australians who go without dental care.

There is another thing that is missing in this budget bill: it did not contain the term ‘Work Choices’. Of course, when the budget was presented we did not publicly know at the time that the Howard government, poll driven as ever, had finally worked out that the terminology ‘Work Choices’ was poison in the Australian electorate. It was before they apparently issued a directive to people who serve on a telephone advice line, answering queries about workplace matters, to look at a sign on a wall which says: ‘We have changed our name to Workplace Infoline; all references to Work Choices should now be changed to workplace relations.’ It was before the Prime Minister had commenced to give long answers in this parliament, studiously avoiding the terminology ‘Work Choices’, and it was before the Prime Minister came into this parliament and tried—unbelievably—to deny that the government’s industrial relations legislation was called Work Choices. But perhaps the Treasurer was the first one to obey the new edict, ‘Don’t mention Work Choices,’ by not mentioning it in his budget speech.

We have known for a long period of time that Work Choices as a term, as a concept, as a package of laws was on the nose. We know, of course, that the government have acknowledged that Work Choices was ripping people off—ripping away their pay rates, penalty rates and overtime rates. It is not the ripping off that the government object to—because they stood idly by, month after month in this parliament, not just neglecting to do anything about this ripping off but delighting in it, coming to the dispatch box and defending it—they are opposed to people thinking they are being ripped off when we are in the shadow of an election campaign. Consequently the government have taken the decision to cleanse the term ‘Work Choices’ because their pollsters have told them to, but they have not cleansed the concept of Work Choices and they are more than happy for the rip-off to continue; they are more than happy for hardworking Australian families to still be ripped off by these laws.

The Work Choices policy started unravelling in the days just before the budget. On the Friday before the budget, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Joe Hockey—who now has been relegated in effect to the minister assisting the Prime Minister on workplace relations—was told to be at a press conference to hear for the first time that the Prime Minister was going to change the workplace relations laws or at least pretend to change them in part. I challenged the minister, when he gave an address on the matter of public importance debate earlier today, to deny the now publicly circulating claim that the first time he heard about the changes to industrial relations laws was while he stood beside the Prime Minister at that press conference. He clearly did not choose to distance himself from that claim so, given he had a full opportunity to do that—15 minutes in the parliament—and did not do so, we are entitled to assume that the minister knew nothing about these changes; he was just told to stand silently at a press conference.

We know that, for the minister for workplace relations, this comes as yet another point in a career that has had spectacular half pikes, double twists and double turns; however, I am sure that on this occasion he would have taken full marks from the judges. On twisting and turning: in the minister’s matter of public importance contribution today, he made some assertions about the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook. Within it, there are expenditure matters that I cannot leave unchallenged because, unless they are challenged on the public record, they could mislead Australians. I would assume that the minister knew when he was making these statements in the parliament that the record is different from how he construed it.

It is true to say that MYEFO recorded, across the forward estimates, what was referred to as the item ‘Workplace relations reform: raising awareness of the Office of Workplace Services and the Office of the Employment Advocate’. That allocation included $7.3 million for the 2006-07 year, $7.2 million for the year after and then $3 million each for the last two out years. This allocation of $7.3 million for the 2006-07 financial year was described as being ‘part of raising public awareness of the services provided by the Office of Workplace Services and the Office of the Employment Advocate’. It specifically said the education and awareness campaign included newspaper and radio advertising.

There are some important matters here. Firstly, this is an allocation to two services that the government has now renamed. Secondly, it is an allocation confined on its face to newspaper and radio advertising. Thirdly, when we asked the government about this in the Senate estimates round following MYEFO in November 2006, the government, as is its wont in Senate estimates and particularly the wont of the minister for workplace relations, refused to provide appropriate details. The government described the allocation as being ‘for targeted educational activities’. When pressed, the government said it was for things like the website, pamphlets and so forth. When asked to provide a breakdown, it was taken on notice and not provided. When asked whether this expenditure would extend to meeting the costs of research activities, polling and market research and the like, the government specifically denied that. Then, of course, the Senate estimates committee got on to the question of how much propaganda was already lying around for the government’s so-called Work Choices laws. The committee was advised by Mr Pratt, from the department, in respect of the number of booklets that they had on hand on 2 November 2006:

At present we have around four million remaining. However, I am advised that over the course of the next couple of weeks, when a back order is processed, we will be down to 3.347 million.

Having opened up this matter, the minister might now come into the parliament and tell us how many of those booklets are going to be pulped because they say ‘Work Choices’ and the government no longer wants to say ‘Work Choices’ and what the waste will be of Australian taxpayer money.

There were major reasons why the opposition did not assume that the new expenditure campaign by the government on industrial relations came from that allocation. The reasons are very simple: the government has clearly polled, and it was denied in Senate estimates that that line item would finance polling. Either the government instructed departmental bureaucrats to not tell the truth then, or it is inconceivable that the minister’s statement in the House today that this is the line item that this campaign is being financed from is correct. Second, the allocation, as I have indicated, is for $7.3 million. We know that just one week’s cost of this campaign in terms of the booked advertisements is more than $4 million. That is before you add in any production costs. So, if you were not going to exceed this line item, it would be impossible to finance a full second week of the campaign. If it costs you $4.1 million for a week of the campaign, maybe you could finance another day or two, depending on what the production costs had been, but you certainly could not even finance a whole second week because that would take you up to $8.2 million plus production costs—in excess of this budget. So if this budget line item was going to support this expenditure then the government ought to have been able to say, when asked at various points: ‘This is the budget line item that supports the expenditure. We will not exceed it. That means that the campaign cannot run as long as two weeks.’ It would have been a very simple answer, but it is a simple answer that has never been given by the government.

Indeed, we had the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations on the John Laws program on 21 May, yesterday, saying, ‘Well, John’—talking to John Laws—‘our advertising booking is less than $5 million.’ John Laws says, ‘A week?’ and the minister says, ‘No, for this first tranche.’ How can there be a second tranche of any substantial nature if all they are spending is $7.3 million and they have spent $4.1 million in a week, plus production costs? So clearly, when the minister was on radio yesterday, he was not saying that the government’s expenditure would be confined to this $7.3 million.

Because we are used to the minister making errors in every interview he does, no-one would think that an error by the minister was anything unusual. But the twisting and turning of the Prime Minister on ABC Radio yesterday is truly extraordinary if the minister has claimed that the only expenditure that is going to be engaged in is the $7.3 million in MYEFO. When he was asked on AM about ‘how much the advertising campaign that you are now putting forward on the fairness test will cost’—that was the question—the Prime Minister said this:

Well, we will make that known. We’ve never said we won’t make it known, but at this stage, while the details of that campaign are being fully settled, it’s not possible to put a precise figure on it.

Can I say this about that advertising campaign? You may have seen it last night.

The Prime Minister then goes on to give descriptions as to what he thinks is the nature of it. Then he is asked:

Well, will you run focus groups after these ads to see if they have worked? And will those results be fed into the Coalition campaign?

The Prime Minister says:

… not going to talk about focus groups. I mean let’s not play that silly game.

He is asked again by the interviewer, Chris Uhlmann:

Well, don’t you sometimes run focus groups after advertising campaigns?

To which the Prime Minister says:

I don’t talk about ways in which the Government tries to interpret what the electorate is feeling. I spend a great deal of time travelling around this country, and a great deal of time listening to people.

He is then pressed again on the question of focus groups, and he says:

I don’t think it is reasonable of me to start going into the details of the myriad ways in which we try and assess public opinion.

So the Prime Minister clearly did not want to give a total quantum for this campaign. If it were being financed by this MYEFO expenditure, he would have said, ‘Yes, there’s a budgeted figure; it’s 7.3 and we won’t spend a dollar more.’ He did not say that. He has left the door well and truly open to spend tens of millions of dollars more than that MYEFO allocation. And the Prime Minister has left the door well and truly open to spending no doubt millions of taxpayers’ dollars on research. He could not have done that out of this allocation, when departmental bureaucrats specifically denied that it would be used for such research purposes.

It is crystal clear that the claim that was made by the minister, during the matter of public importance debate, about the MYEFO allocation cannot be sustained when you hold it up to the light of day. The minister might want to come back into the parliament and clarify the matter. Whilst he is doing that, he might choose to clarify how much polling the government have done on Work Choices—he might even just clarify how much they have done this financial year—what it cost and how much in total in advertising they will spend. If it is $4.1 million a week, will it go for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, 10 weeks, 15 weeks or every week between now and the election campaign? How much will be spent? Will they engage in taxpayer funded polling to assess whether the advertisements are fixing their political problem? He could come into the parliament and clarify each of those.

We know from what the minister has said that we will not see before this parliament the details of the thing that this advertising is supposedly going to until we are in this House on Monday. I state again my strong belief that, on the basis of these facts, all you can conclude is that the government got polling, it designed an advertising campaign and it is now desperately retrofitting a policy to that advertising campaign. That is why the advertising has gone out first and we will see the bill second.

The people squeezed in the middle of that clever, cunning, manipulative politics are honest Australian employers and hardworking Australian employees, who are entitled to clarity in their workplaces about what the law is today. If you were an honest employer today—and this country has millions of them—it would be impossible for you to truly know how to make a legal Australian workplace agreement with someone who earns less than $75,000 a year. If you made an error, you would be liable for back pay later, and that back pay might become payable at the worst of possible times for your business, causing severe cash flow problems and severe problems for the sustainability of the business. The contempt with which this government has treated honest Australian employers and honest Australian employees with this manoeuvre is breathtaking in its sheer arrogance. Honest employers around the country should be ringing up Liberal members of parliament, whether it be their local member or their senator, and saying that they do not want to be treated with this style of contempt by the Howard government.

Of course, when we go to the rest of the federal budget there is more that reveals how ridiculously fake the Howard government’s manoeuvrings are. Overall, the budget reveals that the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations will receive an additional 15 staff. However, the area of the department under which the Office of the Employment Advocate operates—that is under outcome 2 in the budget papers—will actually be cut by 57 staff. The budget also reveals that the Office of the Employment Advocate is being allocated an additional $2.6 million, which is just a seven per cent increase in funding from the previous year. In the year prior to this, funding for the Office of the Employment Advocate increased by 17 per cent. Let us put aside the name change; they are the budget allocations for the new agency that is supposed to administer this so-called fairness test.

The Howard government wants us to believe that, in the year that the agency must implement a new resource intensive process to assess each and every Australian workplace agreement—and the Howard government, of course, tells us that 1,000 new Australia workplace agreements are being signed every day—this will be done in circumstances where the agency will have fewer staff members and will have a smaller increase in their funding than in previous years. We have been told how time and resource intensive this process will be by both the Prime Minister and the Office of the Employment Advocate itself. According to the Howard government, each and every Australian workplace agreement lodged will be assessed against its new test. For the test to work in any way at all, each and every Australian workplace agreement would need to be checked in detail and, specifically, a check will need to be made that proper compensation is received for each protected condition that is stripped away. Of course, ‘protected condition’ is in inverted commas because they are so routinely stripped away that they are not protected at all.

We need to understand the level of detail and scrutiny each and every AWA will require. Pay will need to be checked to see if the so-called fairness test applies, then each and every so-called protected condition will need to be checked to see whether it exists in the agreement or whether it has been stripped away. Then, for each and every condition that has been stripped, a calculation will need to be made of the monetary impact of this condition being stripped away. Then there will need to be a comparison to the total pay in the agreement. But, if the worker has some other form of monetary or non-monetary compensation—say, extra leave or a car parking space or access to training—the impact of these will need to be estimated and this will need to be taken into account when certifying whether the agreement passes the fake fairness test.

The difficulty in such a task has been summed up by Peter McIlwain, who heads the Office of the Employment Advocate, in the following way. He said:

We have considered conducting such analysis. We have looked long and hard at the challenges that that sort of statistical analysis would pose for an agency of the OEA’s size, and I have determined that we will not conduct that analysis ...

He denies, effectively, that it can be done with the kind of resource levels they have.

The Howard government got its advertising campaign, it does not have its law and, even if it had its law, it does not have the inspectors to make sure that its law is anything more than hollow words on a piece of paper. That is clearly what the budget papers provide. It is an undeniable reality and what flows from that is that this is all about clever politics. It is all about fooling the electorate. It is all about cunning politics from this government. (Time expired)

See this speech in context