John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Barker for that question. I am delighted to inform him that we have had some recent evidence of the benefits of flexibility in our workplace relations system. According to the Adelaide Advertiser of today’s date, the City of Port Adelaide Enfield, which is one of the largest councils in the state of South Australia, has negotiated a non-union collective agreement directly with its workforce. This is not an AWA, it is not a common law contract; it is a collective non-union agreement. It is a very interesting collective non-union agreement. It provides for an annual pay rise of four per cent; it is for a period of five years; the staff voted 169 to 93 in favour of the agreement; and 84 per cent of people voted. Interestingly enough, the agreement was opposed by the Australian Services Union, which is the union that has award coverage. They started off on the negotiations but towards the middle they decided to pull out. It is very interesting to read the description given to the attitude of the union by one of the spokespeople for the workforce, Rebekah Yates. This is what she had to say:

“Those guys have a different backing. Their backing is from a national point of view that they’re against WorkChoices,” representative Rebekah Yates said.

“It became apparent that they were not interested in anything else.”

So what you have is a situation where an agreement manifestly for the benefit of the workforce, providing in each of the five years for a four per cent increase, was voted for overwhelmingly by the workforce and opposed by the union. Why was it opposed by the union? Because it is not in the interests of the union movement to support these kinds of agreements. It is not in the interests of the union movement of Australia because these agreements can actually be concluded without the participation of a trade union under the current law. The point I want to make is that, if the Labor Party’s current policy is introduced—if Labor were to win the election and introduce its policy—this kind of agreement would not be possible.

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