Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, they don’t like it because they know that Work Choices is at the heart of why people no longer trust the Prime Minister, John Howard, and the Treasurer, Peter Costello. Prior to the 2004 election, Work Choices was never mentioned. The government did not seek a mandate for Work Choices or anything that resembled it. The member for Moreton did not take this to the people in Moreton at the last election. When, thanks to Queensland, John Howard won an unexpected Senate majority, he went on national television, put his hand on his heart and declared before the people that he would not abuse or misuse the mandate that he had been unexpectedly given. But he has been abusing that mandate ever since then. Nowhere is that more evident than it is in Work Choices—and the Australian people know it.

The Australian people have good reason not to trust a pre-election Prime Minister and a pre-election Treasurer. They have more form than a Melbourne Cup race book. The Australian people also know that if the Prime Minister is re-elected we will not only see a return to Work Choices as we have known it; the Prime Minister will go further. If the Prime Minister is re-elected we will see harsher industrial relations laws in this country. Why do we know that? Because his key supporters have said precisely that. He believes in these laws. His key supporters believe in them and that is why they will make them harsher if they are re-elected. Senator Minchin told the HR Nicholls Society, when he did not know that a journalist was in the room, that Work Choices was only the first instalment in the government’s IR plans. The Treasurer has not ruled out harsher laws either. We have the finance minister and the Treasurer all on the record leaving open the possibility of making these laws harsher after the next election.

What is now clear from the bill that is before the House today is that the government now know they have gone too far with their extreme laws, which rip away penalty rates and other conditions. They know they are out of step with the Australian community, so what they are trying to do is to beat a temporary retreat, to pretend that somehow they have wound back these laws. They are not fooling anyone with this attempt at an extreme makeover and a political retreat. Why is it that they have instructed the Workplace Infoline to drop the name ‘Work Choices’ from its language? Why is it that they are spending millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on political advertising just a few months out from the election? It is to save their political hide, but I think the Australian people have seen through this mob.

This bill is about clever politics. It is not about good policy; it is about creating a perception. It is not about restoring sound process. It will take a lot more than a multimillion-dollar taxpayer funded advertising campaign to restore balance to Australia’s industrial relations system. The bill says there is a new test which is somehow supposed to strengthen the security of Australian families and working Australians. But there are holes so big in this test that you could drive a truck through them. They have not put a safety net in place or, if they have, it has gigantic holes in it. It is a small step forward, but the fundamental unfairness of this legislation remains. Its elements are ill defined and it does not protect basic conditions Australian families rely on. Of course it comes with a bureaucratic army: two new institutions—the Office of the Workplace Ombudsman and the Workplace Authority—and a compliance framework, we have learnt, which will involve recruiting 600 inspectors to make the system work.

If fairness has been restored, why is there a need for 600 inspectors? If they have gone all the way to restore these conditions, why do they need 600 inspectors? Is it not the case that the laws are still unfair? That is why 600 inspectors are required. Instead of policing bad laws, what about putting in place fair laws in the first place? I will tell you why. Because they are not committed to fair laws. They are committed to an extreme makeover just before the election. They will come back after the election and go down the same road again, and double it, because that is the record of the Howard government.

Compared with the system the government introduced last year, these changes may improve the situation for some people, and that is a good thing. I am not convinced it will, but I cannot see how it will make them worse. So for this reason we do not want to prolong the uncertainty caused by these changes. We will not seek to delay the passage of this bill through the parliament, but we have very serious concerns, as the Deputy Leader of the Opposition has already noted. We are concerned that these changes do nothing to protect important award conditions, such as redundancy, rostering protections, long service leave and so on. There is a lack of detail about the meaning of terms like ‘fair compensation’, ‘exceptional circumstances’ or ‘compensation of significant value’. There is disturbingly little scope for scrutiny of the decisions made by the Workplace Authority under these changes.

In short, there is nothing in these amendments that diminishes our resolve to repeal Work Choices and replace it with a system that delivers an appropriate balance between the flexibility needed by a business and the security needed by employees and their families. A sensible and modern industrial relations system takes a middle path that balances flexibility needed by business with security needed by employees and their families and this bill does not achieve that. It certainly goes nowhere near that middle path—the middle path put forward by the Labor Party in this parliament.

If we are to build prosperity into the future beyond the mining boom, current policies need to be directed to lifting productivity and harnessing the talents and abilities of all of our people. The government can dress its industrial relations laws up in all the taxpayer funded spin and propaganda it likes, but this will not alter the fact that the government’s Work Choices industrial relations laws will do nothing—I repeat: nothing—to boost productivity, which has gone backwards in relative terms, on this government’s watch. This government’s failure to invest in the drivers of productivity, despite the rivers of gold flowing from the mining boom, is one of the most significant policy failures in its 11 long years at the helm. The government has been led by a narrow ideological agenda and it has been increasingly forced to rely on desperate arguments to justify the benefits of Work Choices. The first desperate economic argument that it puts is that Work Choices has been responsible for our recent jobs growth. This is one of the great cons of the Howard era.

Despite the strongest world economy in more than three decades and a once-in-a-generation mining boom, the Prime Minister would have us believe that Work Choices is responsible for 326,000 jobs created over the 13 months since March last year. This is a whopper. As porkies go, it is a whopper. This is just another economic myth of the Prime Minister designed to detract attention from the fact that the government has no plan to build prosperity beyond the mining boom.

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