Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Wow! I have heard quite a bit of rhetoric in my time, but that was right out there. ‘Clever politician’—let us think about that a bit. This is said by members opposite as a derogatory statement. What is the opposite of it? A stupid politician? Is that what your leader is? Clearly, being a clever politician is something bad. Then we have the member for Rankin saying that we are misrepresenting Labor policy. Maybe representation or misrepresentation of policy is in the eye of the beholder. But there can be no misrepresentation of the results that the Labor Party had last time they were in government. Have a look at what we had with their IR policy: a huge number of people unemployed, high interest rates and a large amount of industrial disputation. The problem is that the member for Rankin does not seem to realise that in life, in reality, there are no such things as absolute, cast-iron guarantees. He said, ‘The Prime Minister didn’t guarantee no-one would be worse off.’ I guess, by implication, he is saying that the Labor Party guarantees that no-one will be worse off. The Labor Party had the sorts of policies where they made those sorts of guarantees back in the early nineties, including the introduction of things like unfair dismissal and so on. But what do you say to the person who loses a job? Suddenly they become a lot worse off. How do you define and categorise that person in terms of your ‘not worse off’ policy?

Quite frankly, the Labor Party would do very well to follow the industrial relations legislation that this government has introduced, because what you have seen is that the further you deregulate the workplace market the better off the results will be. It has been clear right through our liberalisation of the industrial relations market. Indeed, if you look around the world you see that the level of economic performance of a nation is pretty much proportional to how deregulated their industrial relations market is. Labor’s position: let’s re-regulate the market. You can see in old Europe the results that would flow from that. I think that old Europe is starting to realise the problems with a highly regulated labour market.

Having said that, clearly there has been a problem as far as the Work Choices act is concerned, as far as some of the fairness provisions are concerned. The Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007 recognises those issues and seeks to address them by establishing a Workplace Ombudsman and a Workplace Authority Director as statutory officeholders appointed by the Governor-General, creating an office of the Workplace Ombudsman and the Workplace Authority as statutory agencies, requiring the Workplace Authority Director to be satisfied that specified workplace agreements provide fair compensation in lieu of modification or exclusion of protected award conditions that apply to an employer or employee and establishing a compliance framework to ensure effective operation of the fairness test.

What has Labor offered? So-called policy that will take Australia back to an antiquated system that belongs to the last century. Let us look back once again at the antiquated system that Labor want us to have. Think back once again to when they were last in government. Go back to 6 May 1993 when this exchange took place with Kim Beazley on the 7.30 Report. The interviewer said:

So this group are being told, in their twenties, by society, effectively: You’re the losers; go to the scrap heap.

Mr Beazley said:

Well, those who haven’t made it into work and who are among the long-term unemployed, that’s a reasonable statement.

What an absolute disgrace. Labor’s policy—(Quorum formed) Labor clearly cannot take the truth. Indeed, have a look at the last time they were in government. They had such a bad performance on unemployment that they tried to redefine unemployment so that the numbers did not look so bad. Let us have a look at it. Back on 30 May 1993, Kim Beazley—

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