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

The hero of that was, of course, Greg Combet. And there was the person who thought he had been made to look a bit of a village idiot in that program. He did not like his appearance. We all have problems when our appearances are depicted, and we should not be too sensitive about that. But I thought it was a very interesting revelation: here was Greg Combet, right on song, saying, ‘Yes, real wages have risen over the last 10 years.’ In fact, if you look at the last 10 years, they have been very good years for the Australian people. They have been good years for the battlers, they have been good years for low-income earners, but they have been increasingly bad years for union bosses because most of the predictions of union bosses have not come to fruition, and that of course is why the union bosses are so keen to reverse the drift of power away from them and to return the government of this country to those whom they believe it should belong—that is, themselves.

When I am asked this question about real wages growth, I am reminded about the importance of productivity. I listened to an interview on AM this morning where the Leader of the Opposition struggled rather pitifully to get on top of the concepts of productivity. Let me tell the Leader of the Opposition that productivity, loosely defined, is output per worker. He did not seem to understand that. He did not seem to know that, in the last national accounts, increases in productivity had been recorded. All he could do was to recite a bit of a mantra about how there was a productivity rise in the 1990s, that there was a long-term productivity trend of 2.3 per cent, that it had fallen away, and that we were all ruined if we did not elect a Labor government. I wondered where I had heard that before. I picked up my now well-thumbed copy of the dirty tricks manual issued by the ACTU, and I looked under ‘productivity’. These words came echoing back to me; this is what it had to say:

The statistics reveal productivity growth has fallen. Prior to the 1983 accord, productivity was 2.3 per cent. The Labor enterprise bargaining reform facilitated a productivity peak at an annual rate of 3.2 per cent, in contrast to the first Labor cycle. Since Howard’s first workplace reform, productivity has fallen back to 2.3 per cent.

That is exactly what the Leader of the Opposition was arguing this morning. When he was asked by the interviewer whether he had read the national accounts, he did not answer the question and, when he was asked whether he understood them, he did not answer the question.

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