Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industrial Relations) Share this | Hansard source

There were three government contributors to the MPI debate, and not one of them mentioned Work Choices. This is a debate about industrial relations. The member for Moreton was entitled to debate industrial relations in this country but did we hear, at even one point during his contribution, the words ‘Work Choices’? Did we hear even one government member defend Work Choices legislation and the provisions therein? Of course we did not. We understand that government members support Work Choices. They voted for Work Choices, but their polling tells them that Work Choices is poison, so they no longer mention it at all. They no longer mention Work Choices because they know it is political poison. So what they are going to do, between now and the next election, is pretend that they have amended it fundamentally. They are going to try to convince the Australian public—spending taxpayers’ money to do it—that Work Choices legislation has now been fixed and that it is now okay for hardworking Australians.

But the reality is this: Work Choices has not been fundamentally altered whatsoever. We know it has not, because of Senator Minchin’s comments only this year that the government want to make it worse for workers if they are re-elected. We know, and most of the public are beginning to understand, that this Prime Minister has had an obsession with destroying unions for 30 years and, worse than that, hurting hardworking Australian families. That is what Work Choices is about. When the Prime Minister found himself with a majority in both houses of parliament, upon the election of the Howard government in 2004, he decided—even though the policies announced during the 2004 election campaign made no mention of the provisions of Work Choices—to ram Work Choices legislation through the parliament and down the throats of every hardworking Australian. That is what has happened in this parliamentary term, and what has happened since is that there has been polling to show that working Australians believe in a fair go.

It was Labor, not John Howard when he was Treasurer in the eighties, that decentralised the wage-fixing system and introduced enterprise bargaining. It was Labor that changed the economy fundamentally. The reforms that were made to our economy were made by Labor governments. Changes to the industrial relations system were in fact introduced by a Labor government, as was enterprise bargaining and the removal from central wage fixing to bargaining at the workplace level. The difference between Labor and this Howard government is that Labor introduced these reforms without throwing fairness out the back door. That is the fundamental difference. We made sure there was protection for ordinary working Australians so that their penalty rates would not be stripped away and their overtime would not be removed without compensation.

In the last few weeks, the government have tried to convince the Australian people that they have introduced an amendment to the act that will somehow mitigate the adverse effects of the legislation. That is of course not the case. The holes in the legislation that was put to this House only some weeks ago are so big that you could drive trucks through them. The Australian people, the workforce of this country, have had 18 months of Work Choices and now they are going to get 18 weeks of a so-called fairness test—and if the government are re-elected they will reintroduce ‘Work Choices Plus’. They will remove the entitlements from all hardworking Australians. They will continue to strip away the conditions of employment and, if they can destroy unions, they will make it even harder on hardworking Australians.

I am not going to pretend that unions always do everything well. There are occasions when unions do not work well and occasions when they do the wrong thing. No-one in this world is perfect. But in a decent and democratic country, employee organisations are vital. What is the alternative? The Soviet Union? What do you want? Do you want a country without a trade union movement? It is an absolute disgrace. (Time expired)

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