Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker Andrews, I am sorry you are leaving the chair at this stage because you were so much a part of the success of the former government. When we hear from the member for Newcastle about the situation she has just raised with the OneSteel employees, we know it is the fact the government has been handed a Holden Statesman, state-of-the-art, powerful economy that is going to allow those people who have lost their positions, or who have been made redundant, to go on and get a job. Their skills will be claimed and nurtured by the rest of Newcastle. That would not have been the case before the Howard government came to power.

I am reminded that, over these last 10 years, there were those who made constant criticisms of the Howard government. No government will ever go without criticism. Also, it is very easy to be against something—for 10 years, it was very easy for people to be against whatever the Howard government did—but it is very hard to be for something, to look at what could be the best for our community and to chase that down, to look at ways that we can encourage people into the workforce and grow our workforce right across the nation. I cannot forget the power of small businesses as a result of the changes to the industrial relations that we are talking about today.

These changes started in the Hawke-Keating years and went through into the Howard years. Perhaps the Australian people said at the last election, ‘You’ve taken them one step too far.’ But what we have today is the political reaction. The legislation before us today, the Workplace Relations Amendment (Transition to Forward with Fairness) Bill 2008, is the political reaction to the election that we have just had and to the conversation that we had with the Australian people about Labor’s position as against the government’s position over the 12 months in the run-up to the election. But we should understand that this new Labor government has a debt of $20 million to pay to the union movement. Part of this legislation is clearly to pay that debt. Coming out of small business myself, my concern is that the response of the new government will go too far and it will begin to offend the strong economy that has been handed to it.

In an interview with Gerard Callinan—radio ABC Gippsland—former minister Peter McGauran, the member for Gippsland, was asked: ‘What was so different about your seat of Gippsland and Russell Broadbent’s seat of McMillan in this election campaign? And what was the difference in the state election?’ Peter McGauran explained that Gippsland does not take its current prosperity for granted. We are different. I know there are parts of Australia that have gone through massive change and that people have had to reskill or go into different areas, but Gippsland has been different.

On the industrial relations front, our unions know very well that their local members have supported them over a long period of time. Going right back to when I was the member for McMillan from 1996 to 1998, I remember how we were working through the regional forest agreements with the support of the union movement. There were changes in the pulp and paper industry. There were changes in the dairy industry that we had to deal with. There was the loss of white-collar jobs throughout the whole of Gippsland. There were massive changes to the power industry with its privatisation. That caused very high levels of unemployment and enormous pressure on the community.

As members of parliament—and I describe Peter McGauran; me; Gary Blackwood, the member for Narracan; and Russell Northe, the member for Morwell—we are but reflections of our community, the times that we have been through and the unions that we have worked with. Industrial relations is very, very important to us—the power industry, the pulp and paper industry and the enterprise agreements. Small businesses were very happy with the unfair dismissal provisions that the coalition government put in place; they made changes to the legislation of the previous government. The extremity of what we went through as a community meant that the whole of Gippsland was a hair-trigger for the nation. The reason the attack from Labor fell on deaf ears across Gippsland was that the unions—the people in the community—knew that their members in parliament were reflecting their concerns in this place and wherever else they needed to.

From Peter McGauran’s activity and his support for me in regard to dairy farmers most recently, I know that he is listening closely to his community. Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, after receiving a phone call from home, I can report that it has been raining in Gippsland since early this morning. You might think that that is no big deal for Gippsland. Queensland has been having enormous problems with rain, but we have been aching for rain for a long time. So, on behalf of my dairy farmers and my local community, I want to let you know that it is raining in Gippsland and that that is good news. Good news was part of our election campaign. We talked about the positives. The negative was not going to run in McMillan and Gippsland because we had taken a long time to get to this point of prosperity.

It was embarrassing to have 25 per cent of the kids in your area out of work. There was no answer for it. What were you going to say—75 per cent got a job? What about when 18 per cent of your community could not get a job? In some parts of Gippsland unemployment is still high. What we saw with the Howard government’s strong and careful economic management and in the thrust of industry and small businesses down the eastern seaboard of Australia—and no-one can disagree with this—was the creation of some 250,000 jobs. That was only in the last three years. It is about real people with real jobs. What were those jobs? My argument here is that, if Labor are going to overreact on this issue, they will do damage to those people who received those jobs—and they were not part-time jobs.

What would an employer do if they were worried about an employee coming on? They would put them on part time and if it did not work out they would cut their hours. What did they do this time? In this last three-year period, they put them on full time, 95 per cent of them worked out, the employers were happy, the employees were happy and nearly 250,000 people got jobs. This has got to the point where the unemployment figures across Gippsland that I just talked about, which were so high, have come down to less than five per cent over most parts of Gippsland. That is remarkable. It is remarkable for the nation that the unemployment rate could be down to 4.1 per cent. It must have galled the opposition during the Howard government years that there were such remarkable economic figures and such remarkable budget surpluses.

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