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

I am talking about the bill. This is what this bill is all about: the relationship between employer and employee. It is not true, as Labor have promoted, that every employer is a rogue. That is the message that you were sending across. You sent that to big business and small business. Your shadow spokesman at the time threatened them with retribution if they did not fall into line, and had to be called to account. Who by? By the then opposition leader, Mr Rudd. He had to call the now Deputy Prime Minister of this country to account. However, I digress.

This is about the relationship between employer and employee. This argument has been going on in this place for 100 years. I do not believe that Labor in office will make the sorts of changes that you are promoting that you will make. I do not think that you will be able to pay this $20 million debt to the union movement. I do not think that they will get all they want from you, because there are people out there who know that this country will run better while we have this industrial relations program. I am quite supportive of what you have put forward, because you have individual workplace agreements. I am supportive of that. I cannot go back on what I have said before. I am a person who supports flexibility in the workplace, and I will continue to support flexibility in the workplace.

There has never been a time when you could not join a union in this country and could not have the union go in to bat for you. I will give you an example. I will go back a bit and I will talk about the relationship between the unions and me, because it is important. When we were doing those regional forests agreements, the CFMEU rang me and said, ‘We are not at that roundtable that you are about to have with the Prime Minister.’ I rang Graeme Morris, who at the time was the PM’s offsider. I said, ‘Graeme, the CFMEU want to be at the table.’ He said, ‘I’ll have to talk to the boss’—John Howard—‘about that.’ He did. The member for O’Connor sat next to the Prime Minister at that roundtable. I knew that my unions in my area were represented at that table. That is how we work.

I say to the members in the House that our relationship and what we did—and when I say ‘we’ I am talking about Gary Blackwood, the Russell North representatives, Peter McGauran and I—were totally in support of workers and unions in our area. We have never moved from that. And, by the way, they did not forget it at the last election, either. They did not forget who had been their supporter and who had looked after them and represented them in this place. That is why they voted the way they did in McMillan: because they had a representative, they knew that they had a representative and they supported that representative.

There were people who felt that they needed collective bargaining support. There is no doubt about that. They had their say. Obviously, 40 per cent of people were concerned about Work Choices. Whether Work Choices was the catalyst for discontent with the government or time was up, nobody knows. But what we do know is that the people of Australia have spoken, and I for one respect what they have said. I believe that the shadow minister, the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, has very clearly stated her case and been very clear about where we stand as a party and what we are prepared to put forward to this parliament. But you must remember that there are consequences. If you get this wrong, there will be consequences. Governments cannot afford to get things like this wrong, because they affect the lives of individual people.

A lot of people have gained employment in this country under the excellent economic management of the Howard government. We have had very low unemployment and reasonable interest rates—especially compared to what I have been used to in the past, when interest rates were 22 per cent for small businesses and 18 per cent for households and you had something like 20 per cent of people unemployed. I remember those things. I do not expect everybody in the House to remember those things. I do. I see interest rates at eight per cent, and that is what I was paying 35 years ago when we moved into our house.

These things are important for the daily lives of people. As I said the other day, these laws are important because they affect those at the bottom level of employment—such as those people along the eastern seaboard who got jobs under the Howard government. I believe that the Howard government will be seen by history as having a proud record of economic management and that the Treasurer of the day, Peter Costello, will be seen to have managed this economy very well. Who were the beneficiaries of that? Not the old union movement, with their ‘We’ll keep the jobs for our boys, thank you very much, and lock in the jobs for them.’ Instead, the jobs filtered down to those who were less skilled, unskilled and unable to get a job. If we have one responsibility as parliamentarians in this place it is to have regard to those people who are least able.

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