Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Hasluck for her question. Of course, she is a Western Australian in this place, and the first set of data I want to go to relates to Western Australia. The ABS data released yesterday shows that in Western Australia the wage price index for the private sector rose by 6.4 per cent for the year to December, well above the national average of 4.2 per cent. By industry, Australia-wide, the highest rates of increase in the wage price index over the year to the December quarter 2007 were in mining, an increase of 5.1 per cent, whereas wholesale trade saw the lowest increase, of 3.2 per cent. ABS average weekly earnings data released today tells the same story. There is continued strong growth in adult ordinary time earnings, by 4.7 per cent, in the year to November 2007, with large rises of 7.4 per cent in mining and 11.6 per cent in construction for the year to November 2007, and also large increases in property and business services and cultural and recreational services. Wage growth in full-time adult ordinary time earnings is highest in WA for the quarter.

All of these increases, of course, happened under the Liberal Party’s workplace relations system, Work Choices. It is no mystery, when we look at these figures, that wages growth is strongest in those industries and those parts of the country where skilled labour shortages are at their most acute. The Rudd Labor government knows that managing wage inflation is not about using Work Choices or Australian workplace agreements or individual statutory employment agreements of any nature to cut the pay and conditions for Australians who are most at risk at work. Rather, containing wage inflation is about having an enterprise based, decentralised workplace relations system, one of course that Labor is committed to. But it is also about tackling the underlying cause of this wage inflation, which is skills shortages and capacity constraints.

Unfortunately the Liberal Party engaged in 12 years of neglect of the skills agenda and allowed these skills shortages to become a critical problem. The lazy attitude of the Liberal Party was probably best summarised by the member for Goldstein, who was then the Minister for Vocational and Further Education, when he told an industry group last year:

… we’ve got a problem with skill shortage.

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I mean we knew it was coming but it has arrived with a force.

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And you know, it’s only going to get worse.

On tackling skills shortages in this country, the Liberal Party, like the member for Mayo, were out to lunch—not much verve being shown there, not much verve at all. Apparently it is okay for the Liberal Party to be out to lunch and for the member for Mayo to be out to lunch—

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