Julia Irwin (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

How easily they forget. It is no coincidence that both prime ministers fell on this issue. Clearly the second of those, John Howard, did not learn from history and suffered the fate of all those who do not learn from history or, as in his case, rely on their own false version of history. What John Howard—and I might include all members opposite who were part of his government—failed to understand was that fairness in the workplace is one of the most fundamental of all Australian values.

Here was a government that spoke often about Australian values. We had an education minister, who is now the Leader of the Opposition, who would have had his version of Australian values inscribed above the chalkboard of every Australian classroom. And we had an immigration minister who devised a test of Australian values to be passed before you could become an Australian citizen. But nowhere on that list and nowhere in that test was included the fundamental Australian value of fairness in the workplace. Is it any wonder that the member for North Sydney made the shocking confession on Four Corners that some cabinet ministers did not realise that Work Choices stripped away conditions from working people? That just about sums up the value system of those in the Liberal and National parties. When it comes to any understanding of Australian values, they have not got a clue.

The former government thought they knew it all. They thought workers across Australia were too stupid to realise that they were being ripped off. They thought that, if they spent hundreds of millions of dollars advertising the benefits of Work Choices, they could sell Work Choices to the Australian people. When the trade union movement in this country embarked on a sophisticated campaign to tell the truth about Work Choices, the former government spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising campaigns of its own. In the end it was money down the drain. It could not save the Howard government and it could not save Work Choices.

They tried to change the name. They tried a mickey mouse fairness test. But in the end the good ship Work Choices went down and—absolutely fantastic—the skipper went down with it. The union movement’s television campaign drove home the issue to working families and forced the government onto the back foot. We all saw the wasted efforts of the former government’s $100 million advertising campaign. They even trotted out Barbara Bennett, the public servant responsible for the program. But like all ‘I’m from the government; I’m here to help you’ campaigns it was doomed to fail.

Of course, the employers threw in their lot with the government as well. The result is history and so are the careers of so many members of the former government, including the former member for Deakin—the former government’s backbench cheerleader for Work Choices—who raised the issue of Work Choices more than 100 times in this House. We now have a different member for Deakin, an excellent member for Deakin, and he sits on the Labor side of the House.

Still the members of the former government do not know where they stand on workplace relations. They have learned nothing in the past three years and they show no sign of learning anything in the next three years either. They thought they knew it all. They thought they could give us an American-style industrial relations system which would hold down wages, as has been happening in the United States. They thought they could knock over the trade union movement in this country and the Labor Party would be the next domino to fall. Well, they lost and they lost very badly.

What they must now realise is that it would be a very brave conservative government that would try to break the Australian model of workplace relations fairness. There was a gap of 80 years between Stanley Melbourne Bruce and John Winston Howard. Perhaps it will be 80 years before another conservative leader tries to do it again. But whenever it is tried it will fail again and again.

I would like to place on record my congratulations and thanks to the trade union movement—a movement that I have been a member of since the age of 16—for their efforts in the campaign. One thing was obvious from the time the Howard government introduced its Work Choices legislation: it was aimed at killing off the trade union movement in this country. The whole of the labour movement knew that we had our backs to the wall and that, unless Labor was successful in the 2007 election, the unfair workplace laws would become entrenched in this country and trade unions would find it harder to organise and campaign on behalf of working families. The future of the labour movement was at stake.

This factor united the labour movement as never before. It was great to see unions with different factional leadership pitching in to work for the election of Labor candidates. But behind the campaigns was a determined leadership and a conviction to overturn the Howard government’s unfair workplace laws. As I said, the campaign was sophisticated and, I am sure, took many government ministers by surprise. In New South Wales, the Your Rights at Work campaign was possibly the largest and most effective political campaign ever devised. If the government thought that the unions would rely on industrial action in their campaign, they were wrong. Instead of giving up wages in industrial action, union members contributed to the cost of the media, an on-the-ground campaign that made workplace relations the focus of the election in many marginal seats.

I might mention just one person in particular who played a key role in the campaign: a dedicated and talented young woman, Emma Brindley, who worked for the Unions New South Wales Your Rights at Work campaign. Emma devised the merchandising and other on-the-ground strategies for the campaign and travelled from one end of the state to the other, rallying local union members and presenting the union case to the voting public, especially the young public. With other union members, Emma did a great job. They all deserve the wholehearted thanks of Labor members for their efforts. What we are seeing is a new strategy being employed on behalf of working people. Judging by its recent successes in both the New South Wales and federal elections, we can expect to see many more campaigns just like Your Rights at Work.

What members opposite failed to understand throughout the whole sorry history of Work Choices was that sooner or later workers would realise that they were much worse off under arrangements that cashed out entitlements. Usually that realisation came at the end of the financial year, when they found that their annual income had fallen or had not increased, even though they were working more hours. When it came to increased flexibility, which was supposed to be one of the great advantages of Work Choices, workers soon found that the only flexibility was in the hands of the employer.

Rather than it being the favoured system for high-paid jobs in the mining industry, the greatest increase in the number of AWAs was in the hospitality and retail industries. In those industries, flexibility was almost always to the benefit of the employer alone. There never was any flexibility, there never was any negotiation and there certainly never was any fairness. That is the system that this Labor government is tossing into the rubbish bin, where it definitely belongs. In its place will come a new system, one which has input from all sides of workplace relations, not like Work Choices, which was drafted by employers’ legal representatives and passed into law without any input from workers’ representatives. The new system will be put together by a government that definitely understands the great Australian value of fairness in the workplace.

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