Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to rise in this matter of public importance debate on business confidence this afternoon. As we know from the Sensis reports, the key issues that are affecting business confidence are increasing interest rates, due to the member for Higgins; a skills shortage that occurred on the watch of those opposite; and staff retention. One of the biggest reasons they have problems with staff retention is that good working Australians will not sign their stinking contracts. I can tell you, though, that there is one measure of business confidence that did not change throughout 2007: business was very, very confident that the 2007 election would be won by the Australian Labor Party, and they were right about that.

I will talk for a couple of moments about some of the contributions that have been made. The member for Cowper indicated that he felt that business was unhappy with the decisions being made by our government in this place. Business is just going to have to get used to having a federal government in this place that sticks by what it says in election campaigns it is going to do and delivers on its election promises, and I do not think any one of us would make any apology for that. The member for Moncrieff had 10 minutes in which about the only worthwhile contribution he made was to indicate that the key asset for small business is its employees. I accept that, that is a truth, but principled employers have been caught between a rock and a hard place. They have been caught between the need to be competitive with others in their industry—and following them down the path of ripping off pay and conditions from their workers—or facing bankruptcy. I do not want to say too much about the cheap shot that the member for Moncrieff made about the Minister for Small Business, Independent Contractors and the Service Economy not being here for the debate and then packing his bags up and taking off out the door straight away himself. He shows absolutely no interest in this debate this afternoon either.

I always enjoy this one. The member for Curtin raised this one: ‘We have got the lowest unemployment for 34 years.’ If the member for Curtin takes some advice from me and takes her shoes off, uses her fingers and toes and counts back 34 years, she will find out the Prime Minister at that time was a fellow by the name of Edward Gough Whitlam. Thirty-four years ago unemployment was lower, and in those days you needed a full-time job to be counted as somebody who was employed, not just an hour a week.

The opposition like to sing the praises, as the member for Curtin did, of the coalition’s economic management. At a conference dinner in Sydney in 2007, John Howard delivered a speech which must have had them choking on their prawn cocktails. He talked about the five greatest economic advances of the last 20 years. He named them and he gave the Labor Party credit for 2½ and he took credit for 2½ himself. The first two of those five economic advances were the deregulation of the banking industry and the floating of the dollar; he said that the ALP were responsible for those, and that is great; you can now hear the opposition choking in retrospect. The next was tariff reform, and he shared that with the ALP; he thought that was good. And, for himself, he claimed tax reform and industrial relations reform. The GST and Work Choices were what John Howard was most proud of—the two most hated policies that have ever gone through this parliament.

Let me tell you what the people opposite have done in terms of encouragement for business. In their term in parliament, they encouraged businesses to treat their workers impersonally. They encouraged businesses to ignore the impact of their actions on wage earners’ dependants. They encouraged business people to behave in a way that I consider un-Australian—behaviour that certainly did not offer a fair go for working Australians and certainly was not what those people who came before us sought to establish as a hallmark of this country. The opposition established a regime whereby the most unscrupulous employers could rip away wages and conditions from their employees, and if their more principled competitors wanted to stay in business they were forced to follow suit. We hear that the opposition did not know that that is what they did. The member for North Sydney told us that the frontbench of the now shadow cabinet—the then cabinet—did not know that their legislation was capable of doing that.

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