Bob McMullan (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for International Development Assistance) Share this | Hansard source

I recall from a rather bitter 11 years that the question time and the MPI on budget day are really painful when you are in opposition, and I have never seen a more obvious example of it. I never enjoyed it, and I cannot recall but I suppose a time or two I had to deliver the MPI on budget day, because it is a short-straw system and someone always draws it. But there is no question that the Deputy Leader of the Opposition showed the strain of having to cope with drawing the short straw.

Let us have a look at the issues that this debate is actually supposed to be about. It is about the industrial relations changes and inflation. It is about issues of freedom of information and open government. Let me talk first about industrial relations and then I will talk about freedom of information, open government and a few related issues along the way. The core reality of contemporary industrial relations is this: the opposition still wants AWAs and the government does not. There is a lot of other debate. There are a lot of issues that go backwards and forwards about the relative merits of this subclause and that paragraph, but there is a core issue—and it is the core issue the Australian people passed a judgement about at the last election. Do we want to have our industrial relations system based on individual contracts or do we want to have our industrial relations system based on the collective rights of working people? That is the core question, and it is the core question that, strangely, the shadow minister did not talk about. But that is where the change exists.

It is not the issue that determines whether industrial relations will drive up inflation. That relates to whether or not your model is enterprise based—not whether it is individual or collective but whether it is enterprise based. The data is very clear. From the time that this country shifted to an enterprise based model as a result of the 1993 reforms to industrial relations—which I had the privilege of putting through the Senate at that time, over some strenuous opposition from the then opposition—the shape and character of inflation in this country have changed significantly. You would think, if this government’s industrial relations changes—moving away from the collective based model to an individual one—were going to cause inflation, that the introduction of Work Choices and the introduction of the individual based model would have reduced inflation. But the problem is, in the period after the introduction of Work Choices, inflation went up.

I do not know if that inconvenient fact is going to arise in the course of any of the contributions from members of the opposition. But, if you look at the first quarters of 2006—in the period immediately after the introduction of Work Choices—you will see that unemployment went up in the March quarter, it went up in the June quarter and it stayed above the December 2005 level for about 15 months. So this revolutionary anti-inflationary measure was remarkably counterproductive. The truth of it is, of course, that the factors underlying inflation are much more complex than the sort of puerile assessment we occasionally get from people who think that if only you attack workers’ rights you will do something good about inflation. The core reality of our industrial relations contest is not about inflation; it is about whether you believe in collective rights or individual contracts. It is a fundamental difference and it is a difference around which the current opposition cannot make up its mind.

The issue has been raised of whether the minister in question or the Treasurer have received advice that the government’s policies on industrial relations will lead to inflation. My advice both from the Deputy Prime Minister and, through her, from the Treasurer is that neither of them has received any such advice. That really is the core question here. We can debate the real causes of inflation—and I will have time to come back to them—its history and some of the global pressures that are underpinning it. But, regarding industrial relations and any advice on the impact of the government’s changes, that is my advice to the House.

I will divert for a moment to talk about the other aspect of the debate, which relates to freedom of information. It is remarkable to hear these claims today from somebody who was a minister in the previous government, which for more than a decade hid behind the most restrictive possible interpretation of the freedom of information legislation and retained the capacity to issue conclusive certificates. That means that, after the bureaucratic process determines that materials should be made available in the public interest, a minister can override that advice and issue a conclusive certificate, which is, as the name implies, entirely unreviewable and creates the situation where the public is denied access to material that the independent assessment processes say should be available.

We as a government are committed to the abolition of those conclusive certificates. Maybe not everybody thinks that a government will carry through with such a commitment—because freedom of information is always easier to talk about in opposition than to have in government. But the government has been recommitted to this action not only by the Deputy Prime Minister, by the Attorney-General and by the Special Minister of State, who is responsible for this area, but in question time today by the Prime Minister.

The record of the previous government with regard to the release of industrial relations information is extraordinary. We had from them not the refusal to release modelling but rather the refusal to release the results of AWAs. Surveys were undertaken which started to reveal that AWAs were damaging the interests of workers. So the government had two choices: they could change the policy or stop releasing the information. So they abolished the survey and stopped releasing the information so that the damage could continue without them having to tell anybody about it. And they come in here and ask to talk to us about FOI!

My colleague the Minister for Small Business, Independent Contractors and the Service Economy, the member for Rankin, tells me that when we were in opposition he spent a large amount of time and money on an unsuccessful FOI request regarding a report on the coalition’s proposed industrial relations changes commissioned by the previous government from the Centre of Policy Studies. So, of course, they raced to release it! No, perhaps they did not—they actually refused, saying it was not in the public interest to do so as it would mislead the public. The shadow minister comes in here and says, ‘We have to release this information. It is in the public interest to do so’—but when in government they always refused to.

We also had the circumstance concerning the Treasury portfolio where the tax office proposed to release information. The then Treasurer, the member for Higgins, issued a conclusive certificate and said: ‘This information can never be released’—and it never was released. He overrode the public assessment of the legislation. That is wrong.

This government is going to have a different approach to this general issue of governance. It will always be the case—as when the legislation was first introduced under the previous government and now under Labor—that there will be some criteria under which some information and advice to the government cannot be released.

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