Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

And they will always love you, Member for Reid, and they will always love you, Member for Braddon. The union movement will always love the Labor Party because the Labor Party will always come into this House and do their bidding. They will do their bidding for many reasons, but one of those reasons is the fact that the union movement in this country spent $30 million in the last election campaign bringing this government to power. For that $30 million, there are debts to be paid, and we are seeing those debts paid even now as we debate this bill.

I have heard other speakers say that this bill simply delivers on what was put to the electorate. Speakers on this side of the House have made it quite clear that is not the case and that the bill that is before this House overreaches in many areas—but I will come back to that. The coalition does understand very clearly the message that was delivered at the last election. Work Choices is dead despite the efforts on that side of the House to try to resurrect this idea. Work Choices is dead and we understand that message more so than I believe our opponents do because we actually understand what killed it. Principally, the measure which I think most upset the Australian people was the abolition of the no disadvantage test.

The government may think that there are a whole range of other issues, particularly the re-establishment of union power in the workplace, which the electorate was pining for. I am happy for the government to think that if that is what they want to think. I am happy for the government to take that message to the Australian people at the next election. I am happy for them to think that the key thing that people want more of is unions coming into their workplaces and unions looking into their personal records with no guarantee that those records cannot be copied and kept—and kept permanently. I am happy for them to make that argument at the next election.

Those on that side of the House are desperate to try and ensure that Work Choices is not dead, because they know when we go to the next election that without Work Choices—without the big orange signs which still remain up on some telegraph poles around the country—they will have no argument to put before the people. They want a re-run of the last election at the next election, because at the next election they will have to be accountable for the policies that they have endeavoured to put in place, the policies that will have failed and the policies that will have wreaked havoc—as we have already seen with things like the unlimited bank guarantee and other measures in their response to this global financial crisis. The government is going to have to go to the next election and be accountable for what they have done.

One of the things that they are going to have to be accountable for is this bill that they have brought into this House. The concern on this side of the House is that Australians have jobs. Jobs are not an entitlement. Entitlements are something that you have when you have a job. The test of this bill, to be crystal clear, is jobs, jobs and jobs. When we go to the next election, that is the benchmark, that is the litmus test and that is the acid test that this government is going to have to pass with respect to this bill—and not only this bill but the other bills that it has brought into this place. Their performance on the economy will be marked on their performance on jobs.

On every occasion possible, those on that side of the House like to bring into disrepute the reputation and the earnestness of the coalition when it comes to jobs. We have a record on jobs. We have a record on jobs that the electorate understands. It is record that they experienced. It was not something that was simply talked about. It was not some earnest speech by a Leader of the Opposition on their commitment to jobs. They were actual jobs. People actually got jobs under the coalition—more than two million got jobs under the coalition. Unemployment was reduced from over eight per cent to record low levels of around four per cent. Participation in the labour market increased from 63.5 per cent to 65.1 per cent.

The growth in jobs created prosperity. Real wages increased by more than 21 per cent. Jobs and higher wages were delivered under the coalition. Compare that to when Labor was last in office, when there was a real decline in wages. Our policies led to a strong increase in household wealth and a rise in disposable income, which was recently acknowledged by the Reserve Bank deputy governor, Ric Battellino. On 30 October of this year, he gave a very interesting address at the ITSA Bankruptcy Congress in Sydney. He made some reflections on the status of household income. This is what he had to say:

The first thing to say about household income is that the past five years have been an extraordinarily favourable period. Real disposable income of the household sector grew on average by 6.1 per cent per year, resulting in a cumulative increase over the five years of more than 30 per cent. One has to go back more than thirty years to find a bigger increase over a five-year period.

He went on to say:

Even after allowing for higher interest payments, real household disposable income over the five years still increased by more than 25 per cent.

That is after paying for mortgages; that is after having to deal with the rises in house prices around our major capital cities and in particular my home city of Sydney. He went on to say:

This increase, too, was the largest since the early 1970s. Put another way, over the past five years, the amount of money that Australian households had left over to spend—

money in the pocket—

after paying taxes and interest on all their loans, grew in real terms at the fastest rate in over 30 years.

That is what jobs give you. That is what real wage increases give you. He went on to say:

This growth in household incomes in Australia greatly exceeded that in any other developed economy.

Just in case those opposite might think that only some benefited from this, as is often their protestation, the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank said clearly:

The percentage increase in real income was very similar across all the income quintiles.

He concludes by saying:

In short, the boom in income in Australia was very strong by world standards and a high proportion of Australian households shared it.

That is a record to speak about and to be proud of. That is a record that is on the books. It is something that we as a coalition can be incredibly proud of, because our record on jobs is clear.

The coalition’s workplace reforms revolutionised our economy, not just in the incomes and jobs of Australians but particularly on the waterfront, where we all know that crane rates increased from 16.9 per hour to almost 27 per hour. That was a result of our reforms. That is a real economic record. That is the clubhouse, so to speak. Labor on jobs and on economic reform is yet to tee off. But as they head to the first hole we should note that, when it comes to economic reform, workplace reform is not a club that they have in their bag.

We see in this bill that once again workplace relations have been given the leave pass in the government’s latest war of the day. In February, we had the war on inflation. We had in that war the five-point plan from the government, which we heard about ad nauseam from those on that side of the chamber day in and day out in the early part of this year. It has been a while since I have heard about the five-point plan on inflation. Maybe that is because point 1 of the five-point plan involved fiscal restraint. They say that they were preparing for the global financial crisis over many months. They could see this on the horizon and they were preparing their response. Point 1 of their response was fiscal restraint. This was the thing that was apparently going to save our economy this year in the midst of what we were seeing coming from the United States. By contrast, the then shadow Treasurer, now Leader of the Opposition, understood what was coming from overseas. He understood what was coming down the pipe and what that would mean for our economy and was making very sober and wise comments as a result.

But there was fiscal restraint. There were private savings measures. There was the skills crisis, which I have noticed they have solved simply by looking forward to an increase in unemployment. There was infrastructure investment and workforce participation. What I do not read in that five-point plan, as I noted at the time, was a mention of doing anything on the fight on inflation. When they were talking about inflation, when they thought that was the big problem, they did not think that wage pressures were an issue and they did not think that workplace relations was an issue that had to feature in that plan.

Today we have the war on employment, amongst many other great wars, and once again workplace relations have no role to play, according to this government. Labor simply does not see a role for workplace relations in economic management, and they parade themselves around this place as economic conservatives. But if they are economic conservatives they must be going to different meetings from the ones I am going to for economic conservatives. They must be at different meetings. They must be part of some other weird sect of economic conservatism, and certainly not the fundamental school.

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