Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children's Services) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Mayo says that I do not believe that. I do; I saw it. That is why I will be watching with interest whether or not the Liberal Party can continue their long journey of saying one thing and voting another way. By contrast, I believe the rationale for the Fair Work Bill is to support the aspiration of long lives full of meaning and quality through the creation of fairer workplaces. Consistent with the policies and time frames set out in the 2007 workplace relations election statements Forward with Fairness and Forward with Fairness: Policy Implementation Plan, our government is birthing its workplace reform agenda in measured stages to ensure the smooth arrival of a new system. As a first step, the government introduced into the Australian parliament the Workplace Relations Amendment (Transition to Forward with Fairness) Act 2008. This act, which came into effect on 28 March 2008, prevents any more Australian workplace agreements being made and has enabled the process of award modernisation to begin.

The next step to be taken in the removal of Work Choices came with the introduction of legislation into parliament last week to ensure that its new workplace relations system can be fully operational by 1 January 2010. The relevant election commitments involve putting in place a new workplace relations system to replace Work Choices built on a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay; a strong safety net of 10 legislated National Employment Standards for all employees; a modern, simple award system that ensures decent wages and conditions for award covered employees while allowing upward flexibility for high-income employees through common-law contracts that cannot override the award safety net; a framework of collective bargaining rights and responsibilities focused on bargaining at the enterprise level to promote improved productivity, which is the key to achieving low inflation and low unemployment and to raising living standards in Australia; freedom of association for all workers and their right to representation, information and consultation at work; no provision for any form of individual statutory agreements; a new independent agency, Fair Work Australia, to act as a convenient one-stop shop for workplace relations services, advice and compliance; and unfair dismissal laws which balance the need for employers, including small business, to manage their workforce while protecting the rights of employees to be protected from unfair dismissal. Dealing with industrial relations and the changing workplace sits between economic and social policy and goes to the heart of the difference between Labor and the conservatives.

Work Choices was an obsession, not a policy—an obsession that was bad in principle and bad in practice. More than $60 million—that is how much the Howard government spent trying to convince Australians that life under Work Choices was the best thing since sliced bread. It was a lot of money, and you would think that it would have been more than enough to persuade us that Work Choices was better for us than mother’s milk and that, without it, we would all be plummeting into chaos and ruin. But, as many a business has learned to its cost, if your product is not up to scratch, no amount of slick advertising is going to save it. That is exactly what happened to Work Choices. No matter how smooth the ad campaign, no matter how hard the sell, the product was defective and Australians did not buy it. In fact, after the advertising campaign, the resistance to Work Choices went up.

The authors of Work Choices forgot that the welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparably bound together. Thus, the trouble for the Howard government when it came to Work Choices was that, as more Australians came face to face with it, they did not much like it. In their rush to put their stamp on industrial relations in our country, I think the coalition forgot my very simple opening point: industrial relations is all about people. How we manage and invest in people will drive higher levels of workforce participation and productivity, securing Australia’s living standards and prosperity into the future. After all, we are a small nation, and the thing we have going for us is our people.

In these times, when innovation and knowledge are becoming the main drivers of economic growth around the world, it is important that people are healthy, skilled, motivated, engaged and empowered at work. That is why industrial relations should be about fairness, not fear. That is why it must be about flexibility—about giving people real choices as they increasingly move in and out of the workforce, from job to job and from career to career. That is why it must be about simplicity and certainty, especially for small and medium sized businesses. That is why it must be about creating real opportunities across the workforce for reskilling, retraining and lifelong learning. These are the signposts that guide sustainable industrial relations in our modern, 21st century society. These are the signposts that guide more productive, innovative and diverse economies than Australia’s. They are also the principles that Australians want to see operating in their workplaces. The failure to sell Work Choices was not the failure to sell the message. The failure of Work Choices was its lack of relevance to Australians and the expectations they have of work in the 21st century.

Sustainable industrial relations policy is not just about the fine print of the policy. It is about working Australians feeling as if their contribution to their workplaces and to the broader economy is being treated with the respect, fairness and reward it deserves. As part of my previous job, I talked to a lot of senior managers and CEOs, and I can tell you that a great many of them recognised that Work Choices was first and foremost an ideological agenda—one that had little to do with genuine, effective people relations and pretty much nothing to do with providing solutions to Australia’s biggest challenges. They certainly knew that it was not really about deregulation—just ask Spotlight!—because for many it simply led to even more red tape, more compliance and an even greater administrative burden. It led to foreign backpackers assessing weekend rosters in the retail industry. Those senior managers and CEOs knew that it did doing nothing for skills—the area that concerned them and their employees the most. They knew that it had nothing to do with what this country desperately needed and only got on 24 November—government leadership to boost productivity.

I do not think there are too many people left in Australia—apart from perhaps a few unreconstructed Liberals imitating Japanese soldiers holding out in the Philippines in the early sixties—who truly believe that Work Choices made the contribution that the Liberals claim it made to employment, workforce participation and levels of industrial disputation. The reality is that levels of employment and workforce participation rates were already high and industrial disputes were already low prior to Work Choices. The flexibility in the labour market was already there, and these trends simply continued.

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