Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014. I would like to start with why this bill is important. Firstly we need to recognise as a nation the difficulty we have and the mess we are in with our debt and our deficit. We have had six years of completely dysfunctional government and six years of back-to-back deficits. In fact, we saw today the release of Paul Kelly's new book, Triumph and Demise: The broken promise of a Labor generation, at around 500 pages. I think there were one or two pages of triumph and about 498 pages listed as demise!

We know what that demise is. We are now north of $300 billion in debt, and we know that, if nothing is done, that number will blow out to $667 billion and then continue to increase to $1 trillion. Currently the cost to the economy is $12 billion a year—$1 billion every month, $33 million every day, 70 per cent of which flows out of the country. That is just the interest on the debt we have accumulated. We have also heard about the wonderful Sydney desalination plant, currently mothballed, costing the taxpayers of Sydney an extra $500,000 every day of the year.

To get ourselves out of this problem we as a nation need to lift our productivity. We need to grow the economy, and the best way we can do that is to make sure we give business the confidence to go out, invest and innovate. That is the only way we can do it. I was fortunate the previous week to be at the Reserve Bank hearings in Brisbane. We heard Reserve Bank Governor Stevens talking about the needs of 'animal spirit', but the comments that were not reported were the comments of the other Reserve Bank board member, the assistant governor, Dr Philip Lowe. I think his words about the importance of the decisions we make here in this parliament encouraging small business entrepreneurs are important. Dr Lowe said:

… monetary policy cannot drive sustainable, stronger growth in our economies. It comes through structural reform and entrepreneurship. And it is really the task of political leaders and business leaders to put in place the preconditions for that …

He continued:

… the message is that when the legislature is putting forward new laws and new regulations we need to be very mindful of the effect it has on the ability of people with new ideas, which ultimately are going to be the source of our growth and our income, to come forward and to test these ideas in the marketplace, to create the environment where that is really what they want to do. They have got the ideas—there is no shortage of ideas out there. We have to create the environment in which they do that. It is really up to our parliaments to do that.

That is exactly right. It is up to the parliaments here to make sure that we are doing things that encourage business to invest because that is what will drive the growth in the economy. Unfortunately, over the past six years we have seen broken promises—especially on the issue of workplace relations. We have seen the broken promises. We know, going back before the 2007 election when Labor was first elected, the Labor Party promised time after time after time that there would be no changes to unions' right-of-entry laws. In fact, in a press conference on 28 August 2007, the then deputy opposition leader, Julia Gillard, said:

We will make sure that current right of entry provisions stay. We understand that entering on the premises of an employer needs to happen in an orderly way. We will keep the right of entry provisions.

We know the history. These promises were not kept and unions were given much easier access under the Fair Work Act provisions, which were then exploited. That meant that businesses faced excessive workplace visits from unions even when the employees at that workplace were not union members or when they had not even asked for the union's presence. This is a problem that has been exacerbated in some workplaces by unions competing to represent employees at that workplace.

Of course, the true engine room of our economy, what we need to drive that growth, is our small business sector. We have seen over the past six years 500,000 jobs lost in that sector—500,000 jobs lost in the small business sector over the previous six years. What we need to do is go back to restoring the balance in our workplace laws and to get that balance right because over the previous six years the balance was tilted too far away from the people taking risks: those entrepreneurs in our economy who we need to drive and to create the prosperity to create the employment.

The other thing we have seen is the great decline in trade unionism over the years. If we go back, from August 1992 to August 2011 the proportion of those who are trade union members of the workforce has actually—

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