Terry Young (Longman, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

for the impact that these decisions will have on businesses, and in turn the very workers they are supposed to be fighting for. Again, this is simply a result of their lack of business experience and acumen.

Look at the manufacturing industry in Australia. As someone who spent 20-odd years in the electrical appliance industry, I watched with dismay as electrical appliances went from being made in this country to being made offshore. When I started in that industry in 1986 I was selling Malley's Whirlpool, Hoover and Simpson washing machines, Kelvinator and Westinghouse fridges, Dishlex dishwashers, Chef's stoves, Sunbeam frypans, Victa mowers and AWA TVs all made in Australia. Then, in the late nineties and early 2000s, the Westinghouse fridge was $1,000 and the Korean import equivalent was $700, so the 90 per cent of people who were budget conscious saved the $300, and eventually all the factories that made these local products shut down. From being in the industry and talking with manufacturers, it was simply a commercial decision. The cold hard facts were that a person in the factory that was earning $30,000 for a 40-hour week was now earning $40,000 for a 36-hour week. This, coupled with the lack of productivity when strike action occurred to meet these union demands, simply meant it was cheaper to go offshore and make these goods overseas. This meant thousands of jobs lost. People who had worked for these companies their whole lives, for 20, 30, 40 years, with no other training and no other job prospects—gone.

My question is: where were their union mates then? Nowhere to be seen. Those workers no longer had jobs, so they couldn't pay union dues, so 'see you later, Jack'. The same thing happened in our car manufacturing industry. For goodness sake, mainly due to high wages, it's now cheaper to send Australia fruit overseas to be canned and to have it shipped back here than it is to can it here—absolutely ridiculous.

We must leave this issue between employers and employees. As an employer I can tell you that employers would much rather hang onto employees than go through the arduous task of hiring and training new staff. To do this, employers are always looking for ways to reward good employees so we retain them in the business.

Whether we like it or not, we are part of a global community and economy, and we must be competitive to ensure our economic viability. To achieve this we need wages that are as high as possible without making us uncompetitive. Even the retail industry I'm from is not immune to global competitors. The advent of online shopping and cheaper international shipping has meant that our margins have been squeezed. The profits, of course, are what we pay our business expenses—such as rent, energy, and wages—from. Once a business has negotiated and signed a lease, that cost is fixed. Power, insurances, workers compensation and all other costs are out of a business's control. Out of all of these costs, the only controllable cost that businesses have is wages. So, if any of these costs increase, which they do every year, you must either increase profits or cut costs to meet them. Most business cannot increase prices, as it makes them more uncompetitive in a global market, so the option is to cut costs, and the only controllable cost, as I've stated, is wages. What happens in the real world is that employee hours are cut to meet these extra costs.

I spoke to a baker in my electorate of Longman after the latest $1-an-hour pay increase. One dollar doesn't sound like much, I agree. But here's the reality if it's $1 per hour. If you have 20 employees, that's an extra $20 per hour, $160 a day or $1,120 per week, which is $58,240 per year. I asked him how he covered the extra cost to his business, and he said he laid off two people. And now he and his wife are doing extra hours, and he has asked his remaining staff to work harder to cover the shortfall. The remaining staff will now not receive a Christmas bonus either, due to the lower profitability. This is what happens in the real world, not in a textbook. What about the two workers who lost their jobs? Where's the Labor government when it comes to them?

As an employer I am comfortable with the current model, where the Fair Work Commission operates independently from business and governments and decides on items such as award wages and endeavours to make their decisions that balance ensuring workers are paid as much as possible without sending businesses to the wall. But Labor don't care about this. They only care about union membership, and the way to drive this is to preach only half the message and to incite division between well-meaning, caring employers and hardworking employees who, in the main, have had a good working relationship to date and have been able to come to agreeable terms without government and union interference. But, of course, we know that socialist and communist governments' underlying ideology is to control people's lives, and this legislation feeds into that ideology.

I've listened with interest to the comments by many of those on the other side, talking about the fact that men aren't taking up the teaching profession due to low wages. As the son of a woman who was a schoolteacher her entire life, and from having two close friends who are in the teaching profession, I know that it is the fear of false abuse allegations and the stress of being spat at, kicked and punched by students and not being able to discipline them that is keeping them away, not low wages. That is why the teaching profession is more female dominated.

But why would the Labor Party let the facts get in the way of their little fantasy story? After all, we have Peter Pan for a prime minister and Tinkerbell for a treasurer, who live in a fantasy land called never-never land, which is pretty well named because, under them, Australia will never, never get ahead. The newly elected member for Hawke showed the Labor Party's true colours with his comments that this legislation gets equal income distribution going. That is the real agenda here: pure socialism, which says that, no matter how hard you work, what sacrifices you make or how much you personally put on the line, everyone should have the same standard of living.

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