Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

Labor's proposed workplace changes presented in the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Wages) Bill represent the most radical shake-up of Australia's industrial relations system since prior to the Hawke-Keating governments. In fact, they take us back to prior to the impressive reforms that they introduced. These were followed by the reforms of the Howard-Costello government that really set up our economy for the tremendous growth and prosperity that we've all enjoyed. This legislation is a reversal of that. The bill itself is called the 'secure jobs, better pay bill', but it's actually almost Orwellian in its title because, if anything, this will lead to less secure jobs and, in fact, it may well lead to lower pay rather than higher pay, which is their stated ambition. There are two pieces of data which support this conclusion. The first piece of data is looking at the budget papers themselves. I suggest to those opposite who are here, and there are many in the chamber: open up the budget that was introduced by Treasurer Chalmers just a few weeks ago. That budget itself says that real wages will decline over the next two years. That's what it says; you yourselves are admitting that, from this bill, real wages will decline while inflation continues to skyrocket along with the massive budget deficit continuing to increase. That's what it says.

The other piece of evidence that is worth examining is the evidence presented by Professor Mark Wooden from the University of Melbourne. He's done analysis of different systems across the world as to which systems have produced higher wages over the last few years, bearing in mind that across the Western world wages have been depressed over the last decade. But there have been distinctions between the systems, and what Professor Wooden found from his analysis is that those systems in developed economies which were the most decentralised and had enterprise focused bargaining frameworks have actually experienced the highest wage growth, whereas those systems which had the most centralised industrywide bargaining frameworks had the slowest growth. And he concluded that Australia was somewhere in between those two.

What this bill does is reverse the enterprise-bargaining framework which Hawke and Keating introduced and which has continued since, and chooses the pathway which, according to the University of Melbourne's Professor Wooten, puts us on a lower-wage-growth path. That's what it does, and that's why I say that this bill being called the 'secure jobs, better pay bill' is Orwellian, because that analysis itself says that this will actually lead to less pay for everyday Australians. And, certainly, on our side of the table, we don't want to see that. We want to see prosperity in this country and we want to see prosperity for everybody.

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