Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Speaker has received a letter from the Leader of the Opposition proposing that a definite matter of public importance be submitted to the House for discussion, namely:

The Government’s extreme industrial relations changes, which will threaten the working and living conditions of Australian workers and their families well into the future.

I call upon those members who approve of the proposed discussion to rise in their places.

More than the number of members required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This week we start to see how John Howard has betrayed the Australians who voted him into office. The termites are now at work, slowly eating away at the foundations of living standards for working Australians; slowly undermining foundations such as decent minimum wages, penalty rates, shift loadings, overtime, redundancy pay and rights against unfair dismissal; and slowly affecting agreements, workplaces and employees one by one over the next months and years, Americanising our industrial relations and, in the process, quietly destroying the Australian way of life. This is John Howard’s war on workers. It means lower wages, less job security and no penalty rates. It is all pain for families and no economic gain for the nation, all pain for those Victorian cabinet-makers and no economic gain, all pain for average workers and no economic gain.

Bad bosses have the green light to sack workers whenever they like for just about any reason that they like. Want to sack someone today because they are about to qualify for long service leave? Kevin Andrews says, ‘Absolutely, sack them.’ Want to sack someone because they stood up for a young worker who was getting rough treatment at the hands of a supervisor? Kevin Andrews says, ‘Absolutely, sack them.’ Want to sack someone because they are hardworking and a manager thinks they might threaten his job? Kevin Andrews says, ‘Absolutely, sack them.’ Want to wipe out any obligation to give them redundancy pay? Kevin Andrews says, ‘Absolutely—just put that in your agreement and make it a condition when they get the job.’

This is John Howard’s ideology unleashed on Australian workers, where the powerful get more power while ordinary working families have their rights rubbed out altogether. We saw the Prime Minister in question time today speak on that limited area of dismissal that remains unlawful, and the obvious logical point that any one of us would make when we took a look at that was: if there were a boss who was going to sack somebody from that limited area of discrimination and who wanted to do it and nevertheless make it lawful, why on earth would you expect him to say that he had a complaint about their gender or a complaint about their colour while he did it? It is a nonsense! Of course he would not say that. He would not say, ‘I’m going to terminate you because you’re an Aboriginal,’ ‘I’m going to terminate you because you’re an Italian,’ or, ‘I’m going to terminate you because you’re a woman.’ He would make some spurious claim against that person, and because that claim would fit within the definition of ‘lawful’ that person would be out on their ear.

Let us not forget that, when we put in place the unlawful dismissal legislation a decade or so ago, before that point of time many of the states had unlawful dismissal legislation in operation. Of course, it was largely subsumed by what the Commonwealth did, and it now has been totally subsumed by the Commonwealth’s determination to obliterate any capacity for Australian workers to deal with unfair dismissals in a reasonable way. We are learning now about the impacts on the rights of working people. Telstra is banning union officials from work sites even where there are union members who want to be represented. The workers at InstallEx in Williamstown were sacked and then offered their jobs back with a pay cut of $25,000 and no job security. We are hearing law firms report that dozens of employers are seeking advice on how to get away with sacking whoever they do not like.

In the past year we have had a lot of lawyer talk from the government and very little straight talk, but behind the scenes there has been a bit of straight talking in the government from one of the Prime Minister’s closest henchmen, Senator Nick Minchin. We only know about the straight talk because Senator Minchin did not think he was being recorded or reported, so he spoke honestly—something he would never do if he thought the Australian people were listening. And what did he say? He did not pretend the government had a mandate for these extremist laws, he did not pretend that the people believed these laws were good for working families and he did not pretend that the Howard henchmen had any real faith in Kevin Andrews. In fact, he said that Australians ‘violently disagree with what we are proposing’. He confessed, ‘Poll after poll demonstrates that the Australian people do not agree at all with anything we are doing on this. We have minority support for what we are doing.’

Finally, after a year of industrial relations lawyer talk, we hear a bit of straight talk. It is a pity that we only heard about it because he did not think anyone else was listening in, but what Senator Minchin said was right: Australians violently disagree with these extremist laws. They violently disagree with losing their penalty rates, shift loadings, overtime and redundancy pay. They violently disagree with the erosion of decent minimum wages. They violently disagree with a bad boss being given the power to sack a good worker for no good reason. They violently disagree with being forced to sign individual contracts against their will. They violently disagree with this attack on the Australian value of a fair go. They violently disagree with John Howard’s ideological obsession with making Australia more like America. Yes, Senator Minchin was honest: Australians do not agree with anything this out-of-control government is doing to take away their basic rights.

Senator Minchin had other things to say in the course of those remarks that he made, because those remarks also included an apology to the people of the HR Nicholls Society, who were portrayed as the noble battlers in the minority vineyard which he supported, the people who over the years had stood foursquare against the rights of ordinary Australians in the workplace. He said, ‘I’m sorry we haven’t been able to rip away every single right in this first tranche of our activities, but don’t worry—we will get the opportunity to do that subsequently.’ Senator Minchin set the clearest possible marker down as to why it is absolutely in the interests of the ordinary Australian to make certain this government is turned out at the next election: for fear that even worse is in line for them now.

What is the best argument they try to use in this whole debate, the only argument they are reduced to, the irreducible minimum? The argument is this: whatever pain you are experiencing, there is a gain here for the economy. The truth of the matter is this: this is all pain and there is no economic gain. They say that we should all take the medicine, be quiet and wait five years while they take away the basic rights and conditions of Aussie workers. I say to the Prime Minister: just because these IR laws have left a bitter taste in the mouths of Australian people doesn’t mean these laws are a good dose of medicine. These laws will not heal our economic problems; they are going to hurt us economically, because they are not a cure for problems, they are poison—poison to basic Australian values, poison to the tradition of giving everyone a fair go, poison to the egalitarian Australian values that say we should never give one person unrestrained power to push someone else around.

If the government really wanted to move Australia forward and make Australia competitive again, they would do something to tackle the collapse in productivity. They would invest in training Australian workers instead of making Australia the only industrialised nation in the world that has cut its public investment in education in the last decade. They would tackle our crumbling infrastructure and reverse the backward slide in innovation. They would do something about getting net exports moving again and about turning around a foreign debt that is now worth more than half the value of the nation’s output and that is roaring towards $500 billion. Instead of a real agenda for productivity and growth we get an ideological war on workers, a frontal assault on the values that Australians have held dear for generations, an attack on workers to camouflage the failure of the government to deal with the burgeoning foreign debt, to deal with collapsing productivity, to deal with the stalling of innovation in Australian business and to deal with the stalling of exports in manufactured goods and services. Their excuse: let us drive our competition with China, India and the countries in the region around us on the basis of a wage competition, not a skills competition.

This is a government with the arrogance of 10 years in power, a government that thinks it can get away with anything, a government that does not believe it can ever be voted out. John Howard thinks he is right and the Australian people have got it wrong; he is just not listening. Of course he tried to tell us we had to change our mind. He spent $55 million of Australian families’ tax money to ram a slick Liberal Party ad campaign down our throats and make us believe that somehow this is good for Australia. It did not work. Australians do not trust this government to look after working families, no matter whether they stuff their ads into every letterbox, onto every magazine page and across every TV channel. So the government’s best hope is just to get us to shut up, to stop talking about these industrial relations laws.

We saw it again when they released the next wave of their extremist changes—another 593 pages of complex regulations, making up a total of 2,557 pages of regulations and explanations. This simplification made the regulations twice their previous size. They are now a maze of barely decipherable legalese that gives Kevin Andrews, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, the power of a Soviet-era works minister to regulate in fine detail every aspect of Australian work arrangements. These regulations are meant to usher in the transformation of the Australian economy; they are meant to bring about John Howard’s 30-year-old dream for a right wing workplace revolution. But the government choose to release them at a time when they think they will get the least possible attention: on a Friday afternoon in the middle of the Commonwealth Games. That is belief in your product! That is a stern fight to make absolutely certain that everybody reads the regulations, that everybody looks forward to them in a welcoming sort of way! They have now realised that it does not matter what they say, the Australian people do not believe them and do not trust them to protect the rights of working families. The best they can do is get industrial relations out of the TV news bulletins and off the front pages.

The minister told us last night that we should all shut up and wait for five years before the laws live up to their promises. Ram through the regulations, get the dullest drone in the Liberal Party as your IR spokesman and hope like hell you can kill the issue off. Whenever you are asked about it, you just say, ‘Wait and see.’ First they told us to wait and see the details of the system. Then they said we had to wait and see for the legislation. Six months ago, last October, in an interview with John McKenzie on Radio Easy Mix in Cairns the Prime Minister said:

... I believe that in six months time, eight months time people will look back on this period and say what was all the fuss about?

Almost six months has passed since that interview, and they shift the goalposts again. They say, ‘No, wait for five years and then you will see what it is all about.’ Of course they claim that Labor runs a fear campaign. Let me make this clear, and I have said it all along: not everyone is going to lose out from these laws. Many highly paid employees have never relied on the industrial relations laws to set their pay rates. Things will not change for them. They will continue to do fine. For many people, while the resources boom continues, wages will keep growing. But, as soon as the commodity boom ends and our economy weakens, this law ensures that workers will be in the front line to take the brunt. Even while some employees will continue to do well, they will see things get tougher for their kids, their wives or their husbands, their nephews and their nieces, because the government never want to have a serious debate about industrial relations. In those smoky back rooms of the Howard government, Crosby Textor have been telling them the reality: Australians do not believe them. They do not trust them. They do not accept the Prime Minister’s extremist workplace agenda.

I want to give this commitment to every Australian: Labor will not forget you. We will not ignore what you think. We will listen to what Australians want and we will not let some extremist ideology drive what we do. We will fight for your standard of living and your rights every waking hour on every street corner, in every workplace and in this parliament until you get your rights back. I will rip up this law. We will rip up these laws and put in place a fair system for all Australians. We will put Australian values of fairness and decency back into our industrial laws so that every Australian has a fair go at work. We will get rid of the new Soviet style dictator who has been established in the industrial relations system, the obsessive complexity which has now doubled the size of the IR act in the same way as they doubled the size of the tax act. We will send to Siberia the motives and ideology that underpinned this legislation from the government. On this they will lose.

Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If there was a gold medal in the recent Commonwealth Games for overblown rhetoric then the Leader of the Opposition would have won by a mile. All we hear from the Leader of the Opposition is bluster on this issue, as on every other issue that he brings before this parliament.

It is interesting that for the last three months we have heard nothing from the Leader of the Opposition about industrial relations. In fact, in something like 100 questions in question time, up until yesterday, we had not one question on industrial relations from the Leader of the Opposition. But, on Sunday morning, the Secretary of the ACTU, Mr Combet, who represents the bosses of the Labor Party, was on theInsiders program on ABC television, giving orders as to what the Labor Party in here should be doing. Mr Combet said, after complaining about the inactivity of the Labor Party around these sorts of issues:

... I want to see in coming weeks and months all the way up to the election ... everyone in the ... Labor Party concentrating on [this issue].

After 100 questions in this place with not one mention of industrial relations, yesterday we had a couple of questions, and then a couple more and then, finally, an MPI on this issue today. That is the reality of the Labor Party in this place. What we have seen in the last two days is a great contrast: what a modern, successful, labour leader represents, so far as policy is concerned, versus a labour leader who is simply a captive of the union bosses here in Australia. Yesterday, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Mr Blair, said, amongst other things:

... the defining division in countries ... is increasingly open or closed: open to the changing world or fearful, hunkered down, seeing the menace of it, not the possibility.

If one were to construct a set of words, a paragraph, which described the Labor Party in Australia, then they would be the words which were used by that modern, successful leader of a new labour party—a modern labour party, a progressive labour party—Mr Blair, yesterday. And, as many commentators in the media have set out today, that stands in stark contrast to the man who leads the Labor Party in Australia—a person who is not open to a changing world; a person and a party which are ‘fearful, hunkered down, seeing the menace of it, not the possibility’.

Why is that true? It is true because the rhetoric that we hear from the opposite side of this chamber this afternoon is exactly the same rhetoric that we heard 10 years ago when this government introduced the workplace relations legislation. We were told 10 years ago that the sky was going to fall in on Australia. We had the Leader of the Opposition, the member for Perth and the member for Fraser, Mr McMullan, basically saying that this would lead to a reduction in the standard of living of ordinary Australians. That is what they said 10 years ago: that the sky would fall in. But what has happened over the last 10 years is that we have seen historic levels of employment in this country. We have over 10 million Australians employed in this country today—the most Australians who have ever been employed.

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I hope so.

Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The resurgent member for Hotham says, ‘I hope so’. I congratulate him on being back after the gutless campaign against him which would have tossed him out. It would have been the first time that a former leader of the Labor Party was tossed out.

We have seen an increase in the number of people that are employed in Australia. Over 10 million Australians are employed. Not only have we got more people employed; people’s wages have gone up. Real wages have gone up by over 16 per cent over the last decade. Yet we were told a decade ago, when we wanted to bring some further reform to industrial relations, that this was going to drive down wages, drive down employment and drive down the living conditions of Australians. The opposite has happened. More people are in work and those people in work are being paid more in real terms—as a result, partly, of those industrial relations reforms that we put in place.

To come back to Mr Blair: in 1996-97 when we were introducing these reforms there was a change of government in the UK. And what did Mr Blair say when he turned up to the Trade Union Congress as the newly elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? In relation to the pressure from the trade unions in the United Kingdom to roll back—or, to use the words of the Leader of the Opposition here, to ‘rip up’—the laws which Margaret Thatcher had passed in the United Kingdom, what did the Rt Hon. Tony Blair say when he turned up to the Trade Union Congress in September 1997? He said:

We are not going back to the days of industrial warfare—strikes without ballots; mass and flying pickets and secondary action. We will keep the flexibility of the present labour market. And it may make some shiver but, in the end, it is warmer in the real world.

He went on to say to the Trade Union Congress on 9 September 1997 at Brighton:

The old ways of the Labor Party were the revolutionists, the committee rooms, the fixing and the small groups trying to run the show. That has no future.

His words could equally be applied to the Australian Labor Party today, who are in their backrooms, fixing up deals and buying and selling seats as to who is going to represent which union in this federal parliament, as if it is some matter of trade—and, of course, the member for Hotham knows all about that.

Mr Blair had the guts to stand up to the trade union movement and say, ‘The future of this country will be better off if we actually embrace these reforms and move forward.’ In stark contrast—and this is what newspaper editorials and commentators are reflecting upon today—the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Beazley, does not stand up in that way and does not have a progressive policy to move forward.

The contrast between New Labour in Great Britain—which has an unemployment rate lower than that in Australia, yet has a more deregulated labour market than we have today even after these reforms—could not be more stark. It is a contrast between a new, progressive, modern leader in Mr Blair—who was prepared to take the country forward and prepared to say, ‘I’m not going to just act out of the 100-year ideology of the union bosses who want to run the show; I am prepared to do what is in the best interests of the working men and women of Britain’—and the Leader of the Opposition in Australia, who is a captive of the Labor Party, which in turn is a captive of the unions in this country.

Why is the Labor Party in this country not prepared to embrace change? The reality is that it is because the majority of members who sit in this parliament—members of the Labor Party—are put there by the various union bosses around this country. They are not only put there; the unions paid some $50 million over the last 10 years to fund the campaign of the Labor Party here. This is not about the Labor Party supporting the men and women who work in this country; it is about supporting the union bosses who control the affairs of the Labor Party.

This MPI is about conditions for working families and families in Australia. The motion refers to ‘the working and living conditions of Australian workers and their families well into the future’. Let me take a couple of examples of working conditions for Australian families in relation to the flexibility in the system prior to yesterday and under the new Work Choices system. After this system was announced, there was an article in the Australian newspaper on Monday, 10 October 2005. It referred to a Sandra Xuereb, who is a single parent who works 25 hours a week for a food company, ‘stocking supermarket shelves with coffee, sauce, gravy, salt, herbs and spices’. The newspaper article says:

She normally works three days a week in western Sydney, but condenses this to two longer days in school holidays to spend time with her children, aged five, seven and nine. She has had the job since March last year and has rarely taken sick or personal leave because the AWA allows her to make up the hours lost when the needs of her children force her to leave work early.

So long as she completes her weekly workload, she says that she can ‘leave in the middle of the day’ and ‘do what I have to do’. She says, ‘It’s really good having that option, being a single mother.’ If this is about families in Australia, here is a family in Australia, in Western Sydney, a single mum with three kids, balancing her work and her family responsibilities. She is saying, as a real person in Western Sydney, ‘This option that I’ve got under a workplace agreement which gives me flexibility to be able to balance those work and family responsibilities is something which is highly desirable.’ It is that sort of flexibility for employees as well as employers that these changes are all about.

Let me take another example. Recently I presented the 2005 Work and Family Awards for family friendly workplaces. The winner of the award in the small business employer of the year category was Austral Tree and Stump Service of Adelaide. It also has Australian workplace agreements which contain a number of family friendly provisions. These include flexible start and finish times, flexible working days, paid time off during school holidays for employees with children, employee nominated hours of work, and the ability for employees to bank additional hours worked for paid or unpaid leave. These flexibilities are things that would not be available in the relevant award that covered that work. In the relevant award there is a rigid one size fits all system which has to apply to every workplace and every employee regardless of the particular needs of either the employee or the employer.

One of the employees at Austral who received this award for 2005 was a Mr Chris Grigg. Through his workplace agreement, Mr Grigg was able to enter into fortnightly working arrangements where he worked five days one week and two days the next. As a result of this flexibility, after he had separated from his wife, he was able to have custody of his children every second week. If it had not been for flexibility in the workplace agreement he would not have been able to retain custody for a week at a time. He would have had the opportunity to see his children only every second weekend.

An important thing about this is the outcome of having this flexibility in the workplace for this particular gentleman. He told the audience at these awards—he was quite emotional about this and quite proud of it—that, as a result of this workplace arrangement, he was able to reconcile with his wife. He reported that they were back together. I had the opportunity of talking to both of them. This was a couple who had had problems in their relationship. There were pressures around previous working relationships because of inflexibility in those relationships. Chris Grigg was able to structure an employment arrangement with his employer where he was able to have more time with and care more for his children, and that led to reconciliation in his relationship.

Will we hear stories like that from the ACTU over the coming weeks? I will die waiting to hear a story that is positive from the ACTU. This is what Chris Grigg said in his acceptance speech:

My story is testimony to the benefits of having a workplace agreement. The freedom to negotiate flexible hours has given me the opportunity to build a closer relationship with my kids.

This MPI is about the working and living conditions of Australian workers and their families. I have given just two of many examples right around this country where flexibility at the workplace has been to the distinct advantage of the employees and their families. There is a single mum in Western Sydney who is able to structure her hours so that she can look after her kids. She can be there when they go to school and pick them up after school. She can work more on one day if she needs to and less on another day. And there is this man who was able to structure his working hours so that he could have custody of his children one week out of two rather than be forced to simply have custody of his children on every second weekend. This is the sort of flexibility that employees in Australia want today. This is the sort of flexibility that this government is about trying to achieve.

And there is another benefit, and I finish on this note. Recently the Productivity Commission looked at what further economic reform in Australia would mean for Australians. They said that, if we continue this further reform, of which Work Choices is a part, then the gross average household income of Australians could be 20 per cent, or some $22,000 a year, higher than it is now. Australians would like to see an improvement of some $22,000 in their gross household income. These sorts of reforms will take us in the direction of achieving those sorts of outcomes for Australians. The reality is this: are we going to be modern, open and progressive, and are we going to move forward to sustain the economic growth of this country, or are we going to be backward, narrow and blinkered, as the Leader of the Opposition is? We have made our choice. It is a choice for the benefit of all Australians.

Stephen Smith (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry, Infrastructure and Industrial Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to speak on the matter of public importance, which is:

The Government’s extreme industrial relations changes, which will threaten the working and living conditions of Australian workers and their families well into the future.

At their heart, the government’s proposals are nothing more and nothing less than an attack upon the wages, conditions and entitlements of Australian employees and Australian workers. This is nothing more and nothing less than an attempt to move part of the total factor income of the economy from the wages section of the economy to the profit section of the economy. It is not rocket science; it is a straightforward public policy effort to move part of the economy from the wages section of the economy to the profit section of the economy. To do that takes the government 1,800 pages of legislation, explanatory memorandum, regulations and supplementary materials—a complicated, complex, dog’s breakfast.

No wonder the government’s soul mates, the HR Nicholls Society, stand up and say this is redolent of a Soviet style command and control economy. When Peter Reith was the Minister for Industrial Relations he used to walk around with Alsatians and balaclavas. When we thought of the current Minister for Workplace Relations, we used to think not of Alsatians and balaclavas but of opera glasses and poodles. Now we think only of Commissar Andrews, intricately involved in every detailed agreement in every workplace in the country. Why is that? Becuase the government here is not driven by good public policy or what might be good for the economy. It is driven here by politics and ideology.

The government seeks to justify its attack upon the wages and conditions and the entitlements and living standards of Australian working families by saying, ‘This is absolutely essential for our economy.’ I recall the last election campaign in 2004 where the economy was front and centre the significant issue of that campaign. Did we hear one word about these proposals during that election campaign? No. On the contrary, at the launch of the Liberal Party’s industrial relations policy in Brisbane on 28 September 2004, the Prime Minister was asked two questions. The first question was: are you proposing to introduce a single national system of industrial relations—something that the Prime Minister now says is one of the hallmarks of these changes. He said no. He was also asked whether he was proposing to reduce the so-called 20 allowable matters into a smaller group of allowable matters. He said, ‘No, they were working quite well, thanks very much.’

Another hallmark of these changes is the reduction of the 20 allowable matters to the government’s so-called five minimum standards, leaving adrift and at risk things like penalty rates, overtime, leave loadings and casual loadings. We heard nothing about these proposals in the run-up to the last election. On the contrary, the government said it was not proposing to pursue anything like this. We only heard about these proposals when the government woke up and discovered that it had all the power under the sun, that it had total control the Senate. What did it do then? It scrubbed off the old Acme Jobsback. The last time we heard the now Prime Minister, Mr Howard, saying that reforms, changes or proposals of this nature were absolutely essential to our economy was in October 1992. When you remind yourself of the Jobsback proposal, launched by the then the Liberal Party spokesperson for industrial relations, now the Prime Minister, and compare it to the so-called Work Choices changes, they are redolent of that 1992 Jobsback proposal.

This has nothing to do with the future of our economy and everything to do with the Liberal Party’s, the National Party’s and the Prime Minister’s ideological and political view. That ideological and political view is that somehow, as the Prime Minister said on the day that this legislation passed through the parliament last year, the adoption of these proposals would magically lead to an increase in employment, a reduction in unemployment, would make us more internationally competitive and would somehow magically increase or improve our international competitiveness.

Let us start with international competitiveness. We know that central to these proposals is an attack upon wages and an attack upon conditions and entitlements by the removal of things like penalty rates, overtime and shift allowances—part of the very important income for many working Australians. By removing those and removing the no disadvantage test, they are at risk. We also know the attack upon wages starts with the minimum wage. During question time, the Prime Minister said: ‘No, no, I’m not going to give a guarantee that no-one will be worse off. My guarantee is my record.’

The government’s record on the minimum wage is as follows: if the Industrial Relations Commission had agreed to the government’s submissions on the minimum wage since it came to office, those on the minimum wage would be $50 a week or $2,600 a year worse off. That is a reduction in real terms of about 1.7 per cent. That is the government’s public policy objective here: to drive down wages, starting with the driving down of the minimum wage by a reduction in real terms. That is the legislative prescription of the so-called Fair Pay Commission, which will become a low and unfair pay commission by removing the legislative requirement that the minimum wage be fair and by removing the legislative requirement that the minimum wage must have some cognisance of prevailing living standards. The government’s public policy view is that, if you reduce the minimum wage, somehow you will magically increase employment—particularly at the lower end of the scale.

If we have a cleaner on the minimum wage, about $25,000, then the government’s economic thesis and political and ideological view is that if you reduce that wage by $2,600—from $25,000 to $22,000 or $23,000—magically three things will occur: (1) we will become more internationally competitive, (2) we will somehow magically have two cleaners, and (3) somehow the cleaner will become more productive. You whack the cleaner’s wage by $2,600 and expect them to be more productive and more internationally competitive, and we will have two cleaners, not one, cleaning the same area of space. It is an economic nonsense driven by an ideological view that what we really want to do is to move part of the economy from wages to profit.

Let us deal with the question of international competitiveness. The government has this view that, if you drive wages down, we will become more internationally competitive. We saw the minister for industry, Mr Macfarlane, saying a few months ago, ‘Wouldn’t it be terrific if we could have New Zealand wages tomorrow.’ Ask someone in Western Sydney how they could live in Sydney on the back of New Zealand wages. But if you think you could be internationally competitive by having New Zealand wages tomorrow, the logical extension of that is that somehow Australians could have Indian, Indonesian and Chinese wages down the track. It is a nonsense. The only way we can continue to be prosperous and internationally competitive is by investing in the skills and education of our workforce, investing in infrastructure, investing in innovation, investing in research and development and turning ourselves back into a great trading nation. Those are the only things that will see us being internationally competitive.

When it comes to the illusory economic benefits we know a number of things. We know the Prime Minister has asserted certain things. There is no basis for any of those assertions. We know that the Treasury analysis indicated that there were no economic benefits to be gained from this—indeed, that there may even be a reduction in productivity in the short term. It is little wonder that last night we saw Commissar Andrews as the commissar of the command and control state designated by the HR Nicholls Society. Some of us remember that the articles of association of the HR Nicholls Society were drafted by the now Treasurer, Mr Costello, so they are the soul mates of the Liberal Party. Nick Minchin, the Leader of the Government in the Senate, the minister for finance, turns up to his soul mates at the HR Nicholls Society and says: ‘Please, we crave and beg forgiveness for not going as far as you would want us to, but we have a secret plan—we will go further. Comrades, we are sorry we haven’t gone as far as you would like but, don’t worry, next time we will. We’ll completely knock off the commission, we’ll completely take away the minimum wage.’ It was no surprise that last night Commissar Andrews said on Lateline:

... this reform is probably going to take three to five or six years to have the economic effect.

It is a five-year Soviet economic plan! He went on to say the reform will:

... take a period of three to five or six years to have its impact economically.

These proposals are nothing more nor nothing less than an attack upon the living standards of Australian working families—an attack upon their wages and an attack upon their conditions and entitlements like penalty rates and overtime. The government’s justification for that is that somehow this will magically improve our economy. There is no sensible economic basis for that to occur. On day two of the government’s changes we see the responsible minister saying that you will not see the economic benefit of these things for five or six years—not just after the 2007 election but after the 2010 election. We will make this issue the defining issue of the next election campaign and those opposite will suffer as a consequence.

Phillip Barresi (Deakin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What a lazy contribution to this debate from the member for Perth. It was a speech that has been dusted off from the previous time that this exact MPI came to this House. There was nothing new in that contribution at all—same MPI, same speech. Why do we have this MPI today? There is only one reason, and that is that the ALP have been told to muscle up. They have been told, ‘Get your acts together or we’re going to review your support.’ That is the only reason why this MPI is on today.

And they are slow learners. Yesterday was a great opportunity for the Australian Labor Party to learn from a statesman of the quality of Tony Blair what the United Kingdom Labour Party has done. Why is it that the United Kingdom has in the last 10 or 15 years continued to progress in leaps and bounds? Why is it that the Australian Labor Party is in fact trying to take us back down a road of making sure that the flexibility that has been introduced over the last few years will be reversed by their tearing up of the work choices legislation?

In the stark contrast between the Leader of the Opposition and Tony Blair we have a great example of where this country could be if it were not for the negativity of the Australian Labor Party and its leader. Yet the Leader of the Opposition yesterday had the absolute gall in one of his contributions to Tony Blair’s presence to proclaim some form of synergy, some sort of bond, with Blair and the UK Labour Party. I am not sure whether he was listening to the speech, or whether members opposite were listening to the speech yesterday, but there was a very stark contrast.

Greg Combet, the Secretary of the ACTU, has challenged the ALP: ‘Muscle up, get your act together or we’re going to review your support.’ It is a $50 million tail wagging the dog. To Combet it is a dog that has strayed from home in recent years. It is a dog that needs to be trained and put in its place—$50 million worth really does allow you to make sure that you are listened to and that those in this chamber will sit up straight and all of a sudden take heed of what needs to be done.

Combet admits to not being very impressed with what has been going on in the Labor Party lately. But his solution to the strife in the ALP is to say, ‘People just have to put the interests of the Labor Party ahead of everything else.’ This is a man who in the past has admitted that the ACTU’s campaign on industrial relations is purely political. Combet and the ACTU are not interested in helping workers. In fact, Combet and the President of the ACTU, Sharan Burrows, are really seeking some war stories—they are seeking an individual who has been traumatised, who has had a member of the family who has been injured or maimed in the workplace—so that they can bring that out. We are going to start seeing these examples being trawled through. The ALP are not interested in the workers of this country. They are opposing Work Choices because they have been told by the tail that they need to start getting their acts together—and we are seeing that today, with some fairly ordinary contributions.

We also had the Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, say in his contribution that our work choices legislation is Soviet style, that this is some form of socialistic communism that has been brought down. Yet this is the same leader who yesterday in his contribution when the UK leader was here called the Western Australian Premier an ‘old Trotskyite’. This is the Premier of a state with aspects of its industrial relations system now having been put into our legislation. There are aspects of the Western Australian system that we have adopted in Work Choices—in particular, the negotiation of certain entitlements and conditions. The ‘old Trotskyite’ of Western Australia is someone that the Leader of the Opposition looks up to, but at the same time he decries what we are doing through this legislation.

The member for Brand, the Leader of the Opposition, and those on the other side are embarking on a scare campaign that this country has seen take place a number of times over the years. We have seen the same Labor members stand up here and go into the public domain to utter the same words, the same doomsaying type statements. Nothing has changed. Back in 1996, when we first started our reform program—which of course was the second wave of industrial relations reforms, the first being started by Paul Keating himself—Kim Beazley said:

... the government is attacking the very basis of people’s living standards ... Attack wages and you attack families.

That was on 19 June 1996. Stephen Smith, the member for Perth, in October 1995 said:

The Howard model is quite simple. It is all about lower wages; it is about worse conditions; it is about a massive rise in industrial disputation; it is about the abolition of safety nets; and it is about pushing down or abolishing minimum standards.

We had the member for Hotham saying in February 1996:

You’ll get interest rates up and inflation up ... a recipe for economic chaos.

Chris Evans, Martin Ferguson, Senator John Faulkner, Senator Forshaw—the list goes on and on. The same people who are coming into this chamber and the other chamber saying that the sky is going to fall in, that there is going to be mass unemployment and that there is going to be mass abuse of power by employers, are the same people who were making those claims in 1995, in 1996 and in 1997.

And what has happened? What have we seen? What we have seen is a Howard government, since 1996, presiding over an economic growth which is unprecedented in this country, a Howard government that has understood that economic growth depends on keeping the reform process going so that each new wave of reform will generate a further wave of productivity increases. We are building a platform for ongoing economic growth and prosperity. We have seen during this time wage increases of 16.8 per cent, compared to 1.2 per cent under 13 years of Labor.

And the member for Perth comes into this chamber and says—as he has said a number of times now, and it is a fallacy—that if the Industrial Relations Commission had adopted the federal government’s submission we would have had lower wage increases. The problem with a lot of members of the ALP is that they have been out of the workforce for too long. They no longer understand how the industrial relations system works. They know that in order to have a claim in the Industrial Relations Commission in the past you had to have had a conflict, a disagreement. The way it has worked in the past—and I certainly do not agree with the way it has worked in the past; it is the old industrial relations club—you had to have an ambit claim and a counter ambit claim. We all know that is how it works. We have seen outrageous claims by both sides—employers and employee organisations—in the past.

But what we have seen—the facts are quite stark—is a 1.2 per cent increase in wages under 13 years of Labor and a 16.8 per cent increase in wages under the coalition government. We have seen a 27.7 per cent increase in average household income, as the Prime Minister made mention of today during question time. Significant changes have taken place. The doomsayers were proven wrong. They will be proven wrong again.

The misrepresentation that has taken place before has already started again. We know that the ALP are intending to put flyers into letterboxes around the place. They have got four examples. John, Mary, Brendan and Tanya all claim that there is no job security, that there are no penalty rates, that safety nets have been scrapped and that there is no collective bargaining. I would say to people: when you receive that brochure, make sure you cut through the claims that are made by the union movement and the ALP and test their veracity. Certainly they do not stack up. No employee can be forced to sign an AWA that removes overtime loading and penalty rates, in terms of the claim about John being disadvantaged. There are a lot of other points but time will not permit me to go through them all. All I say to people is: you have seen this campaign before and you will see it again. Test the veracity of their claims and it will be proven that the ALP cannot be believed in this situation.

We had a great leader yesterday make a great presentation to this House. Tony Blair and Kim Beazley’s approaches to IR are in stark contrast. In clear contrast to the approach of Kim Beazley and his Labor colleagues in Australia, Tony Blair, when he came into office, said right from the beginning, ‘We need to change our industrial relations system.’ (Time expired)

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The discussion is concluded.