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

My question is to the Prime Minister. It relates to the issue of the Spotlight AWA raised in his absence yesterday. What does the Prime Minister have to say to Annette Harris, the 57-year-old employee offered the Spotlight AWA which would have seen her lose $90 a week in take-home pay, when she is saying to the Prime Minister: ‘I thought it was an insult; absolutely disgusting. I voted Liberal all my life, but there’s no way I’d sign up to this’?

John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do not pretend to have seen the actual statement that she has made, but what I would say to her, to the Leader of the Opposition and to everybody who is interested in this issue is simply this: at the end of the day the test of workplace relations laws is the contribution they make to the general health of the economy. If workplace relations laws strengthen the economy, they generate more jobs. I would remind the Leader of the Opposition that, when he presided over 11 per cent unemployment in Australia, we had the most highly regulated labour market this country has had in the last 40 years. All the regulation in the world did not save people in the Beazley employment ministry era from losing their jobs.

When it comes to taking advice from Labor leaders on employment matters, I have always preferred the view of my good friend the Labour Prime Minister of Great Britain, Mr Tony Blair, who, when addressing the Trades Union Congress in 1997, said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen’—I do not think he said ‘comrades’; I think he said ‘ladies and gentlemen’—‘fairness in the workplace starts with the chance of a job.’ I have no doubt that the workplace relations laws of the Howard government will lead to more jobs, higher wages and a stronger economy.