Stewart McArthur (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. Is the minister aware of proposals to force businesses to give their financial details to third parties? What impact might this have on the economy?

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

I thank the member for Corangamite for his question. I note that in his state of Victoria the unemployment rate, according to the latest ABS statistics, has fallen to 4.5 per cent. Indeed, the 205,000 jobs created in Australia since Work Choices is almost three times the number of jobs created over the same six-month period on average in the last 20 years.

In October last year the Leader of the Opposition committed to releasing his workplace relations blueprint in the first six months of this year. He said:

In the first half of next year, we’re planning to set down our blueprint for an industrial relations framework …

Mr Speaker, until today, the Leader of the Opposition had been waiting at the altar for his union masters to come along and deliver the blueprint. Mr Combet, the Secretary of the ACTU, has now released his blueprint to run the country. I say that advisedly, because in June Mr Combet said:

I recall we used to run the country and it would not be a bad thing if we did again.

And how does Mr Combet want to run the country? First of all, as the member for Corangamite pointed out in his question, what Mr Combet wants to do in his blueprint is to force employers to reveal the financial details of their businesses. Secondly, he wants to prevent businesses from making any workplace decision without union approval, right down to the working methods used within a businesses. So what we have, if Mr Combet gets his way, is a return to the bad old days when the union shop stewards and the union bosses controlled every hour of every day of every worker in Australia. That is what Mr Combet’s blueprint for Australia is.

As a result of this, we now have a quite clear choice: a government which is committed to providing freedom of choice for employers and employees or an opposition dictated to by the union movement in Australia, which, on their own words, is dedicated to denying people choice in this country.

Let us make no mistake about what this plan is. This is a plan for strikes. This is a plan for slashing jobs. This is a plan for lowering wages in Australia. What Mr Combet has released today is a threat to the jobs of all Australians. If there was any gumption from the Leader of the Opposition—who still has not released his blueprint—he should immediately condemn Mr Combet’s plan. He should immediately condemn it as the job-destroying plan that it is. Mr Beazley, the Leader of the Opposition, should publicly tear up this recipe for economic vandalism. But of course he will not do this. We know he will not do this, because, at the end of the day, what we see is a sinking skipper with his bumbling boatload, who are incapable of running Gilligan’s island, let alone the Australian economy.