Chris Hayes (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On Monday in question time the arrogance of this government and this Prime Minister hit an all-time high when the Prime Minister uttered the nine most revealing words of his prime ministership. With the statement ‘working families in Australia have never been better off’, the arrogance of this government was put up in neon lights for all Australians to see. Yesterday when the Prime Minister was asked to repeat his claim that working Australians have never been better off, he dodged it. He dodged the question by waxing and waning on the false claims that the only dissenting voice to his extreme industrial laws was that of the trade union movement.

The voices of opposition to Work Choices that I hear almost on a daily basis in the south-west of Sydney are not those solely of the trade union movement. I can assure you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and the Prime Minister of that. They are the voices of people such as Reinaldo Martinez, who was sacked while he was on sick leave, and Mr Reynaldo Cortex, who was offered a take-it-or-leave-it AWA that cut his take-home pay by up to $200 a week. They are the voices of the Esselte workers in Minto and the employees of Lipa Pharmaceuticals. Quite frankly, these are not simply the voices of the trade union movement; they are the voices of working Australians. The people who stop me at community events and sporting events or just in the street to voice their opposition to Work Choices do so on the basis of how it impacts on ordinary, everyday Australians. So when the Prime Minister says that working Australians have never had it so good, he does not mean that. We know that people are suffering under this government’s ideologically driven agenda. The facts speak for themselves.

Of the individual contracts surveyed up to May 2006, the facts are that 100 per cent of AWAs had at least one protected award condition removed, 63 per cent cut penalty rates, 64 per cent cut annual leave loading, 40 per cent cut rest breaks, 51 per cent cut overtime loadings and 36 per cent cut declared holiday payments. The fact is that under this government’s extreme industrial relations laws workers have never been worse off.

It is about time that the Prime Minister attempted to prove his statement by releasing the analysis of what Work Choices AWAs really contain. No business would enter into an agreement not knowing the comparison; therefore, surely the minister, through the Office of Workplace Services, can arrive at an appropriate means of comparison. The government managed to produce the analysis once. If the government could do that, what does it have to hide by producing those sorts of statistics again? If the government does not release these figures, the only conclusion that can be reached is that working Australians have never been worse off than under this government’s extreme industrial relations laws. (Time expired)