Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. I refer to the Treasurer’s comments on 6 May when he was asked whether he could guarantee that a Costello government would not repeal or water down the fairness test that the Prime Minister introduced to his industrial relations legislation. The Treasurer replied:

I’m not going to speculate on what might happen after the election.

I also refer to comments by the Minister for Finance and Administration, Senator Minchin, to the HR Nicholls Society when he said:

We do need to seek a mandate from the Australian people at the next election for another wave of industrial relations reform.

Can the Prime Minister confirm that the government has no plans for further changes to its industrial relations legislation?

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

I will make a couple of comments. The first is that, as I have said repeatedly, if further finetuning of this legislation is needed it will be undertaken, but I do not envisage that there will be any further major changes. We think the change that will be introduced next Monday is a very good one. The change will guarantee that, if people trade off their penalty rates and overtime loadings, they will get fair compensation in return. I would have thought that was a very fair proposition because it was never intended when we introduced this legislation that it would become the norm for that to occur. Let me make clear the purpose of this fairness test. As I imagine most people know, although maybe not everybody does, if you are an award reliant employee and you do not enter into an AWA where issues like penalty rates are required to be dealt with specifically, you must be paid what is in the award because that is the law. It is the l-a-w, if I could coin a phrase.

I will turn to the other part of the honourable member’s question. I do not pretend to remember everything that everybody says in this place, but I think you will find that he rather truncated and distorted what the Treasurer said. He is prone to doing that when he quotes people and I think he was being tricky with the truth when he asked that question.