Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Treasurer. Has the Treasurer seen recent modelling on the benefits of industrial relations reform? What does this modelling indicate about the impact of rolling back these reforms?

Peter Costello (Higgins, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Stirling for his question. I have actually seen proposals to roll back industrial relations reform in this country. They of course are the proposals of the Australian Council of Trade Unions and their political creation, the Labor Party, which is led by the Leader of the Opposition. Australia has come a long way since the days of highly unionised, highly centralised industrial relations. But all of that is at risk at this next election, because it is the plan of the Leader of the Opposition to roll back all of the reforms that have been made and to take Australia backwards by decades. He was belled on this by none other than one of his own heroes, former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating, who, on 7 June, on Lateline, described Labor’s industrial relations roll-back as:

... something that will take them further back than legislation I put in place in ’93.

So this throwback, this roll-back, of the Labor Party is not just to pre Work Choices. It is not just to pre the 1996 election. It is going back to before 1993 in its attempt to appease the trade union movement. I said in the parliament last week that the Leader of the Opposition’s dearest wish is to be a Liberal. But he can never be that, because he is a pawn in the hands of the ACTU. He might be able to talk the talk, but he will never walk the walk, because he is beholden to the political apparatus of the trade union movement.

Econtech, the modelling agency, has now done a model on what Labor policy means. This is not mine; this is not the Treasury’s; this is from Econtech, a consultancy which the Labor Party itself likes to quote. Listen to what Econtech says Labor policy will do. In three years it will reduce GDP by 4.8 per cent. This will be the equivalent of losing $2,700 per person in Australia. In three years employment will drop 2.9 per cent and we will lose 316,000 jobs in this country. In three years the CPI will rise to five per cent. Of course, as a consequence of that interest rates will rise. They will rise to double figures. There will be pre-1993 IR and pre-1993 interest rates. We will be back into double figures for home mortgage variable interest rates. In real terms average wages will be lower by $787 a year after three years. And, of course, real wages would begin to decline as inflation broke out.

This was the story of the last time Labor were in government. Those of us who were here remember there was no prouder boast from Mr Keating as he walked to this dispatch box than to say he had managed to depress real wages in this country. It was a boast that the Labor Party had. That is what they are looking like doing again: depressing real wages, increasing the CPI, increasing interest rates, declining the GDP and lowering real wages. Why would you do that? Why would any political party want to do that? I will tell you why: because at their heart the Labor Party are owned, operated and controlled by the trade union movement. They are here to do the bidding of the trade union movement. Every single Labor member is a member of a trade union. Every single one of the members of parliament sitting opposite is a trade union member put here, paid and supported by the trade unions to do their bidding. Australians do not want lower real wages, lower GDP, higher inflation and higher interest rates, and they do not want Labor’s industrial relations policy.