Mike Symon (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister outline the importance of a fair and balanced industrial relations system and the need to ensure that any unfair industrial relations systems are not reintroduced in the future?

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. As I said earlier in question time today, in a party of disunity—that is, the Liberal Party—there are only two things which have caused them to be united this week. One is their agreement to cut the wages of working Australians because of their ideological commitment to Work Choices. The second is to cut the prices of alcopops. Those have been the two things which have been the unity ticket—the only surviving unity ticket—within the Liberal Party this week as the parliament draws closer to the recess.

On 24 November 2007, Australians walked into the ballot boxes around the country and voted to abolish the Liberal Party’s unfair Work Choices legislation. There could not have been a clearer mandate for a government to act. Today, the Senate is debating the legislation to end Work Choices. Those opposite, Liberals and Nationals, cannot make up their minds. They are split between the two enduring factions: the purists and the pretenders—the purists, who want to go out there and declare what they actually believe, which is that Work Choices should be the nation’s legislation for our workplaces for the future, and the pretenders, who seek to push that to one side in order to take the political pain for themselves away for a season at least.

It is now almost 500 days since Australian voters decisively rejected an industrial relations system that bent all the rules in the system away from the interests of workers and in the direction of employers. That system was wrong. They got the balance wrong. We went to the people last time around and said we would get the balance right through our approach to industrial relations. We put that to the people in great detail. The people voted for it. Yet those opposite continue to frustrate these measures in the Senate.

Australians voted for a fair and balanced industrial relations system. They voted for a system that builds a strong safety net. They voted for a system that gives employees a right to bargain with the employer. They voted for a system that protects them from being unfairly sacked. These are the key elements of the system which we seek to replace Work Choices with but, 500 days later, those opposite continue to deny the mandate given to this government to bring about this change.

Again we see these tensions on the part of those opposite in the public debate today. We have the Leader of the Opposition this morning on radio still threatening to vote to keep Work Choices alive. Honourable members might appreciate what he actually had to say:

If Julia Gillard is so stubborn that she is not prepared to give any ground then she may not get her bill through the Senate and it may not be passed at all.

That is kind of the pretend position. But, if you want some purity, of course, you have to go to the member for Warringah. He chipped in on Sky this morning—onya, Tone!—and said:

If all of our amendments are scorned by the government, we will be against the bill.

And of course we know where the other pretender, the member for Higgins, stands on this. He says:

If the bill is not changed in these essential respects, then the Liberal Party and the National Party should vote it down.

They are the positions on offer on the part of those opposite.

What we know for a fact is this: when the member for Higgins replaces the member for Wentworth as the Leader of the Opposition, it will be like Frankenstein having the electrodes reconnected as far as Work Choices is concerned. That is what is going to happen. It is in the Liberal Party’s DNA. It is doubly in the DNA of the member for Higgins—we all know that and he still says that publicly. But there they will be, putting the old electrodes onto the Work Choices system again—if they get the chance, back in government—to bring it back to life. That is what it is all about.

What the Australian people will be carefully reflecting on in the coming debates is that, when the member for Higgins replaces the member for Wentworth—and it is a matter of time, not a matter of ‘if’—as the Leader of the Opposition, the agenda on Work Choices will be clear. The purists will have replaced the pretenders, and the agenda for actually bringing back Work Choices will be there for all to see.

But what about the 11 million Australian workers who are the direct recipients of the rough justice that will be delivered by Work Choices? What will happen to them? As they engage in their internal political debate—Higgins versus Wentworth, Wentworth versus Higgins—not a passing thought is given to those workers and their desire for some basic protection and a basic safety net in the period going forward. The most basic interest they have right now is this: a basic right to ensure that they at least have protection when it comes to redundancy. Those opposite, in Work Choices, stripped that away and that is the system which those opposite wish to re-establish and replace as the industrial relations system for the future. The former ‘Minister for Work Choices’, the current shadow Treasurer, knows that to be absolutely true, as the pretenders once again try to cover up for the purists and pretend that that was somehow not part of the Work Choices regime.

What I cannot understand in this entire debate is how the Leader of the Opposition could stand up, only a few months ago, and say that Work Choices was dead. How could standing up and saying that, and the shenanigans currently underway in the Senate and prospectively in the House, be in any way consistent? Consistency is what people expect in our national political life. Instead they have an epistle of opportunism on the part of the Leader of the Opposition.

Then on the question of unfair dismissal he says clearly, in black and white, that the government has a mandate when it comes to our proposals on unfair dismissal. Yet what they now seek to do in the Senate is to undermine those very proposals. We have a consistent approach on this. What we have on the part of the Leader of the Opposition—the temporary Leader of the Opposition, the current Leader of the Opposition—is one thing writ large: opportunism, opportunism and opportunism squared. People in this country expect some decency—

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Opposition says we are so hopeless on this, on industrial relations. I would say to him, as he rises to address the television cameras next time, I suppose, rather than—

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do not know if those opposite have noticed this but, whenever he asks a question, he does not actually ask it of us; he asks it of the camera. But that is just something to note on the way through.

What we know about this Leader of the Opposition is that, on every thread of consistency, he has been demolished on the industrial relations debate. The member for Bradfield stuck hard to the position—the right-wing position of the Liberal Party—both internally and in his external declarations. He was a purist. He remains a purist. And he was replaced by the supreme pretender.