Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to assure Senator McEwen that I have not—and I do not know of any of my colleagues who have—called her a communist. The wall fell down a long time ago. Rest assured, Senator McEwen, we do not accuse you of communism at all. We say, though, that you and those on the other side are out of date old socialists. There is a slight difference. You are defending an old, regulated, centralist system of the early 1900s. That is what we accuse you of: a protectionist attitude to defend your union masters. We quite understand that you have to come in here. Your preselections depend on that, and the latest round of preselections in Victoria is evidence of it. It is evidence of just how the union movement controls your preselections.

We understand you have to come in here, as desperate as you are, trying to throw up haunting scenarios that may occur under the new industrial relations laws. But as Senator Ronaldson said—and he put it as plain as day; you ought to go out and market test what he said—the Australian public, let alone the Australian workers, know the results of the first round of industrial relations reforms in 1996. They are not going to be scared by you ever again. Under any analysis, the first round of reforms in 1996—having introduced Australian workplace agreements, the Employment Advocate and those sorts of first introductions—was more extreme, if you like to use that word, and more reforming than this one. Yet what have we seen? We have seen that the results are on the board, the jury is in and the proof is in the pudding. Regardless of the rhetoric you ran in that time, you cannot defend the score on the board. We have an employment rate of around five per cent, the lowest in some 30 years.

What is the essence of any government policy? What does every portfolio actually boil down to? It boils down to the employment rate. Employment is the true acid test of a government. It is something that, when you were in government, you failed miserably at, setting records of unemployment. This government is setting records of low unemployment. You had a million unemployed at your peak; we have some 500,000 to 600,000 unemployed—five per cent. My point is that that is the test of any government. It is the essence of any industrial relations system that gets people employed. Workers have, over the past 10 years, enjoyed real wages growth. It is not just employment that they are achieving, but also real wages growth. So their standards of living have improved. Those dual figures prove beyond doubt that the first tranche of industrial relations reforms in 1996 was a success, yet you come in here and run the same old arguments against this second tranche of industrial relations reforms. It simply will not wash out there, whatever market testing you seek to do.

This new reform process is a continuation of the government’s earlier reform. It is an integral part of maintaining the productivity, modernisation and flexibility of our economy. It is integral to all other reforms that we have introduced economically. Again I say that the score is on the board—not just in the unemployment rate but also in low interest rates. They do not just come about. That just does not happen because you have a booming economy, you are selling your minerals to China and therefore you have that cascading effect. A government has to work at managing its economy. At all points it has to reform. Surely a rigid, inflexible and out-of-date industrial relations system is the first port of call for reform.

The core principles were outlined by the Leader of the Senate when he was answering questions—they are to improve the conditions of individual workers, and that has been done; to increase the flexibility and meet the changing needs of the modern economy and of families and individuals; and, of course, to improve the productivity of individual workers and business. What do we hear from the Labor Party? Should they get into government, they will revert all of these reforms back to the old industrial relations system. (Time expired)