Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Parry for his excellent and incisive question and I acknowledge his concern for a better and more flexible employment market. There was an overwhelming need to reform our old industrial relations system. Diverse sources—such as Paul Keating, Bill Shorten, the OECD and a former New South Wales Labor Premier—have all acknowledged that need in the past. Now cheap politics unfortunately stops some of those Labor luminaries from acknowledging this need. But just recently the respected International Monetary Fund has accepted the need for reform and flexibility. The head of the IMF said yesterday—and I invite those opposite to listen: ‘Flexibility is needed in the world and the labour market is no exception. The labour laws, not only of the 1970s but even of the 1990s, are probably not the ones we need in the 21st century.’ Sage, sensible advice.

And yet what does the Leader of the Opposition want to do? As the Australian has so accurately described today, he wants to do a Latham. He wants to take us back to the outdated labour laws of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s when the unions ran our employment market and those opposite were trade union officials, and over one million of our fellow Australians were unemployed. As Mr Beazley was told yesterday, your announcement to abolish AWAs puts the ALP at odds with nearly every credible commentator on the importance to Australia’s overall economic performance of continuing and not reversing the direction of workplace reform.

The irony of Mr Beazley’s attack on Australian workplace agreements is that what we have introduced is not new. In 2005—just last year—Mr Beazley acknowledged that individual contracts have always been with us. He then said that you cannot go around ripping up individual contracts. But now all of a sudden we can, because Mr Beazley is concerned about one individual contract, and that is his own—the leadership of the Australian Labor Party.

Flexibility may well mean negotiating away penalty rates in exchange for higher wages, something the union movement has done for a long time. The ACTU secretary, Mr Combet, admitted that he has done it and, as long ago as 15 years, the shop assistants union in South Australia negotiated an agreement to get rid of all penalty rates, including late night penalty rates and the 50 per cent Saturday afternoon rate, in exchange for an increase in wages. Get this: according to the person involved in negotiating this, some casual employees lost more money in penalty rates than they gained in base salary. That was a union sanctioned agreement. Five years before the Howard government came to power, the unions saw the sense in trading away penalty rates and were even willing to countenance some workers, like casual workers, being worse off. That was 15 years ago. (Time expired)