Judith Troeth (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy President, given that Senator Marshall has chosen to make a remark through you, may I also do that? I listened in silence to Senator Wong and I would ask the same courtesy from her.

I will tell you why. Australian workers find workplace agreements suit their life balance and the way in which they wish to conduct their lives. As Senator Abetz remarked some time ago, the fact is that some allowances or conditions may be traded off for others so that if you are a working mother and you want particular conditions to allow you to pick up your children from school or from preschool you can trade off some of the other things you have, but there are some things which are non-negotiable. It is very true that we have laid down a fairly inclusive arrangement so that workers can choose the sorts of conditions which suit them. No-one is forced to sign an AWA.

I would like to take in some outside opinions here. For instance, the Business Council President, Mr Michael Chaney, said that all the evidence indicates that Work Choices has been a success to date. He says:

Our view has been all along Work Choices was part of the evolution, not a revolution, started by Labor and continued by the Coalition. It’s just a sensible next step.

For a stronger statement we might go to the Prime Minister. He says:

What on earth is unfair about the fact that we have the lowest unemployment rate in 32 years? What is unfair about the fact that we have fewer industrial disputes since 1913? And what is unfair about the fact that real wages continue to grow? The reason that people are critical of WorkChoices; and indeed opposition to WorkChoices is not driven out of concern for workers and their families, although that is the label used by those who attack the Government, it’s not driven out of that. It’s driven out of a desire to re-establish union power over the industrial relations system of this nation.

That is much closer to the truth than anything that the Labor Party can serve up. When the Senate Employment Workplace Relations and Education Committee, of which I am chair, was holding the industrial relations hearings in November of the previous year, you may recall some of the statements that were made. For instance, Mr Kim Beazley, the then Leader of the Opposition, said:

There will be more divorce.

Mr Bill Shorten, now the candidate for Maribyrnong, said there will be a ‘green light for mass sackings’. Ms Julia Gillard said:

... these laws ... are bad for the economy.

You only have to transpose against that the figures I have given on unemployment and on industrial disputes. Mr Tony Upton from the Transport Workers Union said:

This legislation is a direct threat to road safety in this country.

Ms Sharan Burrow said:

Children won’t see their parents for Christmas.

Mr Bill Ludwig, the AWU national president, said:

Our children are going to school with bare feet because parents couldn’t afford shoes.

These sorts of comments have hit a new low. It is a fact that, since the introduction of Work Choices, real wages have increased by 1.5 per cent. On 26 October 2006 the Australian Fair Pay Commission awarded a $27.36 per week wage increase to Australia’s lowest paid workers, and that came into effect on 1 December 2006.

Since March 2006, when Work Choices was introduced, 263,700 new jobs have been created, including 229,200 full-time positions. This is a direct contradiction of the comments of those who argue that Work Choices will lead to the casualisation of the workforce. As we saw, the unemployment rate in February 2007 stood at 4.6 per cent—and I remind the opposition of the 10.9 per cent peak recorded under Labor in December 1992 with their highly centralised wage-fixing system, which was dominated by the unions. Full-time jobs growth—which is where everybody can get a job if they want to—has been the coalition’s hallmark, and there are now 7.4 million Australians in full-time employment. This is a record high of 7,407,000 people. It is no wonder that those on the coalition side are very pleased to have this as their record in government.

In view of Senator Wong’s remarks about how women have faired under Work Choices, there are another couple of points I would like to make. As Senator Wong knows, and as I and many other female workers know, sometimes it is necessary to juggle your job with commitments that you have at home or outside of your job, and Work Choices has been very good in the sense that women can decide what emphasis they will place on certain conditions in their job. The World Economic Forum’s latest Global gender gap report described Australia as a leader in closing the gender gap.

Listening to the opposition, you would think that there are no protections afforded under Work Choices. They know very well that these conditions are protected: (1) parental leave—there is a legislated entitlement to 12 months parental leave; (2) a 38-hour working week plus reasonable additional hours—and there has been a reduction in working hours of 0.7 hours per week in the first six months of the operation of Work Choices; (3) personal and carers leave—there is an entitlement of 10 days leave if you are sick or if a family member requires care and support; (4) annual leave—there is a right to four weeks annual leave; (5) a minimum wage entitlement—no worker can fall below the federal minimum wage of $511.86 per week; and (6) compassionate leave—there is an entitlement to two days compassionate leave in the event of the death of a family member.

When I contrast that with what the opposition presented in its 13 years of government, with its ever increasing, centralised wage fixing and with unions having a stranglehold over the hours people worked, the wages people earned and the way in which they were allowed to work, I am very proud to be part of a coalition government that has eased the constrictions on the workforce in this way. Australia will never prosper unless we adopt flexible working hours and flexible conditions but still protect the right of every worker to earn no less than a minimum wage. That is what this system has set in place. As the Prime Minister has said, if we were to reverse this it would be the first time in 25 years that a major economic reform in this country has been reversed. It would be akin to reversing the progress we have made in trades and tariffs. It would be very negative for investment in this country. (Time expired)