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

Last night’s budget indicated that productivity is expected to increase in 2007-08. Strong business investment is boosting the economy’s productivity capacity and laying the foundations for sustainable economic growth in the years ahead. There is no doubt that the current industrial relations system will boost productivity in coming years. With only three-quarters of the data since the introduction of Work Choices, and considerable volatility in quarterly estimates, it is far too early to make judgement about the productivity effects of Work Choices. But one thing we do know about the current system is that an extra 250,000-plus of our fellow Australians have been able to gain employment, and they have been able to gain real wage increases. That has laid the foundation, we believe, for the productivity growth that we trust we will experience in the year 2007-08.

The Labor Party need to tell the Australian people how they would deal with this issue. Instead of just picking at us and making assertions that, I am sure, they know are not supportable, they need to ask themselves how their policies would increase productivity. They would raid the Future Fund. They would come up with a new industrial relations system, and do you know how they would increase productivity with their new industrial relations system? They were going to have a one-stop shop. A day later, it was going to be a two-stop shop. Then they were going to have a system of 10 minimum conditions. But guess what these great advocates of the workers forgot in those 10 minimum conditions? They forgot the minimum wage—and they had to introduce 11 minimum conditions.

If you ask the workers of Australia, ‘What is the most important component of your package?’ guess what they say it is. It is the wage. And that was the thing that that bright spark who delivered Mark Latham to the leadership of the Labor Party and Medicare Gold at the last election delivered to the Labor Party in her industrial relations policy. I would suggest to those opposite that they are on very weak ground when they seek to assert that their proposed new industrial relations system would be somehow better than ours. We will always accept that we can improve our system for the benefit of the workers of Australia. But what we will not countenance is the sort of nonsense policy on the run that we have seen emanate from the Australian Labor Party’s national conference, courtesy of Ms Gillard. The Australian people can be satisfied of this: we have shown over the past decade sound economic management and a willingness to make the tough decisions in the face of opposition from those opposite. Today, we are living off the dividends of that. Our fellow Australians know that and they know that the policies of the Labor Party would prejudice that future security. That is why we believe that this budget is in fact a budget for the future security of this great nation.