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

We can see that Senator Wong is engaging in the politics of scaremongering. She has admitted that we do not know whether the number of agreements that she is talking about is fair or not. That is scaremongering. To make a statement and then admit that you do not know what the answer is is absolute scaremongering. The fact is that our workplace relations laws have been in place for less than two years. Yet more than 100,000 agreements are being reviewed and more than 1,000 new agreements are being lodged every day with the Workplace Authority, which is the independent umpire ensuring that the conditions of working Australians are being protected. It is this independent umpire that the Labor Party would scrap if it ever gets into government.

We do not apologise for a small delay in processing agreements, because we want to make sure that people are paid properly. That is our top priority. To speed up the process, we want to encourage employers to pay the right money to begin with. The Workplace Authority has a pre-lodgement system for agreements to fast-track the process. Of the 12,749 agreements which have been fully assessed, only 1,070 did not initially pass. Under the proper procedure, the Workplace Authority has written to the employer and employee, requesting changes be made to the agreement—within 14 days—so that it passes the fairness test. This is our system and it works well. If the employer does not make the changes, the agreement ceases to operate and the employer will need to back pay. If they fail to do that, they will be referred to the Workplace Ombudsman.

This system works very well. A great deal of thought went into putting it into place initially, and our reforms of the workplace shift right away from the Labor Party system where the rights of employers and employees were controlled and could only be changed by industrial tribunals and unions. Our system, workplace relations, fits very well with the idea that individual employers and individual employees can come to an agreement about the working arrangements that suit their own personal circumstances, rather than being forced to work under the old, one-size-fits-all system.

I always used to think of the system before I came into parliament as having the needle pointing totally in favour of unions. All I ever wanted to see was the needle shift to neutral on a gauge, you might say, so that employees and employers had equal rights and, under a fair and balanced system, they could be worked out. The difference between Labor’s approach to industrial relations and the approach taken by the coalition is that the coalition recognise that all of the regulation in the world cannot create jobs. We recognise that providing an economic framework that creates more jobs and better-paid jobs is the system that we want to have.

What we have done has determined whether the jobs growth and the increase in wages over the last decade will continue. We have seen the unemployment rate in Australia fall to an over-30-year low of 4.3 per cent and we have seen growth by 417,900 jobs since March 2006. I need hardly remind the Senate that, under the old industrial relations system presided over by Labor, the unemployment rate peaked in 1992 at 10.9 per cent and almost one million Australians were without a job. We have moved to a single national workplace relations system.

Julia Gillard is on record in the Adelaide Advertiser of 17 February this year as saying that the current workplace system hinders industrial action with all sorts of legal red tape. The fact is that the previous industrial relations system worked under 4,000 separate awards—4,000. And, given the chance, Labor will fall into line with the demands of their union mates—(Time expired)