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

I thank the distinguished and eloquent Senator Lightfoot for his question. The Howard government’s industrial relations laws do strike a balance. Employees are given the ability to negotiate working conditions that best suit them, underpinned by a strong safety net and the fairness test, which ensures conditions cannot be traded without fair recompense. Employers—the people who, may I remind those opposite, actually create the jobs—are given the same ability to negotiate flexible working conditions with their workers. They have also had the job-destroying shackles of Labor’s so-called unfair dismissal laws removed. Despite what Labor and the unions say, the ability of unions to represent their members in the workplace has been retained and indeed enshrined in law.

What we have done is put in place a sensible law to prevent unions from simply barging into workplaces on any pretext to stand over workers and employers. It is significant that our laws, which have seen the creation now of over 400,000 new jobs—87 per cent of which are full time—and further real wage increases, are so balanced that the Labor Party now pretend that they would keep some aspects of Work Choices. The problem is that Labor’s position is just that: pretence. Some 70 per cent of Labor’s frontbench and 80 per cent of Labor senators are former union officials. Some of them in their former trade union lives were part of the rabble trying to break into Parliament House before our first budget—and some of us remember who they are. They found it easier to get in by getting Labor Party endorsement and are now sitting in this chamber. They, might I add, would be senior ministers in a Rudd Labor government. Do you think that they would stand up to union thuggery? Of course they would not.

There is the scary and very real prospect of the extremist Greens gaining the balance of power in this place and making Labor’s retrograde IR policies even more extreme. Here are some of the Greens extreme IR policies, a union wish list if ever you have seen one: an absolutely unfettered right to strike; an unfettered right for union representatives to enter the workplace; and the reinstatement—lock, stock and barrel—of Paul Keating’s so-called unfair dismissal laws. No wonder the unions are now pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Greens’ coffers.