Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I return to exactly why it is pertinent: what we are going to see now is a wage-interest-inflation spiral. That is what is coming before us now. To take you back to the crux of what happens next, what happens next is wage-interest-inflation. We have that because of the centralised control that will permeate back into the direction of wages—and obviously unions must reflect the aspirations of their members. They will say that their interest rates have gone up because the government has failed to talk down interest rates, because the government did not have the courage to go out and publicly state that monetary policy is a blunt instrument and because the Prime Minister and the Treasurer refused to go into bat for the working families of Australia and put downward pressure on interest rates. Because they refused to do that, we now have the advent of what will be wage-interest-inflation. It will work quite simply. The workers will meet with their union rep, as they are entitled to do, and they will apply for a wage increase. The wage increase will come about and then people will lose their jobs, because you cannot get blood out of a stone. This is what is going to happen. There is only a limited amount of money to go around.

We are heading for an economic squeeze like we have not had in the history of this nation and it has got absolutely nothing to do with our domestic economy, which has been left in entirely good shape. We could never be so conceited to think that we are the drivers of world economic policy. The drivers of world economic policy are nations that are far stronger than us, and that is what is driving the agenda of this nation. All you can do in this nation is mitigate the effects of it, because that is all you have the power to do. When you open our economy from the inside to wage and interest inflation, you do not mitigate the effects, you exacerbate them. You exacerbate the effects of the hurt and the pain that will come from what is already before us.

That is why, with a completely carte blanche ‘we are going to throw this out’ approach to politics, you may win a political point, you may be popular or a whole range of other things, but you are not a patriot and you are not doing the right thing by our nation. There has to be an ability to mitigate by having an extra lever in some way, shape or form—some control mechanism that is not determined from a centralised point, as this will be.

This government will be judged on its capacity to manage under a position of stress. And I will be honest, it did not bring about this position of stress; it was going to come regardless. If it does not have the capacity to manage it, the judgement will be for all to see, because there will be ramifications for every working family in the mortgage belts of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, which this week had a 26 per cent clearance rate. Those people are under stress and under pressure. They cannot even pay back to the banks what they owe them. As those pressures come on board, this government will be judged on whether it has the capacity and the ability to steel itself to walk up to the line and deal with the issues.

Going back to the bill, the Deputy Prime Minister said that it will not jeopardise employment. Quite obviously, that is a statement that will not stand the test of fact. Anyone who has been in business will tell you that, when times become precarious, you will not take someone on full time if you do not have the capacity to disengage from that employment. Without a shadow of a doubt, in the real world if I am worried and I am under the pump because my nation is under the pump I will not take employees on. The only avenue I have is if I have the flexibility of negotiating with them in the best terms I possibly can so as to keep them in a job and to keep myself in business. But my business is my house mortgage. It also supports my family. I will not let it all go down the tubes by making a stupid decision. So, in small business, my decision is: if in doubt, rule out. I will not employ people; they will stay as casuals. More to the point, if I think that there is going to be some caveat placed on it by the government or some intrusion by the government, I will not employ them at all. I will do without. That is an impediment to the aspiration of the Australian people to go into the workplace.

You might say, ‘We’re at full employment now.’ We are, but as a resource nation, we lag behind the effects in the rest of the world. We have heard some ridiculous arguments in the past by a number of commentators about so-called ‘decoupling’. As I stated earlier, Asia today went down four per cent; so much for decoupling. The US is the nose of the plane and no matter where you are on that plane you will follow where the nose of the plane goes.

The only thing that we can do to try to keep people in the workforce is to create some sort of flexibility of engagement. It is a fool’s errand to think anything else. You are talking not only to the employer but you are talking to a wife with a mortgage and she will not put the house at risk for the sake of taking on an extra employee. This is the reality of where we are now.

The Prime Minister and the Treasurer have the run of this nation for another two and a half years and God bless them and good luck to them, because they need it. But I look forward to a substantial statement of policy direction on how this nation is going to manage the impending threat that is absolutely apparent to anybody who has the capacity to google. As to why this nation is not dealing with it, I have no idea. I have no idea where this political debate has wandered to.

In summary, I believe there is more reason now for legislation to support the working families of Australia and to keep people in jobs, to deal with the reality of the position we are in now. Industrial relations laws change all the time, and six months ago it was a completely different situation to where we are now, and surely Labor must acknowledge that. We need to manifestly express that reality in the policies we put before the Australian people. The Australian people will understand that it is a hard statement but that the alternative is unemployment. The alternative is mortgage repossessions on their houses, loss of the payments on their cars and having them taken away, and kids not being able to go to the school of their parents’ choosing. They are the things that will come screaming in the door. If economic pundits in the United States are correct when they say that this is the biggest economic crisis since 1928, then what page are we reading from? Why hasn’t there been a statement that says that we are going to start to deal with this issue?

My belief is that this bill is now more pertinent to the security of our nation and the security of jobs and to mitigating the effects of the impending recession than has ever been the case before. Our nation has before it now a crisis that has not been seen by our government—and not by any government—for a long period of time. The strength, structure, policy development and courage of the government that is able to deliver those policies to see the Australian people through that period will be held in high esteem by the history books for a long period after all of us have left this chamber. But, if you take the rudders off the ship and you allow the Australian nation to venture forth in full sail at the behest of the storm, we will be crushed by the waves and you will be held responsible.