Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

These are provocative amendments by Senator Murray. They are provocative to the government. It is a very simple amendment to delete one number and put in another number. If the Labor Party actually believed their vehement rhetoric on this, you would imagine that they would accept the amendments of the Democrats. If the unfair dismissal laws are such a matter of great social injustice, as we were led to believe, one would wonder why the Labor Party would not seek the first opportunity to overturn the unfair dismissal laws that we introduced and indeed were elected upon on a number of occasions with a very firm unfair dismissals policy.

It is interesting to reflect that when we introduced certain changes we were told that Labor would oppose them lock, stock and barrel and would rip them up wholesale. We now know that the lock of the constitutional lock—namely, use of the corporations power—is accepted by Labor and the stock was having a national system, now accepted by Labor. In relation to the barrel, all they are doing is making it into a sawn-off shotgun rather than getting rid of the barrel, because they now accept the principle of an unfair dismissal law. They accept that principle.

As Senator Murray quite rightly points out, at least the Greens are consistent. They oppose it all the way down the line. That is fine—fundamental disagreement there. The only thing that stands between the Australian Labor Party and the alternative government on this is that we are unashamedly pro small business, and that is why we support as high a threshold as possible. We believe 100 is the appropriate figure. If you are anti small business, you would go to the lowest possible threshold whilst paying lip-service to small business and saying, ‘Yes, we do need unfair dismissal laws.’ Therefore, Labor have agreed to set it at 15.

The interesting thing is that, when this section was introduced by the former government, I remember receiving wholesale assaults from those opposite saying that this would lead to mass sackings and it would see unemployment skyrocket. The argument that we consistently put as the government at the time was that employers are called ‘employers’ and not ‘dismissers’ for a very simple reason: they are in the game of employing people, not dismissing people. As soon as we gave employers the confidence that if things did not work out they could dismiss, guess what? The unemployment level in this country, and the social misery caused by the unemployment level, was driven down from above five per cent to below five per cent and now, with the latest figures, to below four per cent—3.97 per cent. So, rather than seeing wholesale sackings, we saw wholesale employment and the removal of the social misery of unemployment from literally thousands of our fellow Australians.

We stand by what we stood for and remain consistent with our view that the unfair dismissal laws, which were a social experiment introduced by Prime Minister Keating, were an abysmal failure. They were a great disincentive to employment. Once they were removed, as we had sought to do, we saw a whole percentage point plus fall in our unemployment rate in this country. That meant the removal of the social misery associated with unemployment for literally tens of thousands of our fellow Australians. We believe that, in relation to unfair dismissals, we did get it right. We will be opposing the amendments, but it will be interesting to see how the government twist and turn on this one. Because of all the extravagant and extreme statements they made in relation to unfair dismissals, you would have thought they would be tripping over themselves to bring in legislation to get rid of it.