Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

The position of the opposition is quite extraordinary. I want to clarify this so people understand what is occurring here. The opposition put in place the most unfair laws this country has ever seen—laws which removed wages and conditions from a great many working families in this country, laws which stripped away conditions in the sorts of percentages that I read out earlier. They are now coming in here—I am not actually sure what their line is because the opposition, as it is wont to do, is all over the place. On the one hand we are being criticised from the right; on the other hand, bizarrely for Senator Abetz, we appear to be being criticised from the left, which is an interesting experience. This is an opposition which, when in government, put in place a set of laws for which it did not have a mandate. Senator Abetz, I do not recall you going around Tasmania telling families in Tasmania that you were going to champion laws that were going to enable their penalty rates and their overtime rates to be removed. I do not recall you putting out a press release prior to the 2004 election telling them. Perhaps you would like to disabuse me if I am incorrect on that.

The government have made it clear that we predicate the approach we have taken on the experience of the productivity increases during the period this country did move to enterprise bargaining. We have proposed a new fair and flexible workplace system which is firmly focused on lifting productivity. If productivity improves in an enterprise then there are gains to be shared. That is the approach we will be taking. The workplace relations system the Rudd government will introduce is a decentralised system where employers and employees bargain at the individual enterprise level. We have been very clear about our focus on productivity. We have also been clear about what we regard as an important priority, and that is modernising awards. We are implementing our election policy commitments on this front.

In terms of the effect of our policy, which the shadow minister seems to care about so much, I would like to emphasise to the chamber that these issues being discussed now were discussed quite a lot, you would have to say, in the period leading up to the election. I do not think anyone in this country—unless you really did not read any newspapers or watch any television or talk to very many people—could possibly have thought that industrial relations was not an issue. It was a significant topic at the last election. A great many of the assertions that Senator Abetz is putting forward are the very same arguments that the previous government sought to put against the Labor Party in the previous election and he is continuing to do so in this chamber on a bill that he is charged with handling that, as I understand, his deputy leader and leader have instructed him to support.