Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am extremely pleased to support the Fair Work Bill 2008. This is a historic debate. This legislation is the culmination of political, union and community opposition to the Howard government’s Work Choices legislation. I am very pleased that I was part of the union campaign against the legislation. I stood at rallies with workers who said, ‘We cannot accept this legislation.’ I stood at rallies with workers who had walked off the job despite threats from their employer to take legal action under the Work Choices legislation against those workers. Those workers stood up for their rights and they stood up against what they believed was a very bad law. The Australian community said clearly and unequivocally that workers are entitled to respect, to dignity and to rights at work. The Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Australian Labor Party campaign resonated with the community. There is no argument that it was not a major factor in the defeat of the coalition government at the last election. When in opposition, this government campaigned to develop industrial legislation that struck the right balance between an employee’s and an employer’s needs. Significant consultation took place with affected parties and that has resulted in legislation which does balance flexibility with fairness.

Work Choices was the embodiment of the coalition’s political miscalculations. It is interesting to note that in the coalition’s minority committee report on this legislation they claim that the government’s legislation ‘is the latest iteration in a succession of evolutionary changes to the Australian workplace environment’. Well, there was nothing evolutionary about Work Choices. Work Choices was a radical, revolutionary approach to ripping away the conditions of workers in this country. Work Choices was revolutionary and it was radical, and it was designed to disempower ordinary Australians workers in workplaces around the country. It really was about adopting the lowest common denominator and going down the low road on workers’ wages and conditions. It relied on improving productivity and competitiveness by reducing workers’ wages, conditions and rights. This was a flawed approach, an approach rejected by the Australian public. Work Choices was the epitome of the coalition’s hubris and mean-spirited approach to working people. It was radical and flawed, and it was not the proper way to try and get economic progress in this country.

I have often asked myself why this came about. Why did we move from a situation where it was generally agreed that workers should have rights in the workplace? There is no doubt in my mind that it came about because of a neoliberal approach to industrial relations. The neoliberal approach was to take any protection by government out of the community. Workers should be left on their own to negotiate with their employer, with no union rights, with no safety net rights and with no legislative rights to protect them and give them a fair go in the workplace. Workers were left to deal one on one with their employer.

Before, Work Choices individual contracts were available but no-one moved to them. No-one moved to individual contracts, because it was the general view that they were an unfair form of contract for an individual worker with limited access to the capability of negotiating, with a well-resourced employer, a fair and equitable contract. Under Work Choices workers were then left with no access to external support and advice in the face of well-resourced employers. Why should the employer maintain the complete prerogative to determine when a worker works, how a worker works, what access the worker should have to a union and what rights the worker should have on the job? It does not happen in any other advanced country in the world. But Work Choices headed down that path to give all the rights to the employer and to deny the employee any rights to collective bargaining or rights to reasonable conditions on the job.

This approach is a neoliberal approach. It is an approach that was popularised by the HR Nicholls Society, whose members believe that workers should come to work fearful: they should fear coming to work and they should fear the proposition that they would lose their job. That was the HR Nicholls Society’s approach. We all know that senior coalition government ministers went to the HR Nicholls Society and made regular speeches to the society, doffed their cap to this organisation and behaved, in my view, in a sickening and sycophantic manner, promising even more radical industrial legislation. Work Choices was not enough for the HR Nicholls Society, and the coalition were prepared to give them more. Make no bones about it: if Peter Costello comes back as the Leader of the Opposition—