Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Centenary of ANZAC) Share this | Hansard source

I was in the chamber last week when Senator Seselja recounted his youth working for Woolworths. Madam Deputy President, you may recall that two days ago I referred to his claim that—I will read the words again. I hate repeating this, but it probably needs to be repeated in order to explain his contribution. He said:

They sold me out on penalty rates. I think we got time and a half in the nineties on a Sunday. I was young. I was 19 and I joined the SDA in good faith, hoping they would do me a good deal. It turned out like so many others in the union movement and like Mr Shorten: they sold me and thousands of other workers out as well.

Madam Deputy President, you may recall that I thought that that was wrong, mistaken. I went away to have a look at whether or not Senator Seselja's comments were correct. What we discovered when we did that examination was that Senator Seselja did mislead the Senate. He was not sold out by that great trade union, the SDA. In fact, the opposite had occurred. In fact, his terms and conditions were better than the relevant award. If Senator Seselja was a part-timer back then, he was something like 5.4 per cent better off under an agreement negotiated by the SDA. If he was a casual employee, depending on what sort of assumptions you make, he was anywhere between five and 11.8 per cent better off. As far as I can see, Senator Seselja has not come back into the chamber to correct the misleading of the Senate. I am disappointed about that because I have now got to raise the issue again. I think that when mistakes are made they should be corrected.

It has been a long time since Senator Seselja worked in the retail industry. Almost 20 years has gone past. I would like to give a little potted history of what has happened to wages and conditions, particularly in the retail industry, over that period of time, and what Senator Seselja's party has done over the last 20 years—or fractionally longer than 20 years. After World War II, there was a social compact between business and the unions, that they accepted the Australian industrial relations system. That broke down in the late eighties, with the election of the Greiner government in New South Wales. For the first time, that social compact was broken, and Liberal governments started the long, slow process to what finally ended up as Work Choices. They started reducing and removing the ability of unions and workers to work in the industrial relations system and started winding back all the hard-won conditions that unions had achieved for their members over the history of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act.

It started with Greiner. Then Premier Kennett in Victoria was elected. He went quite a bit further than Mr Greiner. He basically abolished the awards system in Victoria, so workers went from one day having a set of terms and conditions under awards to having basically a voluntary employment agreement. Again, all of those hard-won terms and conditions that workers had been able to achieve through their unions were suddenly thrown out the door in one fell swoop of legislation. Kennett went even further when John Howard was elected in 1996. He actually abolished the entire Victorian industrial relations system and handed it all over to Mr Howard, and we saw similar Greiner and Kennett events occur in other states. In my home state of South Australia, Dean Brown was elected, and he moved down a very similar path.

Unions in the retail industry were predominantly state based, and the reason why Senator Seselja is so mistaken is that he does not understand that little, basic principle. But, when the state governments started making these changes, the unions made a strategic decision to shift out of the old state systems into the federal system. It might be argued, 10 years later, that they had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. But you had to look after and protect your members, and Keating had won that election in 1993, so unions made that change into the federal system.

The tragedy was that John Howard then won the next election, and we discovered that Mr Reith was Minister for Industrial Relations. He started to carry out the Greiner, Kennett and Brown type of industrial relations structure. He did not get as far as he wanted to go; let us be clear about that. Labor and the minor parties in the Senate were able to stop him from going as far as he wanted to go. But, again, he started that whole process of reducing workers' terms and conditions.

Then we come to 2004, and suddenly all John Howard's dreams have come true. Not only does he control—