Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very pleased to rise to speak to this today, because nothing motivates me more than standing up for the hardworking people of this country. If we bring back multi-pattern bargaining in this country, it will be a job killer. We do not want to see our hardworking battlers lose their jobs in in this country. Just as importantly, we don't want to see our small businesses shut down. Believe you me, this is an attack on small business by the usual suspects—the big end of town, the big unions and the big corporations—who want to drive true innovation and entrepreneurship out of this country.

If there's one thing that the Labor Party love its command and control, and that is exactly what this issue is all about. It is about having unions dictate to small businesses what sorts of rules they can have in place. I want it to be absolutely that I am 100 per cent behind union membership. The comments that I am making are directed at the union elites—the same union elites who sit there year after year and call for superannuation rises. We've already had members in the other place call for a rise in superannuation of 15 per cent in the second term if Labor were to be re-elected. I would love to know exactly what low-income earners are meant to be taking home in their pay if 15 per cent of their money is going off into superannuation.

Make no mistake: this will hurt industry, especially small business, at a time when they cannot afford it. It will result in job losses and potentially result in more strikes. We saw what happened in the early 2000s, when there was basically pattern bargaining. The Productivity Commission noted that the estimated cost of lost production from two industrial disputes across the automotive industry the year before was up to $630 million. Do we really want to go into the history of the car manufacturing sector and how inflexible labour laws were a part of the reason, though not the only reason; I've got my own little beef to grind with withholding taxes as well—

Thank you very much for the interjection, Senator Green. This all started way back in 1986 to 1988 under the Button plan. The Button plan, which was introduced by the Hawke-Keating government, destroyed manufacturing in this country, most notably in Victoria. What Labor did straight after that was they brought the Dawkins plan in. So they destroyed the manufacturing sector and then they subsidised the university sector. Now we have the Greens on gender diversity and all of this stuff when we should be putting more money back into TAFE and getting people back into real jobs. One of the things that was completely overlooked in last week's job summit was the fact that, effectively, the first jobs you want to fill in this country are those jobs in your primary industries. Your farmers and your miners—that's where your true wealth comes from. Once you've those jobs filled up, then you work on your secondary industries— you go to your manufacturing industries. Yet, in this country, the Labor Party and the Greens do everything they can to destroy the primary and secondary industries.

Let me tell you, it is the primary and secondary industries—those jobs in manufacturing, farming and mining—that create the wealth to feed the people and help employ people in the services industry. If we want to actually rebuild this country, there needs to be more focus on getting back to primary production, mining and manufacturing. I'm an unashamed protectionist. I put my flag to the mast in my maiden speech. I called on Deakin and Barton, the first two prime ministers in this country who were protectionist. I'll be honest here. This neoliberalism—which, ironically enough, was introduced by the Hawke-Keating government—has basically lowered the barriers of nation states. Now, we've offshored just about all of our productive jobs in this country. So it is incredibly important, if we are to rebuild jobs in this country, that we maintain flexibility in the workplace.

I totally support minimum working conditions and fair conditions for the worker. I will be very clear about that. I myself come from a multigenerational blue-collar family, but the reason I'm on this side of the chamber is that I believe in the individual dignity and worth of every individual and in people having the flexibility to make their decisions. The Labor Party used to believe in that. We know they don't believe in that anymore. They introduced compulsory superannuation, and they never put that to the vote, did they? We know why they didn't. It's because in 1997 when New Zealand put compulsory superannuation to the vote they lost 92 per cent to eight. If Paul Keating had said to everyone in 1992, 'By 2020 we're going to take 10 per cent of your wages and give that to someone you've never met. You may or may not get it back when you're 60, and there's no capital guarantee that you're going to get it back,' do you think the people would have voted for that? Of course not.

What has this superannuation ended up funding? I'll tell you what it's funded. It's funded the privatisation of our sovereign infrastructure, so either Macquarie Bank owns it or the foreign offshore companies own it. We're now paying through the nose for toll roads and services. Our energy grid is on the verge of collapse, because we've had rent-seeking privateers in the superannuation industry always whinging that they want more handouts. Climate change is just this big, virtue-signalling distraction for the rent seekers in the private sector to be milking our essential services dry.

So, like I said, yet again, we have to maintain flexibility in the workplace. We have to let our small business flourish. They are not going to be able to flourish if they've got unions breathing down their throats over and beyond fair work and pay and minimum award conditions, forcing one set of rules from one industry onto another industry with another set of working conditions that are completely different to everyone else.

I tell you what, this is not what we want in this country. We should be trying to get Australians back into jobs, in particular those Australians who exercise their right in a free and democratic country not to take a jab which has been proven to be ineffective. Ten million cases by August 2022; I don't think it works. Sorry, but that's the facts. We have potentially hundreds of thousands of workers out of work, here in Australia, and what does this lot on the other side do, the Labor movement, want to do? They want to increase immigration to push out Australian workers who chose their democratic right to choose what goes into their bodies.

I heard a minister in the other place say last week, 'We're going to bring in nurses, because we've got a nursing shortage.' Maybe we have a nursing shortage because that side of the chamber continues to push people like nurses and teachers—they're not being vilified—out of work. I suggest before we start talking about bringing in rigid working conditions that are going to make it very difficult for small business—why would you want to start a small business in in this country with the Labor movement and the big unions and their bullying tactics and their coercion via mandates? Where were they with the mandates? They ran a mile. They do not believe in free choice. They don't believe in quality assurance. It's all about our way or the highway.

Heaven help us if the Labor Party gets in charge of industrial relations in this country. Even former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd knocked back pattern bargaining in 2007; they didn't even go that far. But we know that the Prime Minister of the day comes from the far, far, far left—any further left and he'd fall off the edge of the planet; that's how far left he is. He's done a very good job of hiding his Marxist tendencies and everything like that, but, don't you worry: he will be totally behind the whole 'You will be happy and own nothing' thing. He's going to do that through basically sending small business broke. Everything's going to come back to being state owned. And while I believe that sovereign infrastructure should be state owned, I certainly don't believe that is the case in the private sector.

Our small businesses are the true capitalists in this country, not the guys in big corporations now, who are controlled by the union funds. Over 20 per cent of all of our major blue chips now are controlled by industry funds. They all have one proxy adviser. Yet again, they've centralised power into the hands of a few inner-city urban elites who wouldn't know the difference between a brigalow and a box tree or between haematite and magnetite. No, they wouldn't know where the wealth in this country comes from, but they're more than happy to set down whole new bunch of rules and laws in this country that are going to drive small business broke and send hardworking Australians back home, in the gutter without a job.