Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I was loathe to stand up and interject then, because Senator Sheldon was recounting what appeared to be a game of Donkey Kong Country there, with his analogies about gorillas and bananas. I was lost in the theatre of it all. But I'll tell you what I'm not lost on: the radical, dangerous and ill-conceived rushed bill that we're seeing coming through our parliament, as we speak.

These are changes that represent the most significant change in our industrial relations system in decades. They are, ultimately, changes that will do exactly what we all know. This is not Super Nintendo. This is not a game of Donkey Kong Country. This is a very serious matter. These are the first stages in handing back the keys to this country to the militant union movement.

And we're already seeing this in South Australia, where there are already reports of the John-Setka-led CFMMEU taking the reins of the South Australian branch and starting to swing the axe. And why wouldn't they? They now have Labor governments at both the state and federal levels, both of whom are paving the way for what we know is going to be a terrible time for business. This is not an issue of people talking about their personal stories, which are excellent stories—the story Senator Sterle spoke about was basically a small business story. These are stories about the imposts that are going to be put on business.

We've heard them from the Albanese government's regulatory impact statement, which has said, very clearly, that the costs associated with this bill are going to be significant: $14,638 for small businesses and $75,148 for a medium business. Those ain't small bananas; they are serious, serious imposts. And they're real; they're not made up. They are absolutely real and they're now written down. Labor have made it clear that they don't care about small businesses. Small businesses do well for workers when they're profitable, but they don't do well when they're getting hit with sums of money like that. Labor have made it clear that they're going to hand all workplaces over to the unions, whether small or large. Industry-wide bargaining is simply set now to increase the number of strikes across the economy. We've seen this before; we saw it through the Hawke-Keating era and we're going to see it again. This is going to be devastating for the Australian economy and it's going to be devastating for Australian businesses, with widespread strike action and, potentially, sympathy strikes by those unrelated to a potential dispute. We saw this in the 1970s; it has happened before and history is repeating itself.

Everyone in this room wants higher wages for every Australian, but there's no evidence that the reforms will ever deliver higher wages. In fact we know, based on comments from businesses and employers, the evidence is that it will be quite the opposite. This is just a fact: Labor's legislation is going to lead to more strikes and more job losses, and it's going to allow unions into small businesses, which have never really had to deal with them before. Take a business, for example, like Crane Services, which was reported on last week in the Adelaide Advertiser. That's a fine publication; as you all know I'm a great fan of it—that's me being ironic, by the way, in case anyone wants to hear about that! But that's not on point and I'll come to that later on. The article said that the boss of an Adelaide crane company said that the livelihoods of the workers were at stake as a stand-off with the militant CFMMEU neared the end of its fourth day, at that stage. This is a family owned business, just like the story that Senator Sterle told about a family owned business. It's now going to be stood over by Mr Setka and his 'colleagues'—we'll use that terminology. There is absolutely no question about that. There will be unreasonable demands for conditions like a 25 per cent wage rise in one year. Businesses can't stomach this sort of knee-jerk reform.

These laws are also going to hold up wage rises because of the complexity of the system. We're now seeing more imposts put on businesses, which are now going to have to get to grips with various different systems. This is going to undermine competition and therefore Australians are going to have fewer choices and higher costs. It's going to force up prices and increase the cost of living—all, by the way, at a time when the country cannot afford it. Thanks to the conditions imposed here, we're all living through growing inflation, higher costs of living and higher energy costs. We have lots of batteries and wind farms though, which is good—lots of batteries and wind farms. They're doing a great job for the grid, by the way, while we're on the subject— (Time expired)

Question agreed to.