Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

There we go. Thank you, Senator Pratt, for making clear that's your priority. Your priority is the union delegates and their rights. Let me have a look elsewhere in here. Schedule 4, part 1 relates to industrial manslaughter. Guess when that commences? It's 1 July next year. There's Labor's prioritisation. Union delegates get immediate rights. Let's put that through! But for all we hear from the Labor Party about industrial manslaughter and such issues, that's a lesser priority. They were happy to hold asbestos provisions and provisions of first responders hostage to getting more union rights. They were happy to equally prioritise union rights ahead of their industrial manslaughter reforms, because it's 'merry Christmas' to the trade union movement. It's about the rights they are being given. Rights that even ensure the right of entry, as Senator O'Sullivan highlighted before, and rights that even override enterprise agreements that are struck. That's the remarkable part of what's in here. An enterprise agreement has gone through all of the processes—processes this government has tightened even further—to get agreement between employers and employees about how their shared workplace will work.

As Senator Cash so rightly put it, none of this works without employers. None of it works without successful, profitable employers. I'm happy to say that word, 'profit', because without it you don't have jobs. Without it you don't have businesses. Without it you don't have an economy. Successful, profitable, cooperative, harmonious workplaces where they reach agreement around an enterprise agreement, and reach terms in that enterprise agreement about how unions might operate in that business sounds pretty reasonable doesn't it? Employers and employees work together—'Here's our enterprise agreement. Everyone's agreed on that. As part of that we agree how unions operate within the workplace. Is that okay?' Not under this law it's not, because they'll just override the enterprise agreement to give even greater powers to the union movement. So don't anybody be conned today in terms of the legislation that is before us. The Labor Party, in pursuit of this legislation, have shown their true colours and their priorities, and the priority they are pursuing is, of course, about giving their union mates the Christmas present they want.

Why is this element and others that we have concerns about so serious? Because it goes to the state of the Australian economy and the operation of businesses across the Australian economy. This week we had the latest national accounts released, and they showed that for the last quarter in Australia GDP per capita went backwards by half a per cent. In simple terms, that means on average every Australian was half a per cent less well off in terms of the size of the economy and how you'd carve that up for everybody. Of course, actually, most households and individuals know they're much worse off than that. Most households have seen interest paid on mortgages go up 7.6 per cent over the last year or so, price increases of 9.2 per cent since the election of the Labor government, and their real household disposable income fall 6.6 per cent over the last year on a per capita basis. Australian households are 6.6 per cent worse off per person. And people know there are challenges around the world. Do you know what the comparative analysis of data shows about real household income? It shows that there has been a bigger decline in real household income in Australia than in any other advanced economy. Australian households have gone backwards by more over the last year than in any other advanced economy. That is the real tragedy, the pain being borne by Australian households.

Some of the drivers of these bad economic statistics are poor productivity in the Australian economy. Now, many advanced economies are struggling with productivity at present—it's not an unusual problem—and we've all been working to try to get productivity growing faster. But do you know what these reforms do?