Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister representing the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Senator Abetz. Will the minister outline to the Senate how Work Choices is working for the benefit of Australian workers and Australian families? Is the minister aware of any alternative policies?

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Mason for his question and acknowledge his longstanding interest in job creation, especially in his home state of Queensland. Senator Mason is right: Work Choices is working. Indeed, the tired old union slogan of ‘your rights at work’ should in fact be changed to ‘your right to work’ because there is no doubt that Work Choices is working, creating more jobs and higher wages for our fellow Australians. Since Work Choices passed into law, 159,000 new jobs have been created in this country—159,000 of our fellow Australians who did not have a job before Work Choices was introduced have a job now. To put this into context, this is the biggest quarterly job creation since the Howard government came to office. That is no mean feat given that over 1.9 million jobs have been created in that period. In fact, in these three months, April to July, the average job creation under the Howard government was 51,000. So we have seen a tripling of the average job creation since Work Choices was introduced.

I say to Senator Mason that, of those 159,000 new jobs created since Work Choices, 41,600 were created in your home state of Queensland. Despite the overwhelming evidence, Labor’s Mr Beattie said only he will fight these industrial relations changes. Only Mr Beattie will provide a roadblock in Queensland to the policies that have seen a tripling of the job creation rate and have seen real wages increase. Basically, the subtitle to Mr Beattie’s election commentary was that, if Mr Beattie had his way, there would be 41,600 Queenslanders without a job today; there would be 41,600 fewer Queenslanders in a job because of Mr Beattie’s manic determination to try to derail Work Choices. Mr Beattie wants to rip up 41,600 of his fellow Queenslanders’ jobs. He wants to see them in the unemployment dole queues rather than in gainful employment. Labor wants to reinstate the job destroying so-called unfair dismissal laws. Mr Beattie should come clean with the people of Queensland and acknowledge that those 41,600 jobs would not be around but for Work Choices—especially the benefits of Work Choices for small businesses.

Mr Beattie also wishes to abolish the Office of Workplace Services, which has recovered millions of dollars in underpaid wages for some of our fellow Australians. Labor’s lazy policy of simply ripping up the legislation is of course a rip-off to all those Australian workers who have now gained employment and obtained real wage increases as a result of Work Choices—in, I remind those opposite, a climate of the lowest rate of industrial disputation ever.