Jeannie Ferris (SA, 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. Is the minister aware of any threats to the accelerated job creation and continued wage growth which has been experienced in this country under the Howard government’s workplace relations policy Work Choices?

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

I thank Senator Ferris for her question and note that she is a great champion of the Australian worker. There is a threat to the accelerated job creation and continued wages growth that this country has experienced under Work Choices. There is a threat to the 175,000 new jobs, and counting, that have been created since Work Choices and, as Senator Ferris would know, that threat is Mr Beazley and the Labor Party. Mr Beazley wants to rip up these job-creating laws. He wants to take us back to the outdated industrial relations system of the 1980s and 1990s, when over one million of our fellow Australians were unemployed and wage growth was stagnant. He wants to take us back to the days when the unions ran this country. Just ask Greg Combet, who said as much recently.

Mr President, I do have a confession to make. On Monday I misled the Senate. I told the Senate that, under Labor’s ‘back to the 1980s industrial relations policy’, if just 51 per cent of workers at a workplace wanted a collective agreement, the other 49 per cent had to cop it. Well, I was wrong. In fact, Greg Combet—the real shadow industrial relations minister—revealed yesterday at the National Press Club:

This is not a system where the role to collective bargaining is predicated upon a majority decision by its employees.

So you do not even need a majority decision by workers in a workplace for a collective agreement; all you need is one worker, and the other 99 per cent would have to follow suit under the brave new world of the Labor Party and Mr Beazley. This is compulsory unionism under any other name. At a time when over 75 per cent of Australian workers have said that they do not want to be members of a trade union, to try to foist that upon the hardworking Australian workforce is nothing but disgraceful and it indicates what the Australian Labor Party would do.

Returning to Work Choices and its job creation impact, let me give this quote to those opposite:

Dire warnings of mass sackings and a resurgence of Dickensian employment practices can finally be rejected for the deceitful hot air they always were.

                 …         …           …

... this beautiful set of numbers—

that is, the 175,000 new jobs and record low industrial disputes—

suggests the opposite to the Dickensian nightmare of an enslaved proletariat.

Who do you think might have said that? The Prime Minister or Mr Andrews? No. It was the Australian editorial of 13 September. Let us go further, to Senator O’Brien’s home newspaper the Launceston Examiner, which represents that wonderful seat of Bass—so ably represented by Mr Michael Ferguson. On 12 September, that paper said:

The stream of horror stories that the unions promised has not eventuated.

There is only one real horror story facing the workers of Australia—that is, the prospect of a Beazley Labor government, which will destroy jobs and jobs growth and ensure that there is a greater rate of industrial disputation.