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

My question is to Senator Abetz, the Minister representing the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. Will the minister outline to the Senate how the Howard government’s job-creating Work Choices industrial relations policy is facilitating real choice in the workplace for Australian workers? 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—a question in which he correctly noted that Work Choices is creating jobs, to the tune of 205,000 jobs and counting, which represents a record period of job creation. More specifically, Senator Mason asked how Work Choices is facilitating choice. Just as the empirical evidence proves that Work Choices is creating jobs, so too it proves that Work Choices is facilitating choice. It is as good as its name.

Since Work Choices came into being on 27 March, some 129,000-plus employees have availed themselves of the choice provided by Work Choices to enter into an Australian workplace agreement. More interestingly, more than double that number, over 308,000 employees, have chosen to sign up to collective agreements. I remind those opposite what the Leader of the Opposition said about the implication of Work Choices. This is what he said:

What all this amounts to is collapsing the right of ordinary Australians to collectively bargain ...

The figures, like all the figures, have shown that prophecy to be wrong. Once again, just as their Chicken Little claims of mass sackings have been proven wrong, so too have Labor been proven wrong when it comes to their claims about choice. There is only one threat to choice in the workplace, and that is the Labor Party and their outdated ‘no ticket, no start’ policy. We had no better evidence of that than what happened earlier this week when Labor prevented non-union journalists from entering their conference venue.

Opposition Senators:

Opposition senators interjecting—

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

The roosters on the other side should listen to this because we now have a new answer to the perennial question: why did the chicken cross the road? The answer is not to get to the other side; it was to hold a press conference! That is why the chicken crossed the road. We now hear Mr Beazley, after three days of denying that he had anything to do with it, saying that he might in fact do a U-turn and come back across the road and change the policy on this. All I say to that particular chicken is this: if you’re going to cross the road so often because you can’t make up your mind, do you know what is going to happen? You’re going to get run over. And the Australian people at the next election will run over Mr Beazley and the Australian Labor Party for their lack of commitment to giving workers in this country real choice.

We are the party of choice. We are giving people employment; we are giving people real wage increases; and we are giving them the choice as to whether or not they want to be represented by a union. Once we gave them that choice, we have seen over 75 per cent of our fellow Australians in employment saying, ‘Thanks but no thanks,’ to the trade union movement. Those opposite are locked into their trade unionism of about five decades ago. We are now in a new era where we give workers choice, and that is what they want, because it is delivering real improvements for them in the number of jobs, in real wage increases and also, most tellingly, in the lowest rate of industrial disputation since records were first kept in this country.