Phillip Barresi (Deakin, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a lazy contribution to this debate from the member for Perth. It was a speech that has been dusted off from the previous time that this exact MPI came to this House. There was nothing new in that contribution at all—same MPI, same speech. Why do we have this MPI today? There is only one reason, and that is that the ALP have been told to muscle up. They have been told, ‘Get your acts together or we’re going to review your support.’ That is the only reason why this MPI is on today.

And they are slow learners. Yesterday was a great opportunity for the Australian Labor Party to learn from a statesman of the quality of Tony Blair what the United Kingdom Labour Party has done. Why is it that the United Kingdom has in the last 10 or 15 years continued to progress in leaps and bounds? Why is it that the Australian Labor Party is in fact trying to take us back down a road of making sure that the flexibility that has been introduced over the last few years will be reversed by their tearing up of the work choices legislation?

In the stark contrast between the Leader of the Opposition and Tony Blair we have a great example of where this country could be if it were not for the negativity of the Australian Labor Party and its leader. Yet the Leader of the Opposition yesterday had the absolute gall in one of his contributions to Tony Blair’s presence to proclaim some form of synergy, some sort of bond, with Blair and the UK Labour Party. I am not sure whether he was listening to the speech, or whether members opposite were listening to the speech yesterday, but there was a very stark contrast.

Greg Combet, the Secretary of the ACTU, has challenged the ALP: ‘Muscle up, get your act together or we’re going to review your support.’ It is a $50 million tail wagging the dog. To Combet it is a dog that has strayed from home in recent years. It is a dog that needs to be trained and put in its place—$50 million worth really does allow you to make sure that you are listened to and that those in this chamber will sit up straight and all of a sudden take heed of what needs to be done.

Combet admits to not being very impressed with what has been going on in the Labor Party lately. But his solution to the strife in the ALP is to say, ‘People just have to put the interests of the Labor Party ahead of everything else.’ This is a man who in the past has admitted that the ACTU’s campaign on industrial relations is purely political. Combet and the ACTU are not interested in helping workers. In fact, Combet and the President of the ACTU, Sharan Burrows, are really seeking some war stories—they are seeking an individual who has been traumatised, who has had a member of the family who has been injured or maimed in the workplace—so that they can bring that out. We are going to start seeing these examples being trawled through. The ALP are not interested in the workers of this country. They are opposing Work Choices because they have been told by the tail that they need to start getting their acts together—and we are seeing that today, with some fairly ordinary contributions.

We also had the Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, say in his contribution that our work choices legislation is Soviet style, that this is some form of socialistic communism that has been brought down. Yet this is the same leader who yesterday in his contribution when the UK leader was here called the Western Australian Premier an ‘old Trotskyite’. This is the Premier of a state with aspects of its industrial relations system now having been put into our legislation. There are aspects of the Western Australian system that we have adopted in Work Choices—in particular, the negotiation of certain entitlements and conditions. The ‘old Trotskyite’ of Western Australia is someone that the Leader of the Opposition looks up to, but at the same time he decries what we are doing through this legislation.

The member for Brand, the Leader of the Opposition, and those on the other side are embarking on a scare campaign that this country has seen take place a number of times over the years. We have seen the same Labor members stand up here and go into the public domain to utter the same words, the same doomsaying type statements. Nothing has changed. Back in 1996, when we first started our reform program—which of course was the second wave of industrial relations reforms, the first being started by Paul Keating himself—Kim Beazley said:

... the government is attacking the very basis of people’s living standards ... Attack wages and you attack families.

That was on 19 June 1996. Stephen Smith, the member for Perth, in October 1995 said:

The Howard model is quite simple. It is all about lower wages; it is about worse conditions; it is about a massive rise in industrial disputation; it is about the abolition of safety nets; and it is about pushing down or abolishing minimum standards.

We had the member for Hotham saying in February 1996:

You’ll get interest rates up and inflation up ... a recipe for economic chaos.

Chris Evans, Martin Ferguson, Senator John Faulkner, Senator Forshaw—the list goes on and on. The same people who are coming into this chamber and the other chamber saying that the sky is going to fall in, that there is going to be mass unemployment and that there is going to be mass abuse of power by employers, are the same people who were making those claims in 1995, in 1996 and in 1997.

And what has happened? What have we seen? What we have seen is a Howard government, since 1996, presiding over an economic growth which is unprecedented in this country, a Howard government that has understood that economic growth depends on keeping the reform process going so that each new wave of reform will generate a further wave of productivity increases. We are building a platform for ongoing economic growth and prosperity. We have seen during this time wage increases of 16.8 per cent, compared to 1.2 per cent under 13 years of Labor.

And the member for Perth comes into this chamber and says—as he has said a number of times now, and it is a fallacy—that if the Industrial Relations Commission had adopted the federal government’s submission we would have had lower wage increases. The problem with a lot of members of the ALP is that they have been out of the workforce for too long. They no longer understand how the industrial relations system works. They know that in order to have a claim in the Industrial Relations Commission in the past you had to have had a conflict, a disagreement. The way it has worked in the past—and I certainly do not agree with the way it has worked in the past; it is the old industrial relations club—you had to have an ambit claim and a counter ambit claim. We all know that is how it works. We have seen outrageous claims by both sides—employers and employee organisations—in the past.

But what we have seen—the facts are quite stark—is a 1.2 per cent increase in wages under 13 years of Labor and a 16.8 per cent increase in wages under the coalition government. We have seen a 27.7 per cent increase in average household income, as the Prime Minister made mention of today during question time. Significant changes have taken place. The doomsayers were proven wrong. They will be proven wrong again.

The misrepresentation that has taken place before has already started again. We know that the ALP are intending to put flyers into letterboxes around the place. They have got four examples. John, Mary, Brendan and Tanya all claim that there is no job security, that there are no penalty rates, that safety nets have been scrapped and that there is no collective bargaining. I would say to people: when you receive that brochure, make sure you cut through the claims that are made by the union movement and the ALP and test their veracity. Certainly they do not stack up. No employee can be forced to sign an AWA that removes overtime loading and penalty rates, in terms of the claim about John being disadvantaged. There are a lot of other points but time will not permit me to go through them all. All I say to people is: you have seen this campaign before and you will see it again. Test the veracity of their claims and it will be proven that the ALP cannot be believed in this situation.

We had a great leader yesterday make a great presentation to this House. Tony Blair and Kim Beazley’s approaches to IR are in stark contrast. In clear contrast to the approach of Kim Beazley and his Labor colleagues in Australia, Tony Blair, when he came into office, said right from the beginning, ‘We need to change our industrial relations system.’ (Time expired)

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