Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Fisher for his question. As the Prime Minister indicated earlier, according to the official Australian Bureau of Statistics data, employees on Australian workplace agreements earn, on average, 13 per cent more than employees covered by certified agreements. If you compare those individuals on AWAs with those on the instrument of choice of the Labor Party, the award, those on AWAs earn, on average, 100 per cent more than those who are on awards.

The member for Fisher asked me whether there are any threats to these benefits which are enjoyed by Australians on individual agreements. There are indeed threats, and those threats come from the labour movement in Australia, who want to abolish Australian workplace agreements, who want to rip away, from these Australians who are better off, those benefits that they have obtained under Australian workplace agreements.

Of course, in return for $50 million worth of funding from the unions over the last 10 years to the Australian Labor Party, we had this craven caving in by the Leader of the Opposition over the weekend, a caving in to the unions in Australia which has been almost universally condemned in the media today. For example, in the Australian, Matthew Stevens says, and the headline is, ‘Beazley bombs as economic manager’. In another article in the Australian, Peter Switzer—

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