Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is—almost a million people on AWAs. There is no greater authority on this than the Leader of the Opposition, who said, ‘There will be a million AWAs in place when we come into office and you can’t wander around cancelling contracts.’ Exactly! This is a promise that the Labor Party is unable to deliver on. We have seen workers in Western Australia and in Queensland in a whole range of industries who like their AWAs and who want to stay on their AWAs. If we look at my own state of South Australia, we find there are 2,000 people on AWAs at Olympic Dam. Roxby Downs has one of the highest income rates of any postcode in South Australia. There are over 9,000 people on AWAs in the electorate of Boothby. I think this is a big mistake by the Labor Party. This is a mistake akin to the ‘troops home by Christmas’ promise by Mark Latham.

The problem here is that the government has a very different vision of Australia from that of the opposition. We have an optimistic view of employers and employees and the way they can work cooperatively for mutual benefit. That is a view shared by the vast majority of aspirational Australians. It is a view shared by the vast majority of workers. We believe that workers should have choice, that they should have freedom to choose. AWAs are a very important strand of the workplace arrangements in this country, which will lead to further improvements in the economy.

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