Michael Johnson (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Howard government I am pleased to speak to the motion before the House. The member for Cunningham asked what our agenda was. Let me tell her, on behalf of the government: our agenda is about national prosperity. Our agenda is about creating jobs for Australians. Our agenda is about giving opportunities to young people throughout the length and breadth of this great country. It is about creating opportunities for all Australians to maximise their talents so that they can provide better opportunities for their families. I am pleased to be able to speak to this motion and put it where it belongs—in the bottom drawer.

This motion reflects the verbosity of the Leader of the Opposition—a lot of hot air and bluster. It is important that we come to the facts. What are the facts? The level of unemployment is at 4.9 per cent, a 30-year historic low. This is in a climate where participation rates are increasing. Since the Howard government came to office, 1.8 million new jobs have been created, real wages have increased by some 16.8 per cent over a decade and 56,000 Australian jobs have been created in one month alone. We have nil national government debt, amounting to savings of $8 billion-plus in interest rates alone. We have had 15 years of uninterrupted economic growth. That is what this government stands for. That is what the Howard government’s agenda is all about.

By contrast, let us look at the record of the Leader of the Opposition. We all know the important position he held when he was in the Keating government; he was finance minister. During Labor’s 13-year term in office, inflation was at 5.52 per cent, interest rates peaked at 17 per cent and the unemployment rate peaked at 11 per cent. One million Australians were out of a job during Labor’s tenure of office. I say to anybody listening to this debate in the parliament today, to the young Australians here, to the school children visiting our parliament: think about your future and the one million people who were out of a job during the Hawke-Keating years. That is something Australians should never forget. Certainly the people of the electorate of Ryan will be reminded time and time again by me, as their federal member, that if they want job security, if they want permanency of employment, the last thing they want is a Labor government. The very last thing they want is a Beazley Labor government, because with that they will get record levels of unemployment again.

The Beazley leadership group is trying to scare the Australian people again. We saw that with the debates in previous years. The most prominent was the tax reform debate, when the Labor Party used all its muscle to scare the Australian people. We all know how important the tax reforms have turned out to be, how significant they have been in stimulating economic activity and producing very low levels of unemployment in this country.

In terms of the statement by the Leader of the Opposition about getting rid of AWAs, there was an own goal on the weekend when a very prominent Labor Party union official, Mr Joe de Bruyn, expressed his great reservations when he said:

There’s certainly been a lot of liberties with the facts.

I say ‘Hear, hear!’ to Joe de Bruyn—someone highly respected in the labour movement and the union movement. It was very much an own goal on the part of the federal opposition. What is this motion all about? It is trying to scare the Australian people. Let me turn to some of the significant comments coming from the business community. I refer to none other than the Business Council of Australia’s President, Mr Michael Chaney, someone who is highly respected, with a track record of credibility and probity in the business community, someone who knows what he is talking about. I would rather back Mr Chaney’s comments and views than those of the federal Labor leader. Mr Chaney says:

The existence of AWAs has created a more innovative environment to progress agreements more generally in the workplace. The fact is that independent research shows that workplace reform, including the introduction of AWAs, has delivered significant opportunities for Australians.

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