Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is all very well for the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations to read out headlines of papers. I have a headline that I would like to share with the House: ‘Wage cuts won’t boost jobs’. That was in today’s Age in an article by a leading economist, Tim Colebatch, which clearly shows that the OECD report that has just been released indicates that you do not have to go the low road to ensure economic prosperity. Indeed, the minister has already conceded that previous Labor governments were able to make the hard decisions and structural change—sometimes very difficult structural change—but the difference between those administrations and this government is that we did not inflict pain upon ordinary working families the way this government seeks to do.

The fundamental difference between the way in which previous Labor governments went about changing this economy—and let us not forget when you talk about changing the economy that it was Labor governments that fundamentally modernised this economy to ensure that Australians benefited from those changes—and this government is that those governments did not, as this government has, choose that ordinary working families would suffer. That is the result of these laws. The Work Choices legislation in effect is driving down wages and conditions of employment. We say to the government: go about change in a way which will ensure that ordinary working families will not be worse off. That has been clearly enunciated by the OECD report. There is a myth that you have to deregulate, that you have to have effectively a laissez-faire economy without any employment protection if we are going to prosper. Of course, the OECD report refutes that. In effect, the OECD has concluded that, when comparing a country and an economy that provides employment protections, encourages collective bargaining and spends on training, it is clear that such a country could yield an equally successful employment outcome.

So it is not the case that you have to choose the low road. Indeed, there are many countries that are comparable to ours in terms of their economy and standards of living that have chosen the high road. They have chosen to spend, for example, a greater proportion of their GDP on training and have been encouraging collective bargaining, encouraging protection to be afforded to employees and providing assistance to people who are out of the workforce, for whatever reason, enabling them to go back in and participate in the workforce.

This government has chosen to go the low road for a variety of reasons. One is that the Prime Minister has had an obsession about smashing unions. I hate to think that a government of this great country has chosen to put, in terms of public policy, its hostility towards employee organisations ahead of the prosperity of ordinary working families, but it has chosen to do that. The OECD has clearly illustrated that it is not necessary to deregulate, to remove employment protections, to remove all unfair dismissal laws in order to provide for a prosperous nation.

I will make some comparisons. For example, the government likes to boast that it has a low unemployment rate. We welcome the reduction in unemployment and always will. We welcomed it when the Hawke-Keating period ensured that the double-digit inflation and the double-digit unemployment of the Howard-Fraser years was turned around. But we turned that around without going down this low-road path and without inflicting pain on ordinary working Australians.

The OECD report does indicate that the unemployment level of this country is 4.9 per cent, which does not place us at the top of the rankings—in fact, it places us in the middle of the rankings of wealthy nations. If we were to compare ourselves to Iceland, Denmark, Netherlands and Norway, we would find ourselves far worse off in terms of unemployment levels. Those countries, which have levels of regulation and employment protections in their industrial relations systems, have far lower unemployment levels than this country.

It is not about us going down the road the government chooses. It is not for us to undertake an Americanisation of our system. Nor is it for us to go down the Scandinavian road. What we should be doing when we are looking at creating a system that will provide sufficient flexibility and ensure productivity improvements is looking at a system that is not going to divide this nation, that is not going to make the majority of employees worse off as a result of the changes. Bringing people along with us is critical—making sure that people in the main are winners, not losers. But this government, by introducing the Work Choices legislation, has chosen the low road, has chosen a road that will hurt ordinary workers. That is a great tragedy.

When we were going around the country, the industrial relations task force visited 20 electorates. We spoke to church groups, community groups, workers, employers and many other representative bodies. What we did not hear was: ‘Yes, you should cut wages or remove protections for employees in order to find ways to improve the economic growth of the nation.’ In fact, we heard amongst small businesses a concern that the government had gone too far. We have heard again today that small businesses are not supporting the government’s Work Choices laws, in the main. There may well be a few people out there who are supporting them, but I have not seen too many small businesses get up publicly and say that they love these new laws. I have heard them say that they find them prescriptive, that the ministerial capacity to intervene between the parties is unprecedented and that the laws are cumbersome and complex—1,200 pages of laws is supposed to be simplifying the system, is it? That is not what we are hearing when we speak to small businesses, including, for example, a manager at a Hertz rental car company in Launceston, in the seat of Bass in Tasmania. He expressed fears that the legislation was out of step with basic Australian values. He told us in February this year:

We are supposed to be a society and an Australian society is supposed to have a reputation of being egalitarian and a fairly evenly divided society. We have travelled overseas and we have seen the gap between rich and poor, abject poverty and absolute wealth.

That was a concern expressed by a small business operator who thought that the way in which this government is choosing to go is in fact dividing this nation between the haves and have nots—not bringing people along with it or ensuring that the growth being produced is being shared widely. Clearly, that has not been the case. If it were the case, we would not hear such criticisms.

The government therefore really has failed to embrace the path that the Hawke-Keating government chose to go down when reforming the economy. Yes, there were some hard decisions made by those administrations. In fact, they deserve great credit in fundamentally altering this society in order to ensure that we had a modern economy and that there were flexibilities in place to ensure growth. But they placed protections in the system. We devolved from central wage fixing into enterprise bargaining, but we did so in a way that would not allow employees to be worse off as a result of that devolution. So we did modernise the industrial relations system, we actually broke the back of the double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment that occurred under the Howard-Fraser years. But we chose to protect people along the way.

Unfortunately, this government have sought to go after employees. It may well be purely through their hatred of unions that they have allowed the most vulnerable in our community to be the target of this legislation, but in the end the Australian people will not forget. They know exactly what has gone on here. They know that Work Choices provides no choice at all for them. They are aware that their conditions of employment are vulnerable. Effectively, now, with the removal of unfair dismissal laws, more than half the workforce of this nation is precariously employed. We had a quarter of the workforce that was casualised. By changing the laws for those employees working for companies with fewer than 100 employees we have effectively ensured that over half the workforce is precariously employed—and that is just not on. That is an absolute disgrace and a tragedy. (Time expired)

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