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

I thank the honourable member for O’Connor for his question. As he and other members of the House know, since the introduction of Work Choices we have seen 175,000 jobs created in Australia—great news for Australian families; great news for Australian workers—and, at the same time, wages have continued to grow in this country and industrial disputation has fallen to the lowest level on record. So this is great news for Australians and great news for the economy.

As the Prime Minister indicated in answer to an earlier question, over the weekend we had the Leader of the Opposition quietly slip out a policy which amounts to sheer economic vandalism of this country. This compulsory union bargaining policy means, in effect, that union officials would be able to march into any business in Australia and demand to have a collective agreement put in place. As part of this process which Mr Combet and those in the trade union movement have been outlining, they would be able to seek to open up the financial affairs and the books of account of all these businesses as well. That is what compulsory union bargaining under the Labor Party means. Let us make no bones about this: this will be a job-destroying move if it is ever implemented in Australia.

Not only that, there is a great contradiction in what the Leader of the Opposition says. On one hand he says, ‘If a majority of employees want to have a collective agreement, then we’ll legislate to allow them.’ But just remember what else he said: ‘If a majority of employees want to have an individual Australian workplace agreement, we’ll ban them.’ So there is not even any internal logic in this place. We have to ask why is it—

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