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

I thank the member for Lindsay for her question. As she knows, this government has been working hard for the last 10 years to ensure not only the creation of more jobs in Australia but that the real wages of Australians continue to rise. Wages have risen 16.4 per cent in real terms over the last decade, while figures for the June quarter show wages going up by an annualised 4.4 per cent this year and the economy remaining strong so that Australians can have a sense of belief in their future in this country.

The latest piece of evidence in relation to this matter is the long-term unemployment data. I can inform the House that the latest long-term unemployment data shows that the number of long-term unemployed in Australia fell by 9,300 in August to stand at 90,700, which is a record low for the number of long-term unemployed people in Australia. Indeed, since 1996 that figure has more than halved.

The member for Lindsay also asked me about these proposals by the Leader of the Opposition to introduce compulsory union bargaining in Australia. So far the Leader of the Opposition has given two examples as to why we should have this plan to take Australia back to the past in relation to compulsory union bargaining. The first example he gave was of Radio Rentals in Adelaide. What he forgot to say was that the Radio Rentals case is a dispute which has arisen because a certain handful of workers there decided that they did not want to take what the union recommended to them—namely, a union collective agreement. So this is a furphy as an argument for what the Leader of the Opposition says. His second example was the Boeing dispute, but he also failed to say in relation to the Boeing dispute that the majority of workers in fact did not want a collective agreement. This points out not only his weak attempt at justifying this policy but also that, if his policy is going to work according to these examples, what he is actually going to adopt is what the Secretary of the ACTU, Mr Combet, said yesterday: it does not require a majority of workers; it only requires one or two workers in a particular workforce. Indeed, when you read further into what Mr Combet said, he is proposing that we return to the system essentially of industry-wide pattern bargaining in this country that operated in the 1980s. Industry pattern bargaining takes no account whatsoever of the individual circumstances of any business; it just imposes a ‘one size fits all’. What a policy to drive inflationary pressure in this country. This once again shows how incompetent the Leader of the Opposition is so far as economic management is concerned. When it comes to protecting the jobs of Australians, the Leader of the Opposition has no interest whatsoever. These proposals show that he is simply not up to the job.

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