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

I thank the member for O’Connor for his question. In answering his question, I note that the unemployment rate in the O’Connor electorate has fallen to 3.8 per cent. We are all aware that yesterday at the National Press Club the Secretary of the ACTU, Mr Combet, delivered his vision for a workers’ nirvana in Australia. In trying to defend this vision, Mr Combet gave some very interesting answers, and one in particular caught my attention. I put it in this context because, repeatedly over this year, we have had from the Leader of the Opposition a demand that the government guarantee that no single worker in Australia would be worse off as a result of changes to workplace relations. Indeed, under pressure to match his rhetoric in June, the Leader of the Opposition said, ‘Nothing we do is going to make people worse off.’ That is a promise which the Secretary of the ACTU, Mr Combet, refused to give yesterday. He was asked by a journalist after his address at the Press Club: ‘Can you guarantee the Australian public that, if this proposal were put forward, there would be no job losses at all?’ There was a very complicated, confusing answer from Mr Combet, but the basic bottom line is that he refused to give a guarantee that nobody would be worse off in his great workers’ nirvana in Australia if this blueprint were to be put into place.

The reality is that of course workers would be worse off. The ripping up of AWAs, the imposition of collective bargaining, the extended rights of entry into workplaces, the imposition of a new payroll tax on businesses in Australia—all of these things which are part of the ALP’s policy under the Leader of the Opposition—would make hundreds of thousands of Australians worse off and would not lead to the job creation that we have seen over the last 10 years.

What all of this suggests is this that when it comes to policy in Australia, when it comes to looking at the future of this country, when it comes to meeting the challenges that we face in Australia, the Leader of the Opposition is simply not up to the job. To quote Laurie Oakes in the Bulletin this week, ‘When Kim Beazley makes a stupid statement, he does his best to ensure that it is really stupid.’

See this speech in context