Peter Costello (Higgins, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I like the Left intervening in defence of the Right. The whole emphasis of that report was that the OECD was wrong; that what you actually need in a modern economy is centralised wage fixation. Nothing could destroy labour productivity more in this country than the abolition of AWAs—a federal Labor policy—and nothing could do more damage than to take wage settlements from prosperous areas of the economy and apply them across awards to areas where there is no capacity. Nothing could take us back to the dark, dark ages of the failed Keating-Beazley Labor government faster than turning on industrial relations reform. Labor is the party of backward economic policy and nothing threatens productivity more than a Labor re-election.

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