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

I thank the member for Blair for his question. The changes put in place since 27 March have led to very significant benefits for Australians, Australian workers and Australian families. We have seen jobs growth, wages growth, record low industrial disputation, record low retrenchments in Australia, a 20-year long-term unemployment rate low and strong productivity growth.

Let me take a little bit of the economic data about what has happened in the last six to eight months in Australia. For example, as the Treasurer has said, 165,000 Australians are in new jobs since 27 March this year, and 129,000 of those jobs are full-time jobs. But let me give you the significance of that historically. The job creation average for the last 20 years was just 70,000 jobs, and yet we have seen 165,000 jobs created since Work Choices was introduced this year. There is a 30-year unemployment low of 4.6 per cent.

We have wages continuing to grow. As I said earlier, tomorrow the lowest paid workers in Australia—one million of them—will get something which the Leader of the Opposition, the Labor Party and the labour movement said would not happen, because they said this was about driving down wages. Tomorrow, the one million lowest paid Australian workers will get a $27 increase in their pay packet. That is good news for Australian workers; it is something which the Labor Party said was not going to happen. We have the lowest levels of industrial disputes on record—and records in one form or another go back to before Gallipoli.

What did the Leader of the Opposition say? He said that the changes would lead to a situation where employers and employees would be at each other’s throats. Indeed, the contrary has occurred. We have a record low number of job retrenchments—the lowest for two decades in Australia—and long-term unemployed figures are also at 20-year lows.

When you cut away the rhetoric of the opposition and the labour movement about this and look not just at the anecdotal evidence but at the official ABS data about what has happened in Australia, all of that data points to benefits for Australian workers and their families as a result of these changes. Yet we still have the Leader of the Opposition maintaining this scare campaign down there at the MCG today, saying he is going to rip up changes that bring advantages for Australians into the future. All of his predictions have been proven false over the last six to eight months since Work Choices came into place.

Why does he want to do this? Because, in contrast to us—we are concerned about the national interest and how we continue to grow this country—the Leader of the Opposition is only interested in vested interests. He is only interested in his job, rather than jobs for all Australians. He is bitterly disappointed, I am sure, by the embarrassingly low turnout that they got at the MCG today. Look at all the excuses they are trying to make about why only half the number of people that they predicted were actually there. The reality is that these are changes which are good for Australia. This side of politics is prepared to make the decisions to ensure that Australia continues to grow. The only interest the other side has is: who is the Leader of the Opposition?

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