Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Canning for his question. I note that the unemployment rate in 1996 was 9.1 per cent in Canning; today it is 4.8 per cent. I am pleased to report that the latest disputes data confirms that just 0.3 working days per 1,000 employees were lost in Western Australia in the final quarter of 2006. Now, that is a massive 430 times lower than the peak under Labor in 1991. That rate is the lowest rate ever recorded by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. It is also the case, of course, that Australia has the lowest level of industrial disputation since 1913—since records were first kept.

That is good for the economy of Western Australia and it is good for the Australian economy. Under Work Choices, the Howard government has said that it is unlawful to take industrial action in support of pattern bargaining. Work Choices is about genuine bargaining, not copycat bargaining. Yet the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, on two occasions now, has refused to rule out, under the Labor Party, the return of pattern bargaining. On Meet the Press on the weekend, and on The 7.30 Report, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition went out of her way not to indicate that the Labor Party would continue with our policy in relation to pattern bargaining.

So the Labor Party believes in the one-size-fits-all approach to industrial relations. Before the Baird committee in Western Australia last week, the Reserve Bank Governor, Glenn Stevens, had pattern bargaining in mind when he said:

I do not think it is any secret that if, for some reason, labour markets became much more rigid, much more prone to very large wage increases, which were not related to productivity and which flowed across industries the way they did many years ago, that that probably would constitute something of a problem for managing resource booms like we presently have.

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