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

No wonder the former head of the ACTU is interjecting. She is one of the union bosses who have got rid of the monkey and come straight into parliament. It is no surprise that that reform of the waterfront, which was hard reform, which was a tough decision, has delivered an improvement on crane rates, going from 17 movements per hour to about 27 movements per hour. There has been a direct flowthrough in improved productivity. The Labor Party opposed that all the way.

The Labor Party opposed our attempt to get the budget into surplus. They opposed it all the way. The Labor Party opposed us paying off $96 billion of government debt—$80 billion of which was accumulated by the Labor Party in the last decade of the Hawke-Keating government. They opposed us paying off their debt. They opposed us getting the budget into surplus. They opposed us on our first, second and third tranche of industrial relations reform. They opposed us on having independent monetary policy. The Labor Party have sought at every point to oppose us on the decisions that have helped to keep the economy strong, to keep people in jobs—to keep people in well-paid jobs that lead on to good careers.

If we talk about the work-family balance, the starting point has to be having a job. All the regulation and industrial law in the world, under the Labor Party in the 1990s, could not stop one million Australians being unemployed. When Labor were in government they had all their restrictive laws. They could not stop one million Australians and one million families suffering the huge indignity of long-term unemployment at record levels. They claim to be a caring and compassionate party, but there is no compassion in leaving a million people on the scrap heap, in unemployment for a long period of time. There is no compassion in that. There is no compassion in having people, generation after generation, stuck on welfare. There is no compassion in that. If you want to rip the heart out of working families, you can do it by ensuring that they are stuck on welfare and can never get out of it, that they are stuck in unemployment and can never get out of it. That is what they did. They thought they were compassionate. They were not compassionate at all.

Compassion is having a record number of people in jobs. Compassion is the people who are working today enjoying the highest real wages in Australian employment history. Compassion is more women than ever before having the opportunity to re-enter the workforce. Compassion is more people than ever who have been long-term unemployed going into real, full-time jobs. Compassion is undertaking the hard reforms that deliver real benefits. That is what we did a year ago. We introduced real reforms—difficult reforms—that have delivered real benefits for Australian families. I can think of no better way to help an Australian family that is ambitious for the destiny of their children than to give that family the opportunity to earn a household income and, importantly, to give them some choice and some ability to be the masters of their own destinies.

One of the vehicles for doing that is the range of agreements that we introduced through Work Choices. You can have a union collective agreement, you can have a non-union collective agreement or you can have individual Australian workplace agreements. Those agreements offer a level of flexibility never seen before in the Australian workplace, because, as the OECD said, the more restrictive and prescriptive laws are in relation to industrial relations, the more they disadvantage those most disadvantaged, particularly women and young people. The reason why our laws did not bring about a revolution in the workplace, why there was no Armageddon, why there were no Bill Shorten predicted mass sackings, why children got to see their parents at Christmas and why they had shoes on their feet when they went to school in January and February is that our laws were responding to the changing workplace.

When the Labor Party’s old restrictive workplace laws—the inflexible workplace that the Labor Party was the architect of and is still the defender of—were in place, they alienated women and young people and put them on the casual list. Business had no choice but to put them on as casuals because to put them on as full-time or part-time employees was such an enormous business risk, particularly for small business, that they could not bring them into the mainstream system. They had to leave them on the outside as casuals. It is the same with independent contractors. Why was there such growth in independent contractors? It was because the rigid mainstream system that the Labor Party defends and wants to reintroduce made it so difficult for those plumbers, sparkies and bricklayers that they had to become independent contractors to work the flexible hours that they wanted to work and to respond to the demands of their customers. Through our laws and the flexibility that we have created in the mainstream system, those people have come back in.

Casual workers have written agreements for the first time; they have been employed for 13 years as casuals, but they have never had an agreement that they could walk down to the bank with and borrow money against. The pride in their voices when they say, ‘I can buy a home, or, as a woman, ‘I now have independence in the family unit,’ is exactly why I came into this place: to make a difference to people’s lives that helps them to deliver better outcomes for themselves and their families. We are not flinching in the face of the most awesome assembled force of union money, union bosses, state Labor governments and the opposition because what we have done is in the national interest. What we have done is in the interests of the people of Australia and in the interests of their children and grandchildren.

We are responding to the challenges of a changing global marketplace. That changing global marketplace will deliver job opportunities for the generations of today and tomorrow that we could never have envisaged. In many cases, the jobs that exist today could not have been described or predicted 20 years ago, and we cannot possibly today think of all of the jobs that will exist in 20 years. That is because the world is changing. That change is either an opportunity or a threat. We have to seize it as an opportunity. We have to give hope to Australian workers of today and tomorrow that they can compete with the rest of the world. We have the emergence of China and India and the entry into the global marketplace of over two billion new workers and family, and we have a changing marketplace that is heavily influenced by the new dynamics of the internet and the digitisation of information. Whilst we have that dynamic change, we should seize the opportunity through a flexible system that responds to a changing marketplace and not see it as a threat.

While the Labor Party wants to turn everyone into a victim or a potential victim, we say, ‘Provide the appropriate protections for individuals but please give them the opportunity to be the masters of their own destinies.’ That is what we believe in. We believe in giving people hope and aspiration, giving people choice and making sure that people have the opportunity to define their future and their jobs rather than be a victim or a potential victim where only the union bosses can come in to save them.

How disappointing it was, on this, the first anniversary of Work Choices, to go on ABC Radio to debate Greg Combet. I wanted to debate the Deputy Leader of the Opposition. The Prime Minister went on Radio National and ended up debating Greg Combet. He really wanted to debate Kevin Rudd on industrial relations. We are happy to do it; we are ready to do it. But what happens? Greg Combet pushes aside the leadership of the Labor Party, steps in and says, ‘I’m calling the shots.’ In the same way he is taking a knife to the member for Charlton and getting her out of the way, so too he is doing it to the leadership team of the Labor Party. If the leadership team of the Labor Party are not prepared to defend their own industrial relations policy, Greg Combet is prepared to do it. He is prepared to come in here and do it if he has to.

We are about higher wages, about more jobs, about fewer strikes, and about hope and opportunity for younger Australians, older Australians and the next generation of Australians. The Labor Party is about the union bosses, about winning power and about ensuring that the union bosses have a place in Australia’s future at a cost to the Australian workers.

See this speech in context