Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw that and replace it: the one thing he would not do was stand in front of the dispatch box and tell Australians what he intends for their future in industrial relations and beyond. That is partly because there are things he does not want to reveal and that is partly because there are whole areas where he does not know what he is going to do next.

Increasingly, the Prime Minister looks like a politician forged in a different age fighting yesterday’s battles. There have been some times in the last few days when I have listened to him in here, on TV or on radio and he has reminded me of those old movies we used to watch on TV where 20 years after the end of World War II they would go to an island and find a Japanese soldier who had not been told that the war was over. The whole plot of the movie would be about ensuring that these people realised that the war was over. The Prime Minister is looking like that because he is fighting the industrial relations battles of yesterday. He is a man whose policies were forged on the anvil of the past not the future, and so he thinks he can create in contemporary Australian society a big union bogy and people will fall for it.

That might have been the politics of the 1960s, it might have been the politics of the 1970s and it might even have bled into being the politics in part of the 1980s, but it is not the politics of contemporary Australia. The politics of contemporary Australia are that working people in this country get up every morning, go to work, work damn hard, come home tired and worry that they have not spent enough time with the kids. Then, despite all of that effort and all of that anxiety, at the end of the fortnight or the end of the month they look at the money coming into the household and the money going out of the household and think to themselves, ‘I’m just keeping my head above water. I’ve got to keep running quickly otherwise this tidal wave of financial insecurity will engulf me.’ That is the politics, that is the reality, of contemporary Australia, and nothing the Prime Minister says about the industrial relations debate deals with that.

Instead, he wants to fight the politics of yesterday. He wants to fight the trade union movement of yesterday. Indeed, he wants to fight the Labor Party of yesterday. So he creates in this debate a whole series of straw people that have nothing to do with the real political contest. Of course fairness starts with the chance of getting a job—absolutely. There is dignity in work. Work is important. We have an obligation to extend work to everybody in this country who is capable of performing it. That is a fundamental Labor value. If he thinks that is in contest, he is wrong. We need a growing economy. We need high-productivity workplaces. We need flexibility in those workplaces. We need to get up every day and find a new and more efficient way of getting the job done. If he thinks that is in contest, he is wrong. That is absolutely right—we need a high-productivity, high-growth economy. What is in contest is whether you achieve that by tossing fairness out the back door or with a set of workplace laws that respect working people and their employers—that respect both sides of the equation.

What the Prime Minister, his minister and every member of the Howard government have lost is a sense of what that fairness would mean. Instead, they hide. They do not want to know the truth; they do not want to deal with the truth. They are the only people in this country who do not think that the New South Wales election was fought, at least in part, on industrial relations. In fact, the members of their own political parties who fought that election think it was fought on industrial relations. Yet here they sit in their parliamentary ivory tower saying, ‘That’s an uncomfortable reality. I don’t want to know about that.’

Then the minister comes into the House. He is always full of bluster, but he is never full of facts. He does not want to confront the facts because if he did he would know that the government’s Work Choices legislation is hurting Australian working families and he cannot make that concession. Yesterday we saw this minister twist and turn on the question of whether or not he would provide further statistics on Australian workplace agreements. He ended up saying no, and after he said no he basically said, ‘I’m too dumb to think of a way of collecting them properly.’ Whether it is ‘no’ or whether he is too dumb to think of a way of collecting them properly does not much matter; the truth is the Howard government is going to keep these statistics covered up. Why is it going to keep them covered up? Because the tale they tell is one that is bad for Australian working families.

We know that in the Office of the Employment Advocate every Australian workplace agreement has to be lodged. It is there, so it is capable of being pulled out and analysed. It is not that hard. You could probably get a group of high school kids in to do it. The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations does not want to do that analysis because, the only time it was done, it showed that everybody lost at least one award protection. More than 60 per cent lost penalty rates. More than 50 per cent lost shift loadings. More than 40 per cent lost a public holiday benefit, and so it went on. The last thing the minister wants is an update on those statistics before the election.

So we have a government that is not prepared to reveal the truth about what these laws are doing now. Interestingly, we have a government that did not reveal the truth of these laws before the last election. It is with a wry smile that I listen to the arguments of this government about how important its industrial relations changes have been for the economy. If they were that big a building block for the economy, why didn’t the government go out and argue that before the last election? Why didn’t it go out and say to Australians, ‘This is the thing that’s going to guarantee your future prosperity’? Why didn’t it argue the case? Because it knew that it could not win that argument. So the government covered it up before the last election, it is covering it up now, and it will cover up what it wants to do in the future.

We have here today the first anniversary of Work Choices. I will make this prediction: there will never be a second anniversary of Work Choices, because there are only two possibilities after the next election. Either Labor are elected and these laws are swept away—and we bring a new balance in industrial relations in this country that meets the needs of working families and also meets the needs of this country for higher productivity, high-growth, high-flexibility workplaces—or we can see this country re-elect the Howard government. In that case we will not be talking about Work Choices, as bad as it is; we will be talking about Work Choices 2. We will be talking about the content that was in this document before they blanked it out, the unfinished business. We will be talking about that, put into law. We will be talking about what Nick Minchin says when he goes to the HR Nicholls Society, what the constituency of this government in advocacy groups—Peter Hendy and people like him—says when those people go to the HR Nicholls Society, when they reveal their true plans because they believe they are amongst friends. It will not be Work Choices; it will be Work Choices plus, and that is why we need to get rid of the Howard government. (Time expired)

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