John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I can inform the House that between now and the caretaker period, whenever that may begin—and I have not the faintest idea, for the information of the Leader of the Opposition—there will be no bad policies from this government; and between the caretaker period and the election there will not be bad policies either, not from our side of politics. But I am already seeing a lot of bad policy from the other side.

To start with, we have an industrial relations policy which is an absolute dog’s breakfast for the Labor Party. I cannot believe it. They were running around telling Australians that we had an extreme industrial relations policy. They are the people with the extreme policy. It is the Australian Labor Party that wants to hand over workplaces not to workers or to employers; they want to hand over the control of workplaces to trade unions, which represent only 15 per cent of the private sector workforce.

I saw the Leader of the Opposition speaking in Brisbane. He was addressing a rally. That is fine; we all like addressing rallies—and I will not make any comment about that. But what he has to understand is that, when you have a business, somebody invests money in that business, and the somebody who invests the money actually takes the risk. I think there is something fundamentally unfair about an industrial relations policy that says that, if an employer wants to make an agreement with some of his employees of a certain kind, he will be prohibited by law from making that agreement. That is the consequence of what the Leader of the Opposition has proposed. Let me take him back again to his policy. I know he does not understand it, but let me tell him what his policy means.

Let me tell the Leader of the Opposition that, if you have a firm of 100 people and 51 per cent of those vote in favour of a collective agreement, it means that the man or the woman who started the business—who put up the capital, who took the risk, who borrowed the money and, in the case of a small business, probably mortgaged their house in order to secure the business overdraft—has no right to make an agreement with one of the other 49 people. I think that is outrageous and I think that is unfair. The fact that the Leader of the Opposition supports such a policy shows that he does not know anything about small business in this country. Not only will he support something like that; he will also support a situation where, on top of that, the employer will once again be burdened with the outrageous unfair dismissal laws, which create a situation where it becomes impossible to properly manage your business in certain circumstances. So I say to the Leader of the Opposition that if he is talking about bad policy I suggest he have a read of his own party’s policy on industrial relations.

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