Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have listened to the member for Scullin, and the simple reality is that only 15 per cent of people in Australia are members of trade unions. In the real world, what is going on now is that the people of Australia have a choice between now and the election: to make a decision about whether they want to vote for a ‘no ticket, no start’ regime or, indeed, to allow freedom and liberty to continue to reign supreme in the way Australia operates. What is fair about a workplace where you cannot be sacked if you steal from your boss but you can be sacked if you do not join a trade union? This is the sort of Australia that the Labor Party delivered when they were last in office and the sort of Australia they would deliver again if they were given a chance. They have not yet even convinced their own support base—the heart of their support base—about the legitimacy of their claims against the government’s pro-choice workplace arrangements. Twenty-eight per cent identified by the Sensis survey last week said that they believed they might have a negative result from Work Choices. Fifty per cent said there would be no change, which I imagine leaves 22 per cent who saw themselves being advantaged. I am a fairly pragmatic and practical sort of bloke and I would reckon that the 72 per cent are probably reading it right. But, regarding the 28 per cent, surely it is easy for those opposite to understand that they do not even represent what Labor would pretend is their base vote.

The unions continue to seek solace in the state public servants in my electorate and continue to tell them that state public servants—nurses, policemen, teachers and people like that—will be forced into some circumstance of change, when it is quite simple that the masters of their destiny are state governments. I know that, once the election is out of the way, state governments will have to consider whether or not adequately rewarding people with skills and ability with private agreements is the way to go or whether or not the amount of time people remain in the workplace will be due to the way in which they continue to be paid. Good teachers are leaving the teaching system in droves. In fact, the Queensland government are paying bad teachers $50,000 to leave and yet they are complaining about the Australian government’s ambition to pay a $5,000 bonus to good teachers.

What I find particularly offensive is what is actually going on right now in my electorate, and electorates like it right around the country: people are being manipulated, phone-polled, infiltrated, doorknocked by members of the ACTU through their six-steps political strategy manual—

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