Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, for your guidance on those sorts of matters. It is my great pleasure to say today that I introduced into this parliament legislation to begin transitioning Australian workplaces to a fair and balanced industrial relations system. For the edification of the shadow Treasurer, it will be a decentralised system built on enterprise-level cooperation and on rewarding productivity in workplaces. It will be impossible under Labor’s system for a wage outcome in one enterprise to flow through automatically to wage outcomes in other enterprises. The system will give Australians a safety net on which they can rely and, when Labor’s system is in full operation, there will be no individual statutory employment agreements, no Australian workplace agreements, that can override the safety net and strip away aspects of the safety net.

I say to the shadow Treasurer, who says he is concerned about the inflation challenge: if he looks at the statistics to see who in our workforce has had the greatest uptake of AWAs, the most AWAs imposed on them, it is workers in the retail sector and in the hospitality sector. If the shadow Treasurer wants to advance to the Australian people that the way to fight inflation is to take away a safety net for low-wage, predominantly young workers in those industries—with some of the horror stories that we have heard about 17-year-olds, 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds having basic conditions like redundancy pay ripped off them, and they can still be ripped off people today—he can put that case. But we will be saying that the inflation challenge in the labour market is a product of the skills shortage.

When I introduced the legislation today in the House, I did three things that the Howard government did not do in the last parliament. First, I brought a piece of workplace relations legislation to the parliament that has the mandate of the Australian people—

Applause from the gallery—

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