Craig Laundy (Reid, Liberal Party, Minister for Small and Family Business, the Workplace and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

You were there? I apologise if you were there. I was told by a journalist you weren't. Were you at the speech?

Mr Bowen interjecting—

Oh, okay. Sorry. I apologise. I do say, as I said yesterday, that there is a clear and frank left-leaning agenda that has permeated its way through the leadership team of the Labor Party. It is so clear that there are those who are responsibly economically minded and don't want to be there.

Then there's the last piece of the puzzle, the piece that for me, as the new minister responsible, makes it make sense: the claim that enterprise bargaining is dead. Again, the Fair Work Commission—the commission put in place by the Labor Party and staffed with Labor people between 2007 and 2009 to consider matters of the workplace, independent of government—is supposedly not coming up with decisions that the Labor Party's union member puppeteers like. We've heard a lot about the EBAs falling away. Last year, the number of EBAs that were contested upon termination in this country was three per cent. Ninety-seven per cent of the EBAs that were terminated last year were not contested. I don't understand, if there is a problem with three per cent being contested, why you would need to completely overhaul something that is quite clearly working. Ninety-seven out of 100 is a pretty good rate. Ninety-seven out of 100 was a pretty good mark when I was going through school. It would have been good if I'd got it too!

The system is not broken. It is the unions that want more power. They want more access. In the party opposite, as I said, historically some genuinely right-wing, reforming and economically minded Labor politicians have managed to come up with sensible, centrist economic policy. I can say this loud and clear: those days are long gone. Those opposite are again being dragged so far to the left, under the guise that things are broken. It is their system. They put it in place between 2007 and 2009. It is working the way that it has worked, independent of government, for the past 10 years. It is making decisions that it considers on the basis of fact, with submissions from across the working portfolio, from employers to employees and from unions to employer organisations—you name it. You have the ability in this country to put your best foot forward in that commission. In the matters that are considered there, the decisions that are made are made in good faith by people, based on fact. However, over the past two to three years the facts haven't suited the union movement in this country. So what have they done? They have moved in and strongarmed a weak and feeble leader who is in need of their support to garner and save his own leadership. Formerly a member of the Right side of the party, he is a leader who has now worked so far Left away from everything that could arguably be named a significant Labor reform and has dragged them—some still with economic sense—kicking and screaming back to a place that this party hasn't seen historically. The time warp has gone back to the 1970s—a time that we have walked so far away from. The shadow Treasurer is today not at his 'zippiest'. I get that, but I know why. It's because I don't believe his heart is in it.

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