Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

After 100 days in office, I'm happy to give the government some free advice today on how they're going. There's a lot of hubris on the other side of this chamber. We wish them well—we're all Australian citizens and we want any government of Australia to do well—but my review might show that I don't think they are doing that well.

To put the hubris on the other side into context, we need to be reminded that this new government had the weakest support of any government incoming from opposition that we've seen for a long time. I am repeating myself, but I like some of these stats, so I will. I'll remind the government that they are in the weakest position of any incoming government with a two-seat majority since 1913. They got a 32 per cent primary vote—that's the lowest for a government incoming from opposition since 1903, so they nearly broke some records there. That's just to show the support they didn't have in the community. The public certainly weren't in love with them. Almost begrudgingly, they were voted in.

How has the first 100 days gone? Well, what we're seeing is that they've paid the piper. They've paid their master. That's what's happened in the first 100 days. The unions, we know, control the factions of the Labor Party. The unions control preselections, and the unions fund the Labor Party, so that means the unions now control the government. The unions control this new government. We've seen the actions that have demonstrated this. Within the first two weeks of sitting, what did the new government—controlled, owned and funded by the union movement—do? They abolished the ABCC in the first two weeks. What does the ABCC do? It's an independent umpire in industrial relations and on the workforce. They didn't like the independent umpire, so they obviously had to reward the people who fund them.

The jobs summit—there's an interesting stat here: 14 per cent of people in the workforce are unionised. I can tell you what, if you look over to the other side, the percentage there is a lot higher than 14 per cent. More than 14 per cent of that lot have been unionised. Probably 94 per cent of the people on that side have worked for or been involved in the union, not 14 per cent, which is actually reflective of the Australian public.

I encourage the new government to stand up to the union movement, because this Labor government does have some precedence where a previous Labor government has actually done that. If you look at the Hawke and Keating governments, you will see they actually did some quite progressive things economically and in the industrial relations system. I think Keating, with all due respect to him, will probably go down as one of the better Treasurers that the country has had—not as good as some of the Liberal Treasurers we've had but certainly better than any other Labor Treasurer. What he did was liberate the tariff system—or he progressed that along and the Howard government progressed it as well—opened the economy up and even did some movements with the industrial relations system.

What we have in the new government, of course, is a leadership that is taking us back to the seventies. What did the now Prime Minister say about Keating in 1987, when the then Treasurer was liberating some of the industrial relations system and our financial system? This is what Anthony Albanese said in 1987 about Keating:

Someone like Keating can put himself up as a possible Labor PM, but he is more comfortable mixing with millionaires and business executives than he is with working-class people .

That's what the current PM thought of a great Labor leader liberating our economy. That's what his core beliefs are. Nothing changes there.

I say to this new government—they don't understand this, because they can't understand why only 14 per cent of the Australian workforce belongs to a union. They don't understand that, because they're born of the union movement, they're funded by the union movement and their careers are controlled by the union movement. But I encourage members opposite to show some courage and to show some real strength of character: don't just kowtow to your union masters. Show some strength, like the Hawke and Keating governments did, and don't just do what you're told.

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