Stuart Henry (Hasluck, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Prime Minister. Would the Prime Minister inform the House how the government is delivering on its promise to the Australian people at the last election to keep the economy strong? Are there any alternative views?

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

Can I take the last part of the question first and say that there is an alternative view: it is the do-nothing alternative of the Leader of the Opposition. The Leader of the Opposition has had 10 years. He may not have been leader for the whole of that 10 years but, for the period that he was not leader of the Labor Party, he was a person of great influence and stature in the Australian Labor Party. He has effectively had 10 years to come to terms with the reality that, when you are thrown out of office after a long period of government, you have got to do something about policy reform before you can be taken seriously by the Australian public. The Leader of the Opposition has had 10 years to develop an alternative, and his only alternative is to say, ‘Anything good that happens in the Australian economy now is due to what the Hawke and Keating governments did.’

Let me say, in contrast to the Leader of the Opposition, I have always been willing to give the former Labor government a bit of credit for one or two things that it did do that were very good such as picking up the Campbell reforms which the former government, under my treasurership, initiated, and also the dismantling of tariff protection. That process has gone on under this government, and the reason that we are so prosperous is that this government—unlike the opposition—has had the intellectual and policy commitment to the reform process.

I am pleased to report that, since 1996, real wages have risen by 16.8 per cent. How much did they rise under the former government? They rose 1.2 per cent over 13 years. We have created 1.7 million jobs over the last 10 and a bit years. But the message is that the process of economic reform is an ongoing one. We live in a globalised, fast-changing world and, unless this country is prepared to continually embrace reform, it will lose economic momentum and it will see jobs begin to disappear. No industrial relations system can guarantee to insulate a workforce against a downturn. The Leader of the Opposition is now arguing against our industrial relations policies in favour of his industrial relations prescription which, in the early 1990s, saw a million Australians thrown out of work. You can regulate the Australian labour market—you can regulate it to a point of strangulation—but, if you do not have a strong economy, jobs will be lost and wages will go backwards rather than forwards.

The test of our industrial relations reforms is not so much the level of regulation or deregulation. The test is: will they improve the strength of the Australian economy? Will they encourage more investment? Will they encourage more risk-taking by entrepreneurs? Will they encourage the making of bargains at a workplace level between Australian workers and their employers? The answer overwhelmingly to all of those questions is yes. That is why these reforms are good for Australia, and that is why the Leader of the Opposition represents the backward-looking policy approach that he has embraced for the last 10 years.