Jackie Kelly (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The June 2006 quarter results in the small-area labour market for my seat of Lindsay show 4.3 per cent unemployment—4.3 per cent unemployment after our Work Choices laws have been in place for some six months. I have done an enormous amount in my area since we presided over a huge level of industrial disputation and double-digit unemployment figures under Labor. I have always worked hard to keep unemployment down. We teetered up and down around the five per cent mark, and it seemed that we could not get below that five per cent. We would nudge below and come back up to around that five per cent mark.

In years gone by, before the Whitlam government, governments were thrown out for five per cent unemployment. Five per cent unemployment was disgraceful. It would see the end of a government—it would be absolutely terminated for allowing it to get to five per cent. With our industrial relations reforms, which have been totally opposed by the union movement, we have seen, finally, unemployment tracking down below five per cent. And there is more good news to come: we have seen an extraordinary boost in the number of jobs available to Australians and in the number of Australians taking up employment due to our new Work Choices laws.

Those laws are vehemently opposed by the CFMEU, the ETU and the ACTU, and pretty much every other ‘U’ you can think of, because this is the partial end of union power. In New South Wales, the unions have cashed up all of their assets and are launching vehement attacks in marginal seats. They have picked out marginal seats. They are going for my good friend the member for Greenway; she was under heavy attack from the union movement. In my seat of Lindsay, they have sort of left me alone because I was not on their target list. But the AEC have redrawn the boundaries and Lindsay has come back into the region of ‘marginal’. And guess what? The CFMEU are out there in Lindsay, pummelling down, breaking down, the locks on my premises to have a home invasion: ‘Let’s do a safety inspection.’

I would be the last to take a person’s safety lightly. I take safety at the workplace very seriously, and so does WorkCover in New South Wales and Comcare at the federal level. But the unions have taken it to a fine art. Having been ruled out of the wage arbitration and wages stakes, they are now moving into OH&S as their power base, so they do these raids on people’s premises and find things that are wrong, like not having a lunch shed. The CFMEU does not even know the law, because the law says: a place of amenity in which to have your lunch. I can think of no better place than the banks of the Nepean River. So they come in with their spurious allegations because they cannot get the play. Because they cannot get the play, they say, ‘Let’s go the player.’ That is how they operate. Then you get the without prejudice call, where they say, ‘For a thousand bucks to the old Christmas club, we can make this go away.’ No, thank you. I will work through issues with WorkCover in a responsible fashion and go to an area where no notices are given, nothing is breached and an independent arbitrator, at arm’s-length from government, makes decisions on these things.

This is the next area of Work Choices that we need to move into. The unions have to be further excluded from this area of industrial relations, because they abuse every bit of power that the weak, ineffective, rolled-over and union beholden government of New South Wales gives them. The amount of power that the Iemma government is giving the unions in New South Wales is an absolute disgrace. The unions are right to fight for their lives. They are right to fight for their very existence under these Work Choices laws, because we are coming for them, disembowelling them and depowering them in every which way, and they will fight dirty to keep it going.

In any event, we have very independent, arm’s-length organisations, such as the Office of Workplace Services, that will be independently coming around and making sure that employers are doing the right thing. Under every industrial relations system since Federation, employers have done the wrong thing, but the people of Australia need not fear and the people of Lindsay need not fear: we are going to continue driving down unemployment with clear workplace reforms that are to the detriment of the unions’ power and financial base and, hence, the ALP. May they fight them as long as they can. (Time expired)