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

My question is addressed to the Prime Minister. Would the Prime Minister outline to the House how freedom of choice has been embraced by Australian workers? Is he aware of plans to roll back freedom of choice in the workplace?

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

I think it is fair to say that freedom of choice is a golden thread that runs through the policies of the coalition. Of all the freedoms to which this side of politics is strongly committed, none is more important than the freedom of a man or a woman in this country to join or not to join a trade union. We believe that if you want to join a union you should be able to do so without penalty, but if you do not want to join a union you should be able to stay out of the union without penalty.

We had an emphatic reminder at the weekend that the Labor Party does not embrace that principle. We saw in South Australia yesterday a vision of the world to come a la Greg Combet, when he said it was about time the unions resumed running Australia. We saw the South Australian state conference of the ALP refuse two journalists admission to the conference because they did not belong to a union. We had the explanation of the ‘no ticket, no start’ rule from the new senior vice-president of the ALP and Premier of South Australia, Mike Rann, when he said, ‘If you joined the union you would be allowed in.’

Not only was the Leader of the Opposition forced into the humiliation of having a news conference in a park because he could not have the news conference in the conference hall but then some of the delegates got up and tried to reverse the policy, and the motion to reverse the policy was defeated on the floor of the conference. The image of the Leader of the Opposition in that park gave me a smidgen of a reminder of one of the most famous photographs in Australian political history, and that was Arthur Calwell and Gough Whitlam outside the Kingston Hotel in 1963 wanting to get instructions from the faceless men—and they were all men then—of the Australian Labor Party as to whether or not our American allies could establish a communications station in the North West Cape in Western Australia.

The Leader of the Opposition pathetically bowed to a ban on the right of people to join or not to join a union. Instead of saying to the ALP conference in South Australia, ‘You change this stupid rule in the name of freedom of choice,’ he pathetically went along with it. When he was asked about it, he said, ‘It’s really got nothing to do with me; it’s got everything to do with the state conference.’ Here is a man who wants to be the Prime Minister of Australia but who cannot say boo to the South Australian ALP. I think it is a pathetic example of exactly what life would be like under a future Labor government. Greg Combet said it all when he said, ‘The unions used to run Australia and it wouldn’t be a bad idea if they did again.’ It is pretty clear that the unions run the Leader of the Opposition. It is our job to make sure they do not end up running Australia.