David Fawcett (Wakefield, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Prime Minister. Would the Prime Minister advise the House how Australia’s continued economic strength is benefiting working Australians and what the implications are of alternative approaches to economic management?

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

I can certainly inform the member for Wakefield that the economic strength of Australia has been dramatically displayed in the single most important marker of economic success of a nation, and that is the capacity of a nation to generate jobs. I have often said in recent months that the holy grail of economic management in this nation is how successful you are in reducing unemployment. We now have a 30-year low in unemployment in this country, and in large areas of Australia, for all practical purposes, we have full employment. Our unemployment rate is at an historic low of 4.8 per cent and, more importantly and more contemporaneously, we have seen 205,000 new jobs created since April this year—205,000 new jobs created since the introduction of the government’s new industrial relations legislation. So much for all the prophecies of the world coming to an end, the sky falling in, wages going down, unemployment going up and there being mass dismissals and employees being persecuted all around Australia. All of those predictions have proved to be absolutely baseless. Australian workers and businesses now have the flexibility to work out arrangements that best suit their needs.

More relevantly and more importantly for the different views of the two sides of politics in this place, a very significant thing happened yesterday in the South Australian parliament. The new senior vice-president of the Australian Labor Party and Premier of South Australia joined a gaggle of senior state Labor members in distancing himself from the Leader of the Opposition’s policy of ripping up AWAs.

Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, he didn’t.

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

Oh, yes, he did. He certainly did. First of all, you had Alan Carpenter, the Premier of Western Australia, who knows full well that if you rip up AWAs you throw a dagger at the heart of the resource industry in his state, you had Mr Hulls in Victoria being asked seven times to support the Leader of the Opposition’s policy and he did not, and yesterday in the estimates committee the South Australian Premier was given ample opportunity to back the policy of the Leader of the Opposition of ripping up AWAs. He used 300 words in answering a simple question, but he failed to affirm in those 300 words that he supported the Leader of the Opposition’s policy of ripping up AWAs. There is a particular South Australian reason for that, and that is that a very significant number, perhaps the majority, of the people employed at the Roxbury Downs mine are employed under individual contracts. That is the reason. I find that Premier a little errant on other issues—I do not want anybody to be under any misapprehension; he is errant on many of the issues that are important to Australia—but when it comes to the resource development of his own state, he knows darn well, as does Alan Carpenter, that ripping up AWAs would do enormous damage to the resource sector. In fact, the Australian Mines and Metals Association has found that abolishing AWAs will cost the mining industry $6 billion. We are dealing here with the one industry that, according to the opposition, is in fact responsible for the current wealth of Australia.

In conclusion, and in reply to the member for Wakefield, alternative policies would greatly damage the economy of Australia, would increase unemployment, would reduce real wages growth and, overall, would be bad news for the workers of this country.