Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have listened to the member for Scullin, and the simple reality is that only 15 per cent of people in Australia are members of trade unions. In the real world, what is going on now is that the people of Australia have a choice between now and the election: to make a decision about whether they want to vote for a ‘no ticket, no start’ regime or, indeed, to allow freedom and liberty to continue to reign supreme in the way Australia operates. What is fair about a workplace where you cannot be sacked if you steal from your boss but you can be sacked if you do not join a trade union? This is the sort of Australia that the Labor Party delivered when they were last in office and the sort of Australia they would deliver again if they were given a chance. They have not yet even convinced their own support base—the heart of their support base—about the legitimacy of their claims against the government’s pro-choice workplace arrangements. Twenty-eight per cent identified by the Sensis survey last week said that they believed they might have a negative result from Work Choices. Fifty per cent said there would be no change, which I imagine leaves 22 per cent who saw themselves being advantaged. I am a fairly pragmatic and practical sort of bloke and I would reckon that the 72 per cent are probably reading it right. But, regarding the 28 per cent, surely it is easy for those opposite to understand that they do not even represent what Labor would pretend is their base vote.

The unions continue to seek solace in the state public servants in my electorate and continue to tell them that state public servants—nurses, policemen, teachers and people like that—will be forced into some circumstance of change, when it is quite simple that the masters of their destiny are state governments. I know that, once the election is out of the way, state governments will have to consider whether or not adequately rewarding people with skills and ability with private agreements is the way to go or whether or not the amount of time people remain in the workplace will be due to the way in which they continue to be paid. Good teachers are leaving the teaching system in droves. In fact, the Queensland government are paying bad teachers $50,000 to leave and yet they are complaining about the Australian government’s ambition to pay a $5,000 bonus to good teachers.

What I find particularly offensive is what is actually going on right now in my electorate, and electorates like it right around the country: people are being manipulated, phone-polled, infiltrated, doorknocked by members of the ACTU through their six-steps political strategy manual—

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration, Integration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Do you doorknock, Gary?

Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I doorknock all the time and I talk to people, but, you see, I am actually elected by the people of Moreton to represent them and work with them. The difficulty, though, is that the trade union leadership in Melbourne have decided to allot a campaign team to coordinate, in a cynical way, a number of things. They want to identify people who live in target seats—that is step No. 1. They want to identify undecided voters—actually drilling down, finding out how people voted and how they feel about things. There is not much push-polling going on there! Of course, they want to make sure that, once they have identified those people, they follow up with potential activists and target certain seat campaign supporters. Of course, we know how the Labor Party are good at targeting people and we certainly know how the union movement have targeted small businesses in the past. What was the line some years ago: the only small business the union movement has ever opened is with a sledgehammer? Step 4 is to register the members who have not enrolled to vote. There was the sleazy view that, because the government has worked to ensure the integrity of the electoral process, with changes which began in April, the Labor Party, the unions, saw an opportunity to enrol the votes of people who might slip through the not quite capable system that was in place—the system that we, of course, have tried to change to ensure integrity.

Step 5 is to systematically contact undecided voters. I warn people in my electorate that June-July is the period for the next call, and there will be another call in September, and then they will doorknock during the election period. So how will you feel when our friends from the union movement front you at your door, in the middle of dinnertime, saying: ‘Righto, brother, we know how you voted last time. We’ve done the check. We’ve factored it all back to the ACTU and they’ve told us to come and give you a little visit to tell you how to vote.’

I long for a return to the time when advocates for local electorates were chosen from the community, not from some Tammany Hall style politics, which is what the ACTU have re-introduced to Australia. The Labor Party need to stand away and distance themselves from this style of political thuggery, because Australians do not want the union movement back into their lives, as Rod Cameron said the other week. Labor ignored him. He is just another pollster, just another voice in the wilderness. I’ll stand on the side of people in my electorate to make their own choices. (Time expired)