Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

If we ever doubted that Mr Beazley’s weekend announcement of rolling back existing Work Choices legislation and the 1996 workplace reforms was a reversion to old Labor repaying its labour masters with the abolition of AWAs and returning all things to a collectivity run by the unions with the central focus back to the old, grinding industrial relations, and if we ever doubted that that was a return to the old Labor—a party that has not adjusted and will not adjust to the new, flexible economy—we only needed to hear the previous speaker, Senator Sterle. He used all the old language of Labor. He came in here in defence, no doubt, of a surprise decision by Mr Beazley. But he was willing within a day or two to take up the cudgels and support that policy, though he may have been caught on the hop.

Mr Deputy President, you only needed to listen to his old language—that old, union, industrial language—that is so out of place today. It is so out of place amongst his own workers, for that matter. He was using terms like ‘scungy bosses’, ‘crap jobs’ and ‘hordes of foreigners’—and throw in the word ‘Filipino’ while you are at it! He said ‘exploited workers’; what a shrill performance that was. That is an example of how Labor have learned nothing since the 2004 election. They went to that election under Mr Latham with the policy of abolishing AWAs, and now they are going to the next election with that exact same policy. You have learned nothing from the lessons of the election, which was that you must have some economic credibility. People have to have some skerrick of trust in your management of the economy, but you may as well bring back Mr Latham. Your hate, your language, your paranoia and your shrillness, Senator Sterle, are equal to Mr Latham’s. You have learned nothing, and if you think the Australian public—let alone your workers, whom you purport to represent, or your new claim on middle Australia—will trust you, you will have the same destiny as you have had the past four elections. And thank goodness for that.

You will not be trusted with the Australian economy with your old-world industrial relations policies. You talk about grinding and lowering wages and you say that this is our ambition with the new Work Choices legislation.