Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

The government opposes the motion. We were just told that the government is seeking to impose its will in relation to these matters and what the government wants in this debate. Let me confess right up front that the government does want to impose its will—its will that there be more people in jobs, that people have higher wages, that people have more flexibility in their employment situation and that there be more family-friendly provisions in workplace agreements that are entered into.

As with every significant reform that has been undertaken over the past decade, the Australian Labor Party have stood in the way. Each and every time they have said: ‘It will create an economic Armageddon. People will be thrown onto the unemployment scrap heap. People will be worse off.’ They said it about GST. They said it about our first wave of industrial relations reform. They said it about waterfront reform. They said it about welfare reform.

But of course, each and every time, the exact opposite has occurred. Unemployment has decreased. Real wages have increased. Unlike the situation under Labor which had one million of our fellow Australians on the unemployment scrap heap, we are now down below five per cent unemployment for the first time in three decades. Also over Labor’s 13 years in government real wages increased by—what was it?—1.2 or 1.3 per cent, compared to our 10-year period where real wages have increased by well over 10 per cent. In fact, 16 to 17 per cent is the figure. The workers of Australia know this, and that is why the workers of Australia have continued, very kindly, to support the Howard government: they realise and understand that our policies are designed to assist them in their aspirational approach to life.

Nowadays, not even one-quarter of the workforce are members of the trade union movement; it is about 20 per cent. The Labor Party are still stuck in the rut of representing those workers who are members of trade unions, as they should, and we of course seek to represent those workers as well. But we also listen to the other 80 per cent of workers who have made a conscious choice not to be members of the trade union movement. Unlike the Labor Party, who exclude the 80 per cent of workers who are not members of a trade union, we actually embrace them, we listen to them and we encourage them to fulfil their aspirations.

Yes, there are 1,800 pages to these regulations and yes, there is some complexity in this legislation. But Senator Wong knows full well and the Australian Labor Party know full well that under the former regime, with all the different state government legislation on top of the federal legislation, together with all the awards, you would have had hundreds of thousands of pages to deal with, not the hundreds of pages that we are dealing with now.

Mr Acting Deputy President, you will recall, as will others in this chamber, that when the Work Choices bill was being debated in this place—for 23 hours, I think, in the House of Representatives and for 32 hours in the Senate chamber; hours and hours of debate—there were these gross predictions that, as of 27 March, when the Work Choices legislation came into being, there would be wholesale sackings all around the country, the unemployment rate would go up and we would have a veritable economic Armageddon. Well, what has happened in the two months since Work Choices came in? After having hovered between five and 5.3 per cent for 20 months, the unemployment rate, according to Labor and union predictions, should have spiked up to 5.5 or six per cent. What did the unemployment figures do? They in fact went down to 4.9 per cent. The reason the unemployment rate actually went down was that, in the month of April, 22,000 new full-time jobs were created and, in the month of May, 55,000 new full-time jobs were created. Their predictions were wrong. Will they apologise to the Australian people and the workers that they sought to spook? Of course they will not. They did not do it on waterfront reform, they did not do it on industrial reform, they did not do it on GST reform, so why should they do it on this occasion?

Senator Wong told us that the minister could ‘interfere’ in relation to certain aspects of workplace relations. That is quite right: he can under this legislation. But this is where the dishonesty comes into this debate, because the power of intervention that is part of sections 102 and 103 of the Workplace Relations Act as amended is a replication of sections 43 and 44 as they used to be. There was no mention of that—no mention that this was simply a replication of that which existed before. It is another case of the Australian Labor Party being willing to say anything and do anything to run a scare campaign.

We are also told about prohibited content in agreements. This is very dangerous ground, I would have thought, for Senator Wong to traverse. She was humiliated at the Senate Employment, Workplace Relations and Education Legislation Committee budget estimates hearing when she asserted as fact that occupational health and safety training by trade unions would be banned. Mr Smythe, senior legal counsel—who is now off to the International Labour Organisation because he is so highly regarded—had to disabuse her of that view time and again until she finally got it, and then she said, ‘Well, can you understand why workers are confused?’ I will tell you why some workers in the community are confused: because people like Senator Wong have gone around the community peddling the misinformation that she has now unwittingly put on the Hansard record for all to see and read, when of course she was wrong. That is why she did not pursue that line today in this debate. She was very foolish to have even reminded me and others of it.

In relation to occupational health and safety, a matter of great concern to every Australian, whose jurisdiction is it? Everybody knows, or should know, that it falls fairly and squarely within the jurisdiction of the states and territories. Yet it did not stop the flip-flopping Mr Beazley from trying to make cheap political capital from the Beaconsfield mine tragedy when he was in Brisbane by suggesting that it might not have occurred if trade union training had been allowed, knowing full well that—well, chances are he did not know. I do not think he knew. And that is the problem with Mr Beazley: he will say anything at any time if it suits him. Having said that, just to make the point, let us have a look at what he has been saying about Australian workplace agreements. Here you see Mr Flip-flop in action, par excellence. On 4 July 2005, the Age newspaper reported that Mr Beazley said:

I dislike AWAs but—

listen to this—

there’s always been individual contracts ... and huge numbers of Australian workers have signed up to that.

Well, I can understand he dislikes AWAs, but I fully agree with him that there have always been individual contracts and a huge number of Australian workers have signed up to them—in fact, over 500,000 have.

Some 26 days later, on 30 July, he told another newspaper, the Australian:

We are going to abolish the capacity of AWAs to undermine collective awards. We are going to weight the balance of this in favour of collective agreements …

Then, on 2 August, to the Australian Financial Review, there was another version:

What I’m saying on AWAs is that nobody is going to bother with them once they are not in a position to.

Then, three days later:

But Mr Beazley argued that while unions wanted to ‘destroy’ AWAs, he wanted to ‘strangle’ them.

How hairy chested can you get? He wanted to strangle them! But then on 9 October, on the Sunday program, Mr Oakes asked Mr Beazley:

So you no longer subscribe to the policy Labor took to the last election, which was effectively to abolish AWAs?

Mr Beazley replied:

I subscribe to what I just said. There’ll be a million of those things in place when we come into office, and you can’t wander round cancelling contracts.

I would say ‘amen’ to that. It was one of those rare, lucid moments in Mr Beazley’s involvement in the IR debate. ‘You can’t wander around cancelling contracts’—I fully agree with him. Yet what did he say on 11 June to the New South Wales state Labor conference, without consultation with the caucus or with his shadow minister? He said:

So today delegates I announce that a Beazley Labor government will abolish John Howard’s Australian Workplace Agreements.

Remember those contracts that you could not go around the country ripping up? All of a sudden you can go around ripping them up. Why is that? Because Mr Beazley did yet another flip-flop.

We were told by Senator Wong about penalty rates, and how evil it was that penalty rates could be removed. Can I say this: they can only be removed by agreement with the workers.