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

This is very simple. We as a government promote changes in the law. In relation to small business, there has been a change in the law saying collective bargaining will be allowed. In relation to the employment situation, we are saying that Australian workplace agreements are now being allowed, that this is a change and that you should be aware of the possibilities that those changes provide to you as an individual.

This question has unwittingly debunked the Labor Party’s whole campaign against the government’s communication program because it highlights very clearly and very starkly that we only deal with those issues where the laws are changed and people need to be advised about those changes to the law. That is why, when it was changed for small business—might I add, for their benefit, and they embraced it and liked it—we told them about it. Similarly, on the workplace front, hundreds of thousands of Australians have embraced Australian workplace agreements and the changes, but they would not have been necessarily able to do so had they not been made aware of the wonderful range of choices that are now available to them—a range of choices that has seen the unemployment rate fall to 4.2 per cent and an economy which is now delivering in the terms that our leader in the Senate announced to us earlier on in relation to decreased taxation. Wages have increased by 20.8 per cent. We do not only deal on the work front; we do not only deal with small businesses; we deal with the whole gamut of the economy. When you get the positioning relatively right, you get the good human dividends that Senator Minchin was able to tell us about earlier in question time.