Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

Do you know what? The international evidence demonstrates this. What does this legislation lead to? Multi-employer bargaining leads to more employment. It leads to lower unemployment. It leads to better jobs. It leads to higher wages. It leads to higher productivity. It leads to less gender inequality. But you guys opposite are not remotely interested in any of that. I tell you what, your relationship with the concept of productivity is so broken. What you have here is a government that is doing what it said it would do—that is, legislating its agenda. The only thing that you are doing is trying to break the productivity of this parliament because what is going on does not suit your political timetable. That is what this is really about. What you, you and you want is months and months and months to run a dishonest partisan political scare campaign in Australian workplaces to frighten ordinary small-business owners out there. These propositions are very straightforward, very simple to understand. I will give you an example of how simple to understand they are. There is an outfit called the OECD. You lot opposite may have heard of it. It is run by a fellow who used to loaf around over here trying to keep Australian wages down. That is what former Senator Cormann did; he tried to keep Australian wages down. The outfit he leads, one of the most respected economic analysis outfits in the world, makes the proposition very simple. It says multi-employer bargaining is a cornerstone industrial relations institution in 18 out of 26 OECD countries. It is a cornerstone not just of their industrial relations system but of their macro-economic system—

Opposition senators interjecting—