Page 4808 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 14 December 2005
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so good, things are prosperous, and they will continue to be as long as we continue to reform our economic system and ensure that Australia is a competitive country.
Being competitive does not mean trying to undercut the average Indian worker or Chinese worker. It means doing things in a better and more clever way to ensure that we are economically prosperous. I was watching a documentary the other night about Finland and the changes made in that country in the 1990s to make it competitive and strong as an economic entity, given its massive European neighbours and all that goes with those industries that are in those European countries. The program showed how countries do need to improve their efficiencies and their way of doing business if they are to survive. That has been achieved there. I do not necessarily embrace everything that was done in that country, but the program certainly illustrated the point that if you want to survive economically in this world you have to be constantly modifying the way in which you do business.
The fundamental that we hear about from those opposite is wages growth. Mr Gentleman talks about wages growth versus family needs. Real wages have increased by nearly 15 per cent since 1996. They went up 1.26 per cent over 13 years of Labor. Those are the figures; let us not pretend that anything else is the case. What did the current leader of the Labor Party federally do? During the accord, the policy of the ALP and the ACTU was to hold wage growth and reduce the minimum wage. I will talk a little bit later today about that period. Whilst that was one direction of the trade union movement, the violence and tyranny that were inflicted on some businesses were also a feature of that period in Australia, one of which I have very strong and vivid recollections which are very relevant to today, particularly this day, some 20 years after those matters were addressed so vigorously in the Victorian Supreme Court in the Dollar Sweets case.
But what did Mr Beazley say recently—this is not old stuff that I am trotting out; this was on 1 April 2005—in a speech to the sustaining prosperity conference? I am sure that Dr Foskey will be interested in what he had to say there. He said:
We achieved 13 years of wage restraint under the Accord. The wage share of GDP came down from 60.1 per cent when we took office to the lowest it had been since 1968. We left office with the wage share of GDP at 55.3 per cent.
There we had the leader of the Labor Party, the hero of the labour movement, saying how they managed to grind down people’s wages when they were in power. That was not some right wing, Liberal, hardline industrial warhorse talking. It was Kim Beazley. In fact, the minimum wage declined by around five per cent in real terms between 1983 and 1996.
Turning to industrial disputes, we were told in all those predictions that there was going to be mayhem. In fact, under the coalition government industrial disputes have consistently remained at the lowest levels for strikes since records were first kept in 1913, before World War I, which is extraordinary. That is the track record. It is interesting to see what the fallen hero of Labor, Mark Latham, had to say in his diaries. There are some gems in there. In particular, he criticised Sharan Burrow and Greg Combet for their influence over Labor MPs. One of the problems for this Assembly is that it seems that the group which has to be listened to is UnionsACT, the ordinary folk of Canberra. What did Mr Latham say about that. He said:
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