Page 2530 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 23 August 2006
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We will see a winding back of the positive reforms that have occurred under the Howard government. These reforms, by the way, were opposed in 1995 and 1996, yet, as recently as this year or late last year, Mr Corbell has stood in this place and said that we have a really good industrial relations system. This is the industrial relations system that has been opposed by this mob for the last 10 years. They cannot have it both ways. They cannot say, “We opposed it and it was terrible and the sky was going to fall in, but it has been really good. With these new changes, the sky is going to fall in and it is going to be terrible. Believe us this time.” What have we seen? There have been 159,000 new jobs created.
It would be much more helpful to this debate if Mr Gentleman were able to bring facts and figures to the table. I can understand why he does not. They do not support his claims. He did not produce one shred of evidence to support his motion. That is the concern. If you are going to move a motion like this, come armed with facts. Unfortunately, the facts do not suit his arguments so he has not bothered to present them. I am doing my best to present them for him so that perhaps this motion will not be wasted and we can get on with the job of having a rational debate about industrial relations rather than the hysteria that is often presented by Mr Gentleman.
Let us have a look at what people have said about Labor’s plans to wind back the industrial relations system. Access Economics, in a comprehensive report to the Business Council of Australia on the potential impact of the ALP’s workplace relations policies, noted that the likely outcome from the abolition of AWAs is lower productivity growth and less accurate matching of wages and productivity at the enterprise level. Paul Keating’s former economic adviser, John Edwards, warned that Labor’s plans to re-empower the commission would “reintroduce the worst aspects of the old award system” and that “the Australian industrial relations system could thus leap back to the 1960s and 1970s when the arbitration commission routinely determined actual wages”. In other words, it would be a return to the days of high inflation, soaring unemployment and declining real wages.
In the Labor Party’s 13 years in office, real wages rose by rose 1.2 per cent. In 10 years under the Liberal government, they have risen by 16.8 per cent. That is 16.8 per cent over and above inflation. That means that not only are more people in work as a result of these changes, but also that more people are getting more money coming into their pockets. Yet all we hear from Mr Gentleman and the unions is that it is bad. Perhaps what is more important and more to the point in relation to the unions is that they think the last 10 years have been bad for them. They have been bad for the unions. They have not been bad for the workers. It is the unions that are declining.
Mr Stanhope: Talk about health in the workplace.
MR SESELJA: Well, we will talk about health. Mr Gentleman says, “Isn’t it terrible. People are feeling stressed at work.” Mr Gentleman is one to talk. I wonder how Ms Porter felt when he was verbally abusing her in the estimates process. Mr Gentleman lectures us about people feeling stressed in the workplace as a result of the workplace changes; he blames everything on WorkChoices. He produces no evidence. We know his track record. When he gets annoyed, he starts hurling abuse at his colleagues. The opposition has come to expect that, but he does it to his colleagues.
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