Page 2842 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 21 October 1992
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The signs of economic distress are ever present - a million unemployed; investment diverting to other countries in the world; the rise of South Korea, Japan and Malaysia as the region's industrial leaders; the emergence of Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan as the financial centres of the region. In the ACT we must adapt to the new centres of influence, the new markets, the new methods of business and the realities of the 1990s and the twenty-first century. If we do not recognise and adapt to these needs, even the ACT, with all its protection and its public service employment - and Richard Carleton knows all about that - will not prosper; and prosper we must, Mr Deputy Speaker, if our children are to know the fulfilment that productive employment brings, if our enterprising young people are to risk their vision and succeed in new business, and if our young tradespeople are to value enterprise and quality work.
Change is needed now, Mr Deputy Speaker. This Government must not only adopt a new realistic attitude but also put it to work. Make it productive. Give the ACT and give our children a future worth having. The Follett Labor Government, for the time being, carries the responsibility for the 300,000 Canberrans. They must demonstrate new energy, new ideas, a new vision. Mr Deputy Speaker, the status quo will not do.
MR BERRY (Minister for Health, Minister for Industrial Relations and Minister for Sport) (3.27): Nothing has changed. The rhetoric is just as slick and the message just as blurred and just as inaccurate. What the Liberals want to do nationally, and our local Liberals are following slavishly behind them, is to drive down workers' wages throughout this country and put the excessive profits into the hands of a few. There is no question about that. But they cannot do that while the workers remain organised and are protected by the trade union movement. If they were to attempt such a course, under the current industrial framework the conciliation and arbitration powers of the Industrial Relations Commission would prevent them, just as they prevented exploitation of the Gold Coast factory where workers sought to throw away their conditions. That would have been contrary to the public interest, and the commission has so ruled, appropriately. That has been built up into a monstrous political stunt by those opposite. As I have said, they follow slavishly in the footsteps of the Federal Opposition as they attempt to move down the path of reducing wages and working conditions, driving living standards in this country down - living standards which have been built on over years and years of development in this country.
There is no doubt that in this country, in the period of the Federal Labor Government, a new relationship has been developed between employers, the Government and unions. The sort of progress that has occurred in those circumstances has never occurred before. Indeed, workplace reform has gathered pace, and it continues to grow and to assist in the development of industry in this country. If it were not for that cooperation, Mr Deputy Speaker, we would be in a dreadful position now because we inherited from the Liberals, as many of us might recall, a wages freeze - there was no prices freeze - intended to drive wages and working conditions down. We inherited a period of gross confrontation where the atmosphere of conciliation was being eroded, and had been eroded, and where the ability of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, as it then was, had been eroded as well by government action. Since then, of course, things have changed for the better.
Mr De Domenico: Ask the million on the dole about that.
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