Page 3820 - Week 14 - Thursday, 10 December 1992
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Let us take a look at the waterfront. They were going to have a stop-work meeting on the Sydney waterfront last year, but there were not going to be enough people on deck on the job to actually call the stop-work meeting. They were all off on idle time. They had to wait until they came back the following week to have the stop-work meeting, so that they could have a strike the next week. Forty per cent of our waterfront is on idle time. You know some of the outlandish work practices and allowances that have been developed on the waterfront. When they were building Darling Harbour, that is, when the Darling Harbour waterfront was active, it was very close to Chinatown in Sydney. The smell of dim sims permeated the area and distracted the workers, so they had to have a dim sim allowance - the price of a Chinese meal each week - just to keep them on the job.
Mr De Domenico: And how many people are unemployed?
MRS CARNELL: Nearly a million. Also, people working in courtyards, quadrangles and shopping malls in some parts of Australia get abuse money because some of them are concerned that some people might swear at them or abuse them. So, they need abuse money. We pay ourselves more as a nation to go on holidays, with leave loadings, than we do to go to work. We have penalty rates and very little job flexibility. There are massive inefficiencies and these inefficiencies stop people getting jobs.
We all remember the report in May last year of the 63 Federal Government meat inspectors who live in towns that do not have abattoirs, requiring extensive and expensive travel costs. There is the union which demanded $80,000 for each of its members taken off shift work, even though all of them kept their jobs. Where do you think that was? It was in Victoria. It was in the Latrobe Valley power industry. That State can ill afford that sort of inefficiency. Another example is that unions picketed a Western Australian wharf to prevent a private contractor loading potatoes at $7.50 a tonne because union manned stevedores usually charge $35 a tonne. That happened in May this year. That was not a long way in the past; it was only a few months ago. Right now we have a recession that has been created by those rigidities, impediments and cost disadvantages that have been accentuated by bad government policy.
Mr De Domenico: In one name, who caused the recession? Give me one name.
MRS CARNELL: Mr Keating. Fightback offers a whole new approach to industrial policy which will increase the scope of businesses and industry to grow and compete internationally. It will create jobs by radically reducing business taxes and regulatory constraints, by reducing the cost base of industry through efficiency gains in the provision of infrastructures such as energy, transport and communications, and by providing a new and legal framework for industrial relations which will promote a sense of common purpose and encourage greater productivity and individual enterprise, incentive and reward.
Mr Deputy Speaker, this Labor Government supported a strike which was motivated by fear - the fear of change and the fear of losing power. Yet change is absolutely essential to Australia's future. They supported a strike that cost Canberra businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars - money they could ill afford to lose in the worst recession we have had since the 1930s. This Labor Government should be concentrating on creating jobs and improving business confidence, not creating industrial chaos that will inevitably lead to further job losses.
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