Page 1088 - Week 04 - Thursday, 1 April 1993
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I have described what happened in the past between Mr Berry and Mr Connolly, and I dare say that it is going to happen again. One newspaper stated:
Party sources said yesterday that Mr Connolly was extremely "frustrated" by opposition to the agreement from the Minister for Industrial Relations, Wayne Berry.
When asked to comment, Mr Connolly said that he would not comment on the issue; that it was purely a matter for Mr Berry. We all know that, and we all know how confident the Electrical Trades Union is in Mr Berry, and how confident a lot of other people in the community are, like the kick boxers association, the racing industry, the trotting industry, the dog industry and any other industry that Mr Berry is involved in. We know how confident they all are in Mr Berry and the way he handles things. The ACTTAB is another one that comes to mind.
Let us look at the specific dispute. It goes this way. As I said before, ACTU accords mark VI and mark VII, the Federal Labor Government, John Howard, the Liberal Party, most scribes in the country and most observers of industrial relations practices all agree that enterprise bargaining, and specifically agreements between specific enterprises, is the way to go. Let me quote what a Mr Peter Robson says. Mr Peter Robson is not known for his conservative views in terms of politics or any other thing. Alluding to the enterprise bargaining agreement with the Federal Public Sector Union, which is of a different political colour in terms of Labor politics from the local one, Mr Robson said:
... the agreement, which included a 4.9 per cent wage rise overall, was just the first stage in a two-part process, the second being the development of the agency based productivity agreements.
If the agreement that Mr Connolly signed off the other week was not an agency based productivity agreement, I do not know what was. Mr Connolly, quite correctly, coming from the right-wing faction of the Labor Party, the sensible part of the Labor Party, agrees with what Mr Ferguson and Mr Bill Kelty of the ACTU say about enterprise agreements, what Mr Keating says, what Senator Cook has said from time to time, and what even Mr Laurie Brereton continues to say. Quite rightly, Mr Connolly did the right thing. We applaud Mr Connolly for attempting to do the right thing. However, in comes Mr Berry.
We all know that Mr Berry is of a different faction to Mr Connolly. Ms Follett is of a different faction of the same faction that Mr Berry is in. So we have the pragmatic Left on the one hand, Ms Follett, attempting to do nothing at all because she cannot do anything, we have the looney Left that Mr Berry belongs to flexing the muscle - we know that the Trades and Labour Council controls that - and then we have the sensible part of the Labor Party, Mr Connolly, but he has been chopped off at the knees again. Mr Berry and Mr Connolly will stand up and attempt to say, "Listen, everything is hunky-dory in the Labor Party". Mr Connolly will say, "I love Wayne and Wayne loves me, and everybody loves everybody else".
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