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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 5 Hansard (15 May) . . Page.. 1308 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Listen to what Mr Berry had to say. He spoke about the workers' industrial organisations, the right to organise and to conduct industrial action, the need to maintain strong unfair dismissal laws, and so on. It has all been passed by, Mr Speaker. The people of Australia indicated in recent elections, elections that produced eight non-Labor governments out of nine in this country, that they see the world changing very rapidly; but, putting that to one side, on 2 March, in the most recent election, they indicated with resounding clarity that the Federal industrial relations policy which had been characteristic of the previous Government of 13 years was not the way that they wanted industrial relations to be conducted in the future. Mr Berry's profound wisdom concludes that, of course, the Australian people made a mistake on 2 March; they got the wrong answer. Perhaps we can have an electronic voting system such as they have in the United States, and if you press the wrong button you can get an electric shock and a message saying, "No, sorry, that is the wrong answer. You have to vote Labor to get the right answer".

Mr Speaker, Mr Berry made reference to Mr John Howard, the Prime Minister, saying that he has not changed much since the days of the Fraser Government. I will tell you how he has changed. Today he enjoys the highest level of popularity of any Prime Minister since opinion polling began. The reason he does is that he has told the Australian people the truth. He will get support for having indicated real solutions to Australia's problems. Among those solutions, Mr Speaker, is winding back Australia's archaic industrial relations laws - laws that even his predecessor, Mr Keating, in the last Federal election was prepared to reconsider. Do you remember the second debate? In that debate Mr Keating was asked, "Mr Keating, there is a lot of concern out there by employers that some of Australia's very high unemployment rate is contributed to by our archaic industrial relations laws, particularly by the unfair dismissal laws. What do you think about that, Mr Keating? Will you do anything about these unfair laws?". In fact, it was not in the second debate. It was John Laws who asked him this question. In response to John Laws, Mr Keating said, "Yes. If re-elected, we promise to have another look at those unfair dismissal laws".

They are the same laws that Mr Berry says must be maintained, with no change. He is saying, "They are to be protected. Put up the iron barriers. Get the army of workers to protect the bastion to make sure that they are not attacked". Mr Speaker, anybody with a modicum of commonsense can see that those industrial relations laws have contributed to a decline in Australia's competitiveness, to archaic industrial relations applications in this country and to high levels of unemployment. They, like everything else that went with the previous Government, need to change. That is what John Howard has an unequivocal mandate to do.

I wonder whether Mr Berry could tell me how many seats a government needs to win in the House of Representatives to entitle them to the right to implement the mandate on which they are elected.

Ms McRae: By a majority in the Senate.

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