Page 3443 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 21 September 2005
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It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? We heard it this morning. Mr Beazley went on to say:
It seeks to neuter the award system. It seeks to limit the rights and capacity of working people to act collectively to protect their living standards. It proposes an even higher level of punishment for working people, who, as a result of all this, have no avenue left for protest or protection but the right to withdraw their labour.
What actually happened, in contrast to these doomsday predictions of 1996, is that the reforms came in. What have they delivered? Over 1.7 million more Australians in work than you people could deliver when you had your turn. An increase in average real wages of over 14 per cent—and let us hear it—compared to 1.2 per cent in 13 years of Labor between 1983 and 1996. Which party is looking after the workers? We have the lowest unemployment in three decades—currently five per cent—and, of course, in Canberra it is three per cent. You cannot even find people to work here, there is such a wonderful level of employment. And the other area where we were told we were going to have tyranny and chaos under the Liberals was industrial disputes. We have the lowest level of industrial disputes since records were first kept in 1913.
The record speaks for itself. There was the history of all the trouble that was going to flow after those predictions were made by Stephen Smith and Kim Beazley but, like everything else they say is going to happen, there are different stories and outcomes because of good economic management. The Labor policy would, of course, return Australia to the dark days of a rigid one-size-fits-all industrial relations system. It would discourage enterprise bargaining and effectively abolish individual Australian workplace agreements.
The ALP’s current industrial relations platform imposes on the party a policy that would not only roll back the reforms of the Howard government since 1996 but would, in fact, also undo the enterprise bargaining forms implemented by the Keating government in 1993. I had many a meeting with Laurie Brereton, who was urging me on. He said, “Richard, get more of those agreements in your industry. Come on; move off this old award system!” But apparently that is no longer in vogue. Paul Keating’s former economics adviser, John Edwards, described this platform as one that had the potential to “reverse Labor’s own reforms of 1992 to 1994 and to reintroduce the worst aspects of the old award system”.
This came from an economic adviser to one of the Labor heroes. Access Economics, the ALP’s preferred economic consultants—although they are also mine, I have to admit—concluded that, “Such policies are unlikely to deliver one of the four goals espoused by the ALP—high growth, high incomes, low unemployment, and a fairer Australia. The ALP workplace relations policy platform runs the risk of moving Australia further from these goals.” These are economists that your organisation has used. Access Economics have warned about the hazards associated with the direction in which Labor is heading.
Kim Beazley’s response to the need for further workplace reform has been to stick his head in the sand and deny that any further reform is necessary. He has had to do a lot of that lately—with his predecessor. I can understand, but I think that, on the industrial relations area, he needs to modernise his thinking. Indeed on 12 April Kim Beazley told the National Press Club that, “The industrial relations lemon has been squeezed dry.”
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