Page 3788 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 18 October 2005
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There will certainly be simpler minimum standards. For the first time ever under a federal system, a common set of minimum terms and conditions will apply to all employees. And unlike the current system, which consists of thousands of different awards, all of which must be updated to reflect any safety net wage rises—and that is a process that often takes months, sometimes years—a single minimum wage system will cover all employees. The awards will be further simplified from the current 20 allowable matters to 16. The four matters that are being removed are matters that are protected already in other legislation: long service leave, superannuation, jury service and notice of termination.
AWAs, the secret individual contracts that the ALP disparage, have in fact been of huge benefit to workers. Workers on AWAs currently earn, on average, 13 per cent more than those on collective agreements and 100 per cent more than those on awards, which is the ALP’s preferred alternative. Almost 750,000 AWAs have been entered into since 1997. The ALP’s policy would be to abolish AWAs and force workers back on to awards, and that would slash the take-home pay of thousands of workers. It is an ironclad guarantee that the ALP policy would cut the wages of workers currently on AWAs.
There is another furphy: employees cannot be forced into agreements. It will continue to be unlawful to force employees into new agreements. If a worker does not like what is on offer, they can opt to stay on their current arrangements.
The ALP made a lot in relation to some of the federal government proposals back in 1996. In contrast to their predictions that it was all doom and gloom and would be dreadful for working people, the 1996 reforms, some nine years ago, have helped deliver over 1.7 million more Australians into work; an increase in average real wages of over 14 per cent, compared with only 1.2 per cent in 13 years of Labor between 1983 and 1996; the lowest unemployment in three decades, currently five per cent; and the lowest level of industrial disputes since records were first kept in 1913.
Something I can also remember as a young bloke is the large number of industrial disputes we would have in Australia and in Canberra. You would not go for a week or so without someone going out on strike. That was of immense inconvenience to the community. Things like that really annoyed the Australian community so much that that probably started the drift away from unions. Now we have the lowest level of industrial disputes since records were first kept in 1913.
Think about the number of industrial disputes. In the past 10 years, even the last 15 years, there have not been that many at all. They are very rare indeed. It sounds like I am putting myself in the grave almost but, when you get on a bit in years and have lived through a bit, you can see the added prosperity that most working families have now compared with what they had in the 1960s. I can see that in my electorate; I can see that with the people I meet; I can see that with people who are real battlers.
The battlers are a hell of a lot better off than the battlers I knew back in the 1960s and the mates I had at school. Indeed, the material prosperity which I see amongst a lot of people now is significantly better than perhaps what my own family had and what a lot of my mates had back then in the 1950s, the 1960s and the early 1970s. Times have changed.
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