Page 4807 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 14 December 2005
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Mr Speaker, there are only two conclusions that you can take from Labor’s arguments. The first is that the position they had then was totally wrong, as it is today. The second is that the real agenda is to try to protect the role of union officials. That comes as no surprise because my friends opposite have a great deal of debt to the union movement.
On the first point, I would remind Mr Gentleman and his Labor colleagues of how wrong they were in those predictions. The fact is that the Howard government’s workplace reforms since 1996 have helped deliver higher wages, higher productivity, more jobs, and lower interest rates. How much have those lower interest rates helped ordinary people in Canberra buy homes? Young couples can afford now to buy homes, but did not have a chance of doing it under Labor, because the interest rates have come down and they know that they have jobs and they know their kids can get jobs due to the economic sense of the Howard government’s reforms.
The disaster that was predicted has never come about. We have never had it so good in this place and we are looking forward to boom times as we go forward, thanks to the changes that are being made in a host of different areas by the commonwealth government. We now have something equitable in the tax arrangements through the goods and services tax, which has captured much of the expenditure that was missing out on attention as regards contributions to commonwealth tax collections.
Ultimately, the best protection for workers and the best guarantee for job security and higher wages is a strong economic position. A modern workplace relations system is an essential component of that. We had a heavily regulated workplace relations system in the 1980s and it failed to protect one million Australians from being thrown onto the unemployment scrap heap. What are the union officials all about? Are their jobs so critical, are their positions as highly paid union officials sitting on war chests that have been collected over the years more important than ensuring that the people they purport to represent are in fact employed, that their kids can get jobs, that they can afford to own their own home, and that they can have manageable interest rates? Those are the things that I think they ought to be all about.
Members opposite purport to represent the plight of ordinary working Australians, as they often trot out, but where are they when they look back at what has been achieved? Since March 1996, 1.7 million jobs have been created: 900,000 of those have been full time and 800,000 have been part time. In contrast, between March 1989 and March 1996 only 107,000 jobs were created, of which 188,000 were full time and 519,000 were part time. Those statistics tell you volumes. Unemployment is presently at about five per cent across Australia. In Canberra, it is down to three per cent. For the past 12 months it has been consistently at 30-year lows. When Kim Beazley was employment minister, unemployment reached a post-war peak of 10.9 per cent.
They might just sound like statistics, but they are not just statistics to the people affected. Talk to people who went through the period of Labor, those who were in small business and who were being crunched because of the interest rate situation, often losing their home, going through ruination or seeing their own children not being able to get part-time jobs to support themselves, and compare that with the situation today, where the biggest problem that people are complaining to me about is that they just cannot get people for their businesses. I hear it around Canberra all the time. It is because things are
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