Page 2528 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 23 August 2006
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There was not one piece of evidence to link the health of workers to the WorkChoices legislation. There were some vague articles from the Illawarra Mercury, which did not even draw a link with the WorkChoices legislation. Mr Gentleman offered no evidence, just a bunch of stories.
This is consistent with the approach of the union movement and the Labor Party on this issue. We know where Mr Gentleman gets his information. It is from his union mates, the TWU and the ACTU. We know how credible they are. On Lateline, Sharan Burrow of the ACTU said, “I need a mum or dad of someone who has been seriously injured or killed. That would be fantastic.” That is a disgraceful statement—an absolutely disgraceful and outrageous statement. These are the kinds of people that Mr Gentleman gets his information from.
Time and time again in the federal parliament Mr Beazley and Mr Smith have used personal examples, and time and time again they have got it wrong. They cannot be trusted. They never go to overall figures because the figures, which I will get to later, completely give the lie to what they are saying. They have to rely on individual stories, but so many of them have been discredited that we just do not know what to believe from the Labor Party. For instance, Mr Beazley was caught out on his claims about OH&S in relation to WorkChoices. He claimed that WorkChoices has prevented an occupational health and safety clause being included in a workplace agreement in the Newlands mine in Queensland. The Leader of the Opposition conveniently failed to mention that the Newlands mine agreement contains an entirely separate clause entitled “safety in the workplace”.
The Office of the Employment Advocate disallowed a separate clause proposed by the CFMEU that stated that employees would be given leave to attend bona fide union business. We do not know what that would mean. It certainly does not have to relate to safety; it could relate to anything. Recently, in the ACT, the CFMEU politicised a death by announcing in a statement that it would attempt to enter the site to investigate the circumstances to determine whether the Prime Minister and Minister Andrews have blood on their hands. This is the kind of rubbish that we get from the Labor Party in this place and from their Labor mates on the hill. Time and time gain the information they present is not credible.
Mr Gentleman did not present any facts. He did not present anything. He talked about 150 days of people feeling less safe and less secure and how their health has been impacted over those 150 days. Let us look at what has happened in the 150 or so days since the WorkChoices legislation came in. There have been 159,000 new jobs created. In 150 days there have been 159,000 new jobs created. That is more than 1,000 jobs per day, and 129,000 of these jobs are full time.
The unemployment rate in this country is 4.8 per cent. Since WorkChoices came in it has gone down. The growth in jobs—159,000 jobs in the space of about five months; 1,000 a day—is perhaps the largest that has ever been seen. Yet in the several months prior to the implementation of WorkChoices, we heard Mr Gentleman in this place and the federal Labor Party saying that there would be mass sackings. What have we seen? We have seen 159,000 new jobs.
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