Page 2529 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 23 August 2006
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What Mr Gentleman is saying is that it would be better if WorkChoices had not been put in place; then we would not have seen a lot of those jobs created. It would be better, Mr Gentleman says, if those people who were unemployed previously had stayed unemployed. He would prefer it if our industrial relations system went backward rather than forward and if the 159,000 jobs that have been created since March had not been created. This is the level of argument that Mr Gentleman brings to this place time and time again. He has no figures to back his argument. He has stories that are consistently discredited. He does not want to focus on statistics because statistics give the lie to what he is saying.
Earlier the industrial relations minister implied that the last 10 years of the Howard government have been terrible in terms in terms of industrial relations and economic growth. He did not say “economic growth”, but I can only assume—
Mr Hargreaves: You are not verballing him, are you?
MR SESELJA: I might be verballing him a touch. I think maybe even he acknowledges that economic growth has been pretty solid for the last 10 years or so. But he certainly did make a comment about how terrible industrial relations have been.
Let us look at what has happened. In 1996 we had the same mob, the same Chicken Littles, the same doomsayers saying, “We’ll all be rooned. It’ll all be terrible. We’ll tear these laws up.” Since 1996, 1.8 million jobs have been created. We now have the lowest unemployment rate since 1976 and there has been an increase in real wages of 16.8 per cent. These are fantastic figures. Everyone would have to acknowledge that these are fantastic figures. In the ACT, the unemployment rate is 2.8 or 2.9 per cent. The workers of the ACT are doing very well, thank you very much, under this industrial relations system.
Mr Gentleman does not think they are doing well. The Chief Minister has been telling us how well they are doing. Of course, he tries to take all the credit! Across the nation we are seeing fantastic economic times, fantastic employment conditions and the lowest unemployment seen in this country for the past 30 years. If it were up to the likes of Mr Gentleman and Mr Beazley, we would not have that.
Let us look at Mr Beazley’s record, because this is what we would be going back to. Mr Gentleman says, “WorkChoices is terrible. Kim Beazley is going to come in and tear these laws up. Wouldn’t it be great if he got in and we could go back to how things were in the good old days when he was in government?” When Kim Beazley was employment minister, unemployment peaked at 10.9 per cent, putting nearly one million Australians out of work. In May 1993, when Kim Beazley was unemployment minister, long-term unemployment peaked at 329,800. Kim Beazley has admitted that he was simply not up to the job of protecting Australian workers. He said, “I lost a lot of ambition and I stopped straining. I thought there was less capacity to achieve in that portfolio than just about any other I have had.” He is right about that. He did not achieve much, except to push the unemployment rate up. If the Labor Party gets back into government federally, that is what we will see again.
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