Mr RANDALL(7.45 p.m.) —The Western Australian Labor Party has promised to wind back the industrial relations clock by four years by promising to remove the industrial relations reforms on workplace agreements if it is elected this Saturday, 14 December. This is yet another indication that the Australian Labor Party is an industrial relations dinosaur when it comes to workplace reform. It is a step back into the dark ages of workplace regimentation.

All informed workers and hence voters in this Saturday's Western Australian election will be aware that the award is, quite rightly, the safety net provision for workers. Without the flexibility of the workplace agreements provisions, workers are locked into a very rigid pay deal which gives them little chance to better their pay and conditions. Dr Gallop's proposals should scare the living daylights out of Western Australian workers when they contemplate his returning them to the dark ages of industrial relations, especially those tens of thousands of Western Australian workers already happily employed on individual contracts.

Is there really another agenda? Prior to the 1993 Western Australian election, the former ALP labor relations minister, Yvonne Henderson, stated that it was her party's and her intention that all WA workers would be compelled to join a union. Yes, the ALP were going to make union membership in Western Australia compulsory. Yvonne Henderson and the former Lawrence ALP government were keen supporters of the draconian no ticket, no start mentality in the Western Australian work force.

Is this what Geoff Gallop and the state ALP want to return WA workers to? Under the Court coalition government, Western Australian workers have had a choice. This flexibility in the Western Australian work force has seen WA workers achieving great take-home pay and the ability to earn more.

It has seen the union hobnail boot taken from the throat of the worker, but small business and employers need the ability to make localised and personal decisions about mutually agreed pay and conditions, and the flexibility to negotiate and trade off to achieve these ends. There is no creditable economic commentator in this country who does not agree that the Australian work force in general must become more flexible before greater and sustained growth can occur and that this flexibility in the labour force will see a genuine reduction in unemployment, and youth unemployment in particular.

Few workers and employers in Western Australia would disagree that the coalition's current workplace policy strikes a good balance between productivity and fairness. It allows workers to negotiate agreements on an individual basis. Alternatively, if the worker wants to be employed under the award, they can choose to do so.

Geoff Gallop, by wanting to impose collective bargaining on workplace agreements, chooses to ignore the fact that 70 per cent of the Western Australian work force does not belong to a union. These people want the individual flexibility to negotiate their own set of conditions which they want to factor to their personal circumstances. For example, a mum wanting to start work after nine and finish at 3.30 p.m. can do so under a flexible agreement—so she can take her kids to and from school—if agreed terms and conditions are negotiated.

The other 30 per cent making up the unionised work force can choose to negotiate with the union as their agent at this moment in Western Australia, if that is their choice. However, I am not convinced that all of that 30 per cent union membership in Western Australia would choose to select the collective arrangement with the union as their agent.

I declare that Dr Gallop should stop pandering to the Western Australian unions. I say to Western Australians: don't vandalise the productivity gains and wages growth that have been achieved under a more flexible workplace agreements program in Western Australia; don't victimise or terrorise those workers whose individual and legal right it is to choose the flexibility and productivity that go with the Court government's Workplace Agreement Act. I say to Dr Gallop: stop beating up on the workers for crass political mileage. Give Western Australia back to a creditable coalition government that has run its workplace the way that a progressive government should do.