Mr RANDALL (6:13 PM) —It is my very great pleasure to speak on the Workplace Relations Amendment (Fair Dismissal) Bill 2002 [No. 2]. This is going to be the beacon that stands out in the electorate demonstrating why the Labor Party are not connected to business and to the people who work in business. We have just seen the Labor Party go through the biggest mixer in their history—the first time in the history of this parliament that a Labor leader has lost the seat of Cunningham. The opposition leader, Mr Crean, came out and said, `We have got to start connecting with the public. We have got to start listening to what the people want. We have got to start letting them tell us what they need rather than having us tell them.' And what do they do? They stand up in this place and they say, after voting against this 14 times, `No, we are not going to support this.'

This is the biggest no-brainer that the Labor Party have come up with in the history of their opposition to things in this country—other than their opposition to the GST, and we know what happened with the GST. The Labor Party opposed the GST for three elections. Wasn't it magnificent? Keating opposed it, and Beazley opposed it twice. It took the Labor Party three times to get it through their thick skulls that they were on a loser. They are on a loser again, because unfair dismissal laws in this country are fair for the people the Labor Party purport to represent, because they will give them jobs. The Labor Party go on with all this social, class warfare stuff—`We can't allow them to be exposed to this and that'. This has nothing to do with fairness; it has everything to do with the fact that the Labor Party are wedded at the hip and tied by the ankle to the union movement. As you would know, Mr Deputy Speaker Adams, they are tied hand and glove to the union movement, so they cannot move on issues like this.

The quote is: `The risk of being poor is greater for those out of work'. Let us understand this: if you do not have a job in this country, you have a greater chance of being poor. What is the alternative? Work for the Dole is a good program, but it is certainly not as good as having a job. Welfare payments? No, that is not good; that is not having a job. The greatest thing you can do for a person in this country is give them a job. The Labor Party complain and say, `There's a chance of people being dismissed from their work under these unfair dismissal laws.' To be dismissed, you have to have a job first. How do you get knocked out of a job if you do not have one? This is a no-brainer on the part of the Labor Party. They have lost the plot. They have lost contact with the electorate and they have lost contact with small business.

The Labor Party have never been supporters of small business in this country. In fact, they see the small business community of this country as their enemy. Why? Because they cannot control it. They cannot control small business because they cannot mandate people into a union. Most of the members opposite in this House have either been members of unions or come from union backgrounds. We are told that they are all members of unions in any case, because you cannot be a member of the Labor Party unless you join a union. Talk about fifty-fifty! Fifty-fifty means five bob each way. The Labor Party cannot have it in this case because they are all members of unions. As a result, they have blinkered views in relation to these matters.

Because it is not the constituency of the Labor Party, the Labor Party have always burnt small business. You can see that with Mr Hawke's accord. The accord had nothing to do with creating a greater number of jobs for workers; the accord was about how to control the workers in conjunction with the unions—how to actually marshal the workers into the union's jurisdictions. That was what happened under the marvellous accord. When you look at the results of the accord, you see that we had an unemployment rate of over 11 per cent, and youth unemployment went through the roof—and there were all the social and economic spin-offs from that in this country. It was a tragedy, but the Labor Party keep mouthing these words about jobs for young people, jobs for people in business and job creation. We know that the only jobs they created were the $60,000 type jobs that Mr Crean created under his great Working Nation policy, which did nothing—`Bill Hunter, job ready, here we are.' None of it was productive, there was not much of a training element to it at all, and as a result unemployment in this country blew out to the levels we know about.

We have had all these hypocritical platitudes from the Labor Party in terms of looking after the workers, but we know in this country—and I have said it here many times—that the Labor Party are not interested in looking after the workers; they are interested in looking after the elites in the union movement. And how do they do that? They do that by making sure they get a heap of union dues. And how do they get a heap of union dues? They make sure that they all join the union. Unfortunately for the Labor Party, many of the people working for these small businesses with fewer than 20 people are casual employees, and because they are casuals many of them do not belong to a union. Many of them are schoolkids who are in part-time jobs et cetera and do not want to be part of a union. They work at the deli down the corner, help out at the garden centre down the road or work at the bread shop on a Saturday morning. They do not want to be a member of a union. So, of course, they are not people the Labor Party and their mates in the union movement really want to foster—because they are not part of their controlled group.

But, in comparison, let us have a look at one of the things that the government has done for jobs. In the building industry in Western Australia, for example, we see much of the building being done by subcontractors, and yet—talking about the way generic Labor treat the small business man, or the subcontractor, in this case—Labor were not opposed to the fact that these subcontractors were going to be locked into a bad tax regime, the 80-20 rule. Let us look even further at small business operators in Western Australia who employ fewer than 20 people. Mr Kobelke, the state Labor minister, recently did a little deal—quite publicly, believe it or not—with the big end of town. Building companies like BGC, J-Corp and Dale Alcock, the largest builders in Perth, have been given a guarantee or a surety that they will not face building indemnity problems. But what about the small subcontractors? There is no such indemnity from the state government. You might ask what this has to do with unfair dismissal laws. What it has to do with unfair dismissal laws is this: the small contractors who employ this handful of people are not getting the same treatment from a Labor government that is very wedded to the union movement in Western Australia.

We are saying that under federal law we would like to see a template for legislation which would provide fair dismissal. What is the alternative? We now have six Labor states controlling their labour laws. Let us have a look at what was brought in recently in Western Australia under the new Labor regime there. Maybe this is what the federal Labor Party would have liked to have seen happen if they had won the last election. Where there used to be a 28-day period to lodge a claim for being unfairly dismissed, they now have no sunset clause. No-one has actually said what the sunset period is on an unfair dismissal claim in the Western Australian state Labor jurisdiction. It is certainly not 28 days like it used to be. Is it the statute of limitations—six or seven years? Does that mean that six years later you can come along and say, `I recall that when I was employed at the kebab shop around the corner they were quite unfair to me and, as a result, I'm going to lodge a claim.' The bloke might have onsold his business and moved on, but he is still subject to a claim from somebody who has decided he is fair game for unfair dismissal prosecution.

The member for Newcastle said nobody knocks on her door about unfair dismissal. I have people knocking all the time and saying, `I would employ more people, especially young kids, if I didn't have to put up with being worried that, if I employ them and they do something wrong at my place, I can't do anything about them without it costing me a poultice.' There was even a case—as I mentioned when I last spoke on the bill—where somebody who had not even started the job put in a claim. He had been given verbal notice by the bloke who ran the fruit and veg part of a small supermarket. The bloke said, `Yes, you can start Monday,' but he did not start on Monday. He turned up on Monday and said he was not going to start and then he lodged an unfair dismissal claim. Of course, it was thrown out of court, but the owner of the business still had to go in and contest the claim because it had been lodged.

What do these sorts of claims cost? With legal fees, time off work and all the compliance that goes with them, they cost a minimum of $3,000 to contest. As they go on, many of these claims cost $8,000 or $10,000. The claim by many is, `I put it in because they said I would at least get something out of it; they said that there was a couple of grand in it for me.' It is disgraceful that the Labor Party continue to oppose a set of laws that would tidy up this rort which stops people being employed in the small businesses of this country.

There are plenty of checks and balances in this bill. We have already said that it applies only to businesses with under 20 employees. That is because of the definition of small business. I heard someone from the Labor Party saying, `I know a girl who was pregnant who was told that, because she was pregnant, she was going to lose her job.' That is just not true. It is not true at all. This legislation does not take away the elements of the law that relate to unlawful termination. Under the unlawful termination laws of this country, you cannot dismiss somebody for things like that, but you can dismiss somebody who has been stealing from you, not turning up or doing things that would be detrimental to the reputation of your business. You are not going to dismiss somebody because they have a disability or a sickness. You are certainly not going to dismiss apprentices.

The Labor Party have even said, `Under this legislation, apprentices and trainees will lose their positions.' That is absolutely not true. Enshrined in this legislation is the fact that apprentices and trainees will not be dismissed. In fact, they have very great protection. We are the party that wants to increase the number of apprenticeships and traineeships in this country. If you recall the speech I made the other day, I said that, under the Howard government, apprenticeship positions in this country have gone from 105,000 a year to 334,000. That is more than a doubling of the number of apprenticeships in this country. Compare that to what the Labor Party in government were doing: running down the skilled work force of this country. We are not going to put traineeships and apprenticeships in this country in jeopardy. We are about making it easier to employ these people. You will make it easier to employ people if you first of all give them a job.

One of the reasons we have a low unemployment rate in this country is that we have been able to get through a lot of workplace reforms. Throughout the world, people have acknowledged that the Australian work force has become far more productive. That has a lot to do with work force flexibility—to the extent that you can make arrangements through workplace bargaining rather than through collective bargaining, which is what the unions are endeavouring to take us back to now. So, for example, owners of the seaside restaurants at Cottesloe have flexibility if they cannot pay award rates of double time and triple time just because it is a Sunday. You would have heard the one about the old wharfies' picnic where the wharfie begins to tell his grand-daughter a bedtime story, saying, `Once upon a time-and-a-half.' That is almost endemic in the way they think.

Flexibility gives young people the opportunity to get a job. You can make arrangements with your employer, creating a flexible work force which will suit both the employee and employer. Some people do not want full-time work. As I said, some people are students and some people are parents who want to work part time. People wish to make their own arrangements. Flexibility gives rise to greater productivity in the work force.

So that people do not have to go off and employ their relatives and friends in their businesses because they are too frightened to employ somebody from the work force, I suggest that the Labor Party get their heads out of the ideological trough, get up, get some air and see what the people of Australia really think about providing the opportunity of jobs to young people. I say this in light of the fact that those around this country who are taking their TEE are going to be finished shortly. A lot of young people will be wanting to get part-time work in small businesses—in local hardware stores or on lawn-mowing rounds et cetera. They will want to actually go and get these jobs and make sure that they can have some work before and after Christmas, during their holidays, and maybe as flow-on jobs after leaving school. As a result of Labor opposing these laws, we are going to see those young kids denied those opportunities.

The member for Newcastle was trying to decry the sort of research that has been done, but the research has been well done over years and years, and information from it shows that in my electorate, for example, one in five small businesses, given the opportunity of having these laws taken away, would employ another person. If they did not have the Damocles sword of unfair dismissal hanging over their heads, they would each employ one more person. In Canning where there is high youth unemployment and over 3,000 businesses, one in five equates to something like an extra 600 jobs. I want to see the Labor Party get its act together, get behind the government, especially in the run-up to Christmas, and get ideology and union control off its back, so that ultimately young people—in Australia generally and in my electorate of Canning particularly—will have the opportunity to get a job in the run-up to Christmas and after.

Sitting suspended from 6.30 p.m. to 8.00 p.m.