Mr BEAZLEY (Leader of the Opposition) (3:21 PM) —It has been an extraordinary question time in which we saw the new Deputy Prime Minister of this nation repudiated outright by his Prime Minister on the first question he answered from this side of the House. Contrary to the Prime Minister’s interpretation, the Deputy Prime Minister was not confirming what he had said to the National Party gathering. He was confirming the minimum conditions that he said would be protected—and they are: four weeks annual leave; personal and carers leave; parental leave, including maternity leave; maximum ordinary working hours of 38 hours per week; public holidays; meal breaks and smokos—by the legislation of the Commonwealth government. That was the National Party position. That is what he said in this place, and the Hansard will show that record unless it is doctored between now and when the greens become available to the general public. All of us here heard that. That was the guarantee as far as the Deputy Prime Minister was concerned. The Prime Minister then got to his feet and attempted to interpret that as a positive answer to the fact that he had said something like that, as opposed to actually giving that commitment in this House. The Prime Minister did what he has done to just about everybody who has tried to give some degree of definition in this debate: he slapped him down—just as he slapped down his Treasurer and just as he slapped down those who have come out and pointed out things which might, from time to time, be seen by the Prime Minister to be inconvenient for him.

Let us understand one thing absolutely here: no guarantee has been given by the Prime Minister or the minister to the minimum conditions which are laid down now in awards in the industrial system. Therefore, all we have to go on in this place is what the Prime Minister has had to say about the minimum standards that he is prepared to protect and what we know of the minimum standards that exist now. If the Prime Minister wants an answer as to why Australian workers, unionised and non-unionised, are turning out in their thousands now around this country at meetings I have been to, meetings my colleagues are going to and many other meetings and informal discussions—talk about barbeque stoppers; the attack on the wages of ordinary Australians is the barbeque stopper par excellence—let me do a comparison taking ordinary Australian workers, those who build this nation and create the families that sustain a future for us. What they fear is that the difference between award conditions and minimum standards means nurses, for example, could lose up to 33 per cent of their pay, or $18,688 per year. Restaurant workers could have wages cut by up to 20 per cent, or $7,052 per year. Hotel receptionists could lose up to $9,037 per year. Tradespersons such as electricians could have a pay cut of up to 16 per cent, including the loss of payments for supervising and specialist qualifications. Cleaners could lose up to 27 per cent or $9,686 per year, including rest and meal breaks.

This is a collapse of Australian standards of living. It will oblige, of course, those workers to struggle in some other way to ensure that they get back what they have lost in order to keep paying their mortgages, to keep paying for the necessities of life and to keep their children at independent schools, if that is where they can manage to send them at this point in time. Basically, all the things that sustain family life are bound up in the sets of conditions that now apply in awards that have been obtained through collective agreements, which are now protected as irreducible minimums below which a worker cannot be paid legally. This is a critical issue for ordinary Australians.

It was also interesting in question time today that, for the first time, the government attempted to present an economic rationale for this. There is no economic rationale. This is not about efficiencies in the workplace; this is about lowering wages. This is not about improving productivity. That, by the way, is collapsing under this government because, as the Reserve Bank and the OECD know, the only way you are going to get a substantial increase in productivity in our work force is by addressing the issue of skills, which this government has shamefully neglected, and the blockages to production in our infrastructure and by encouraging again innovation in our businesses—an encouragement stripped away by this government in its early budgets. That is how you will increase productivity in the work force. All you will do with the government’s measures is to cut wages. You will increase the profit share but you will not automatically increase productivity as a result of doing that.

It is no surprise that the people of this country should be mystified by this, because this represents a piece of opportunism and arrogance on the part of this government that was not foreshadowed in anything this government had to say during the last election campaign. The community is absolutely transfixed by what the government intends to do, because what it intends to do had not the slightest foreshadowing in the course of the last election campaign. There was nothing said in the last election campaign about an intention to change average weekly work hours. There was nothing said about the view that four weeks annual leave was up for grabs. There was nothing said about award conditions above the standard being removed. There was nothing said about what might happen to meal breaks or that lunch would be a luxury. There was nothing said about eliminating penalty rates in relation to public holidays or about knocking over shift rates. There was nothing said about state IR systems being overridden. And there was nothing said in the last election campaign about what would happen in relation to unfair dismissals—that a situation would emerge where there would be a suggestion that the application of unfair dismissals to businesses employing under 20 people would be lifted to 100.

Given what this government is now proposing, the Australian people are entitled to believe that during the last election campaign they were deeply, deeply misled. They demand an answer from the government guaranteeing them that those things that they did not expect are not going to happen. They demand that answer from the government. The Prime Minister tried to make an economic argument, as I mentioned a little earlier—but this, as I said, was the first time he has done that. What he said at the Liberal Party national conference—which, by the way, repudiated him on all of this—was that his rationale for what he intended to do was not a matter of economic necessity in this country or a matter of significance with regard to the efficiencies of industry; he said it was an article of faith. That was the Prime Minister’s defence—and indeed it is.

The Prime Minister’s statement, and all that we have had to hear from him since then, is of a piece with his obsession since the day he entered federal politics, an obsession best and most violently summarised by him back in 1992. When he was invited to speculate on whether or not he would stab the Industrial Relations Commission in the back he said, ‘No; when we get into office we will stab the IRC in the stomach.’ It was an extraordinarily violent allusion to a longstanding institution of this nation but an absolutely authentic representation of the obsession and extremism underlying what the government intend to do about industrial relations policy. It was an absolutely authentic representation of the sheer extremism of the Prime Minister’s position.

From time to time in his arguments on industrial relations, the Prime Minister conjures an image of the world which may have had some level of resonance in the 1970s but which has absolutely no resonance now. It has no resonance now, because of simple decisions taken by the Australian work force in the 1980s and 1990s that they would undergo a process of structural reform that would substantially increase the productivity of our work force, that would lift the profit share in return for additional investment in innovative change in Australian industry through one industry plan after another.

The Australian work force, with their employers and with the government at the time, decided Australia needed to change. They understood that by going over to a system of enterprise collective bargaining, by making changes in the structure of the work force, Australia would remain competitive with the region around us and that through that process of reform Australia would be able to participate in and benefit from the international economy. We knew that a nation of 20 million on its own would never provide the economic circumstances that would permit growing prosperity for the people of this nation. We understood that absolutely at the time. The Australian work force understood that and they delivered change. They were prepared to sacrifice some levels of their security; they were prepared to make changes to move to a different form of collective agreement—they were prepared to do all those things. It is as though the Prime Minister slept through it all. It is as though he is the Rip Van Winkle of Australian politics. He woke up in 1996 and said, ‘Well, things are as they were in the 1970s, so I am going to act accordingly.’

But the Prime Minister said something else in 1996, which he is not saying now. As he wheedled his way into office in 1996, the Prime Minister gave an absolute guarantee that no Australian worker would be worse off. He and his minister will now find any formulation but that. That is the one thing he will not say about the situation that confronts Australians now—because he knows, deceitfully, that he does not have to. He has the power in the Senate and he has 2½ years to put it all in place. He will sweat blood and he will wade through mud up to his neck to get through that ambition that he has always had for Australian industrial relations. That ambition is to shift the balance crucially against the position of the ordinary Australian wage earner; to eliminate from the work force and from any role in the labour market at all, as far as conceivably possible, organised labour—the trade unions; and to stab in the stomach the Industrial Relations Commission and eliminate it from its classic role in conciliation and arbitration. He has this chance now and he will not miss it.

What we saw in question time today were the essential first stages of his manoeuvring around the issue, his characteristic misleading in answers, his half-truths and all the rest of it—his utter refusal to give guarantees on anything, and the slapping down of any of his ministers who might get up and deviate from that line, who might create for the Prime Minister the slightest degree of embarrassment. Our news for the Prime Minister is this: we are on to you. Our news to the Prime Minister is that we know what he is up to. We are going to expose it around this country and we will deal with it. No amount of his mealy-mouthed arguments, or those of his spokesman in this matter, is going to conceal from the Australian public what is aimed at them—and we will defeat you at the next election on this. (Time expired)