Mr GAVAN O’CONNOR (8:44 PM) —In the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (Workplace Relations Requirements) Bill 2005 we witness one of the worst cases of industrial blackmail in this country. In recent times the government has made much of the actions of the union movement in various industries and categorised the movement as being laden with thugs who are keen to impose their will on unsuspecting employers, yet the national government of Australia is engaged in one of the worst cases of industrial blackmail that this country has ever seen. The government is using its financial power to impose its ideology and industrial relations framework on the higher education system in this country.

It is important to reflect on the record of this government after nine long years of incompetence. There has been a cut of some $5 billion from the universities of Australia. Australian students, many of them in my electorate of Corio, cannot get a place at an Australian university. Those students who are fortunate enough to get a place at university are saddled with debt, courtesy of this Prime Minister and the Liberal government. Families have been burdened by the policies of this government. But there are some fortunate ones. Never let it be said that the Prime Minister, John Howard, and the Liberal government never looked after their own. If you have $100,000 or a credit card you can buy your way into a course in Australia. But you cannot get there on merit, because this government has cut $5 billion from those universities and, in the process, has curtailed the opportunities of good Australian students.

What we see in this legislation is a gross interference in the affairs of the tertiary sector. The government wants to attack the working conditions of those whom we rely upon in our higher education institutions to keep us competitive and ahead of the rest of the world. In June this year, 17 of Australia’s leading academics in the field of industrial relations and the labour market released a series of papers on the issue of industrial relations reform. In these papers, they identify the labour market issues that are facing Australia: labour and skills shortages, courtesy of the Howard government; a productivity slowdown, courtesy of the Howard government; work-family tensions, courtesy of the Howard government; and growth in low-paid, insecure employment, courtesy of John Howard and his Liberal government.

These academics are of the view that the government’s ideological approach to industrial relations will undermine people’s rights at work. It will deliver only one-way flexibility. It will do nothing to ease the work-family tensions; indeed, it will make them worse. It will have no direct positive impact on productivity, and it will disadvantage already marginalised individuals and groups. If those are the criteria for good policy, the sooner the Australian people get rid of this government the better.

There are many workers out there listening to this debate who put their faith in the Prime Minister at the last election. Already they have witnessed the betrayal. I would say to those workers: do not blame Labor when this Prime Minister strips away your wages and your conditions, and do not blame any Labor member in this parliament for making it harder for you and your families to balance work and the responsibilities of family and your community. There is only one person to blame, and you should have been aware of this Prime Minister’s record when you made the decision to vote Liberal at the last election.

This Prime Minister has a record of saying one thing to you on a whole range of policy issues and doing another. This Prime Minister said to Australians that he would not sell the rest of Telstra. This Prime Minister told Australians to put their lives on the line for a lie in Iraq—a deception that has cost thousands of lives. There were no weapons of mass destruction, yet there were many working people who voted for the coalition on that basis. Of course, the Prime Minister has longstanding friends in this place. I note the presence tonight in the chamber of the member for Corangamite, from the electorate adjoining mine in the Geelong region. I say this to the member for Corangamite: you have the tall order of going into the Geelong community and convincing working people that they will keep their houses, when you intend to strip their penalty rates and the income that they have received from those means.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Jenkins)—Order! The honourable member for Corio will be not be provoked by the member for Corangamite and will address his remarks through the chair.

Mr GAVAN O’CONNOR —I will address my remarks through the chair because the honourable member for Corangamite must know, as I do—

Mr McArthur interjecting—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The member for Corangamite should be silent.

Mr GAVAN O’CONNOR —that this legislation before the parliament is one of the worst interferences in the affairs of Deakin University that we could possibly imagine. Deakin University is one of the top universities in Australia.

Mr McArthur —And it is in the seat of Corangamite.

Mr GAVAN O’CONNOR —And of course it is located in the seat of Corangamite and in the seat of Corio. That is one thing that the honourable member for Corangamite and I share, and I do believe that the honourable member for Corangamite and I share a desire for Deakin University to get a new medical school. We are in agreement on those matters. But we will never be in agreement on the contents of this particular bill, which seeks to impose on the Deakin administration a set of ideological straitjackets on the basis of the ideological prejudice of the Prime Minister and the Liberal Party, not related to good administration at all. I do not know how the member for Corangamite can sit there bald faced and front up to Deakin University, to the hundreds and hundreds of staff who live in his electorate, who will be forced onto AWAs and will have their wages and conditions cut and whose families will be affected by this legislation. How does the member for Corangamite look them in the eye when he goes around Deakin University? It is an extraordinary proposition that we have here today that this government seeks to interfere so much in the affairs of a great university like Deakin University.

Let us look at a few of the platitudes that are wheeled out by the government in regard to this legislation. The first is that employees will have freedom of choice. They will not have freedom of choice. For new employees, at least, it will be: ‘Accept a workplace agreement or look elsewhere for a job.’ By what tortured definition of choice could you describe this as giving any employee or prospective employee a fair crack of the whip or a shot at the title? The freedom to choose to bargain collectively has also, in reality, gone. It is worth noting that this loss of the freedom to engage in collective bargaining has occurred because, simply, it is not guaranteed in any shape or form as a right in Australia as it is in the United States and in other OECD countries.

The government also claims that employees will have the same job security that exists before the bill is passed. This is clearly not the case, because there can be no limit set on the use of contract and casual staff. There will obviously therefore be an increase in both contract and casual staff at the expense of staff who have ongoing employment. The increase in casual staff will put great pressure on those full-time staff who have to support them in their work, because the casual staff are not familiar with the processes or the systems in place at the university. The increase in casual and contract staff clearly undermines the independence of the staff in this academic environment.

If AWAs get a foothold in universities—and I am hopeful that their staff will be wise enough to resist them all the way—can you imagine how impossible it will be for the human resources department to monitor and look after the staff with, say, 2,000 of their 5,000 staff on AWAs and the rest on an enterprise agreement? Each AWA has the potential, if the minister’s dream becomes a reality, to be unique. Holidays, allowances, workloads, attendance, special conditions and salaries will be different for each employee. The efficiency gains the minister thinks he will make with the AWAs will be lost through gross inefficiencies in the administration of these contracts. Extra staff will have to be employed to keep track of all these variations. Imagine being a dean and trying to manage a department of 50 teaching and research staff, all of whom have these different conditions of employment.

The minister says minimum standards of salaries and conditions will be maintained. Of course they will not. Everybody knows that they will simply be whittled away. The award will become a skeleton award with few allowable matters. The minister does not propose how his minimum standards will be maintained in this legislation, but of course that is not surprising, because it is not his intention that they should be maintained. The minister knows very clearly the import and impact of this legislation, and so do his advisers. We can expect to see the wages of the administration staff and lecturers at universities like Deakin University in Geelong drastically reduced over time. But, as we know from our experience in other industries, the wages and salaries of management near the top will of course increase. This is a trend that has always occurred with these sorts of reforms.

This type of action or policy sets the scene for a change in culture at higher educational institutions. A ‘them and us’ mentality will develop between the few at the top of the hierarchy, those close to the vice-chancellor, who will benefit from the introduction of AWAs, and the rest of the staff, who will have to provide the productivity increases with lower salaries—not a great way to build the vibrant, modern organisations that are critical to Australia’s long-term competitiveness and development. As with all retrograde industrial relations changes, and those that are being proposed are certainly no exception, the impact will fall most heavily on women. It is always women who are overrepresented in the statistics of casual and contract staff.

Let me now turn to another reason for this legislation. It centres upon the lack of funding that the government has provided to these universities. This government has pushed the universities so hard with its reduced funding that there is serious concern now about the viability of many of them. The government can see itself as having to bail out a university or two before the term of this parliament is finished—maybe right at election time. So this government’s second aim is to set the scene so that the universities can reduce their costs through the appointment of staff on lower salaries and with worse working conditions. It will therefore be the administration of a university that is at fault, not the government, if they run into financial difficulties. The government will claim it gave the universities the ability to manage within their budgets, because they had AWAs available to them.

Debate interrupted.