Mr ANDREWS (Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) (3:29 PM) —There can probably be no greater irony in parliament this week than for the member for Perth to propose a matter of public importance which refers to the accurate informing of the Australian people, given his actions and those of the Labor Party yesterday in this place. It is a very interesting choice of words for the member for Perth to be speaking about accurately informing people, when that is what he and others in the Labor Party quite clearly failed to do yesterday. If he was interested in accurately informing people, he might have taken at least 30 seconds out of his 15 minutes to apologise for the way in which he misinformed the Australian people yesterday, because he conceded on radio this morning that he had done so.

Let me just take the House and those who are listening to this debate through what happened yesterday. The member for Perth in question time yesterday put a question to the Prime Minister which said, in part:

Later on we had another question coming from the member for Capricornia, who said:

Saying that this was an AWA that was currently in place was quite clearly wrong. It was misleading because this AWA was not currently in place. The terms, conditions and amounts in the AWA which was approved and is therefore in place for these employees are different to those that the member for Perth pointed out in the proposal yesterday.

This is compounded because we know that the Labor Party was then hawking around the press gallery a letter from the relevant union, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, which says, in the first line of the letter that has not been whited out: ‘Recently the union came across an Australian workplace agreement which is proposed to apply to employees.’ This was the letter that was being hawked around the press gallery yesterday, in which quite clearly the union says, ‘This is an AWA which is proposed to apply.’ It was not the AWA which applied. The AWA which was being referred to had not been approved and, indeed, even if the AWA which was referred to had been approved the reality is it amounted to an increase of some $86 a week for full-time employees over and above the award rate for employees in that particular business.

What we have here is one more example of a pattern of conduct that we have seen from the union movement and the Labor Party in relation to the government’s proposed changes. We have seen this with the television advertisements. One television advertisement shows a female worker purportedly being terminated because she is looking after her family due to family responsibilities. What that advertisement does not point out is that it is unlawful in Australia today, within the federal industrial relations system, to terminate somebody’s employment because of their family responsibilities. That ad was clearly misleading so far as the general public were concerned. And then, to compound this pattern of behaviour, we saw footage on Lateline a few weeks ago showing a campaign meeting involving the President of the ACTU, Sharan Burrow, in which she said words to the following effect: ‘Wouldn’t it be great for our campaign if we had the mother or father of a worker who had been injured or killed in Australia. That would be fantastic.’ Those were her words. This is despicable conduct coming from the labour movement. They were saying, ‘It would be great if we could just find someone whose child had been unfortunately and tragically injured or, worse still, killed in some accident and we could use them for our campaign against the government.’

There was also the incident in this place yesterday when the member for Perth came in, aided and abetted by the member for Capricornia, and referred to a document which they must have known was referring to an AWA that had not been approved and was not in operation, because the very letter that they referred to and that was hawked around the press gallery yesterday says that this is a proposed agreement, not one which had been put in operation. A simple question to the union concerned or a simple phone call to the employer concerned would have verified that. It is no excuse to say, ‘Oh, we made a mistake,’ or, ‘We were sloppy.’ This is a case in which the Australian people were being misled by the members opposite in relation to the matters that they raised in the House yesterday.

Contrary to what the member for Perth says, the reality is that the current AWA would not have been approved by the Employment Advocate. The AWA which they are referring to actually cashes out all annual leave, but under the proposals that the government are putting to the parliament we are saying that, as part of the minimum wages and conditions, a person has to have as part of an agreement—whether it is a collective agreement or an individual agreement—four weeks annual leave. We go further and replicate what is in existence in Western Australia—apparently acceptable to a Labor government in Western Australia—and say that up to two weeks of that annual leave can be cashed out on a case-by-case basis at the request of the employee. This is something that has worked successfully for many people who want to make use of that in Western Australia. Even under the circumstances which the member for Perth puts to the parliament today he is wrong, because under the new system these provisions of the AWA would not be enforceable as they cash out all annual leave. It would have been invalid and it would not have been approved in the form that he talks about. He has even got that wrong.

We are told about failure to accurately inform the House, failure to accurately inform the people. What about the opposition’s attitude to Australian workplace agreements? On the Sunday program the Leader of the Opposition was asked whether his policy was to abolish Australian workplace agreements. Let us remember that 770,000 Australian workplace agreements have been entered into since their inception. Somewhere in the order of 500,000 of these individual workplace agreements are being used by Australians successfully today, paying more in wages than do both collective agreements and award arrangements for workers in Australia. When asked about this on the Sunday program, the Leader of the Opposition said:

Laurie Oakes asked:

Mr Beazley answered:

So is the Leader of the Opposition, to quote the words of the matter before the House, ‘accurately informing the people of Australia’? What exactly is his policy about Australian workplace agreements? He says on one hand that he will not abolish them. In fact, he says that he cannot abolish them, because there would be too many losers. He is right about that. There are thousands of workers in his own electorate of Brand in Perth in Western Australia who have made use of Australian workplace agreements to get higher pay. He knows he cannot abolish them, but what he wants to do by stealth—this is hardly accurately informing the Australian people of matters—is to strangle these agreements and cut them off, yet pretend that he is not going to abolish them, because he knows that people would be worse off as a result. The reality is that, to use the political cliche, the Leader of the Opposition is attempting to walk both sides of the street.

But there is one thing he is right about, and that is that people would be losers. If you abolish AWAs, you are effectively saying to those people who are earning more on AWAs—whether they are managerial or non-managerial workers in Australia—that you would cut their wages. That is what you would do if you abolished AWAs. The Leader of the Opposition is right about one other thing: there will be a million of them approved by the next election. So what is he saying to up to 10 per cent of the Australian work force who have made use of the flexibility which is available under these sorts of instruments? He is saying, ‘We are going to make you worse off.’

There was a story published in the Australian newspaper yesterday about a grocery merchandiser, Sandra Xuereb, who has an Australian workplace agreement which allows her to choose her hours and cope with the demands of being a single mother of three. The article says:

Here is a single mum raising three kids in Western Sydney, making use of the choice and flexibility that Australian workplace agreements give her.

A government member—What a great story!

Mr ANDREWS —That is right; it is a great story. It is a great story about somebody who is getting on with their life and has a job. We heard this nonsense from the Leader of the Opposition today—he complained about an accurate depiction that we put in the 67-page document that is available for people who want to look at the detail of our policy. We said, honestly, that there can be circumstances in which a worker—someone, for example, who is unemployed—can be offered a job on minimum wages and conditions as set out and protected by the Australian fair pay and conditions standard. We had a mocking reference to this from the opposition as if being on welfare and not having a job is somehow better than having a job.

The reality is that almost 40 per cent of people who get a job in Australia use that within a year as a pathway to another job. Many people, probably many members of this House, have started a job to get a foot in the door—or ‘to get a foot on the ladder’, to use an expression that was fondly used by the previous Leader of the Opposition. Many people have started by getting a job and then used that as a stepping stone to another job. We say unashamedly to this parliament and to the Australian people that it is better to give somebody who is unemployed the opportunity to get a job because that is an opportunity to get into the labour market in Australia. It is an opportunity, in many cases, to get off welfare and do something of benefit for themselves and their family members in the future. That is something which we, as I said, are unashamedly about.

We have heard from the Leader of the Opposition about another policy of roll-back. He has been trying to avoid the word ‘roll-back’ ever since the disaster of the roll-back of the GST—something that the opposition were going to do and then eventually caved in on, because they saw the good economic sense of the GST that everybody else recognised. For two terms of parliament, we had the Leader of the Opposition and others saying, ‘We’re going to roll back the GST,’ when every Labor Premier out there in Australia had been talking about the benefits to them of the GST and wondering how they could get some more revenue out of the GST.

Now we have the Leader of the Opposition saying that he will roll back this policy. He was asked yesterday whether he would roll back a policy which gave the government power to do something in exceptional circumstances when essential services were threatened in Australia. He said that he would roll that back. Note this: essential services legislation exists in every state of Australia. I do not hear the Labor premiers around Australia saying, ‘We shouldn’t have the power in exceptional circumstances to do something about essential services.’ Is the Leader of the Opposition seriously saying to the Australian people that if a rogue union, say in the electricity industry, went out on strike in such a way that the power supplies to public hospitals and aged care and nursing homes were put at risk, and the health and wellbeing of people in those hospitals and aged care homes was therefore put at risk, then we should not have the power to order an end to the dispute and get the parties into the Industrial Relations Commission? That is the practical effect of what the Leader of the Opposition was saying yesterday. He would roll back essential services legislation.

The reality is that when it comes to these matters the Leader of the Opposition is an opportunist. We have seen opportunism every time from this opposition in terms of the GST and other policies that we have put forward, and we have seen it once again today. These changes are good for the Australian people. They are about building on the 1.7 million extra jobs that we have created, building on the 14.9 per cent increase in real wages over the last 9½ years and building on our economic prosperity so that we can meet the challenges of the future and not go backwards, as we would under the policies of the opposition.