Mr ANDREWS (Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) (3:28 PM) —Nothing gets in the craw of the Australian Labor Party more than for them to be reminded that it has been this government that has created 1.7 million extra jobs and seen a 14.9 per cent increase in real wages. When it comes to the question of which party in government has done more for the Australian workers then we are prepared to trade our record and to rely on our record against the man who is walking out of the chamber at the present time, the Leader of the Opposition.

Mr Byrne interjecting—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Hon. IR Causley)—The member for Holt should remember that there has been a general warning.

Mr ANDREWS —He wants a debate and he has gone scuttling out of the door.

Mr Byrne interjecting—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER —The minister will resume his seat. The member for Holt will remove himself from the parliament under standing order 94(a).

The member for Holt then left the chamber.

Mr ANDREWS —When one looks at the historic record the reality is that it has been the coalition in government which has delivered to Australian workers and their families. This government, in the last almost 10 years, has delivered 1.7 million extra jobs for Australian workers and their families. It has delivered a 14.9 per cent increase in real wages to Australian workers and their families. The rhetoric which we heard today—the overblown, almost hysterical rhetoric which we have heard today—from the Leader of the Opposition is very similar to the rhetoric which we heard in 1996 when this government introduced the Workplace Relations Act in the first place. I say to ordinary Australian men and women listening to this debate and to some of the extraordinary carrying on from the Australian Labor Party today: cast your minds back 10 years, to 1996, and listen to the same rhetoric which we have heard today. In fact, on 19 June 1996 the Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, said:

Isn’t that just what we have heard once again?

Mr Danby —It was right then and it is right now.

Ms Annette Ellis interjecting—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER —The member for Melbourne Ports and the member for Canberra are apparently slow learners.

Mr ANDREWS —The member for Perth went even further in 1996. This is the man who said on 17 October 1995:

Mr Adams —Answer the charges!

The DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The member for Lyons! You sit in this chair, you should know better.

Mr Downer —Was this last week?

Mr ANDREWS —This was 11 years ago, Foreign Minister, when the member for Perth used the same overblown rhetoric that we hear once again from him today. The reality is that, on each count raised by the member for Perth and the Leader of the Opposition back in 1995 and 1996, they were wrong. The record of this government has been to increase massively the number of jobs for Australian families and to increase real wages. The level of hysteria that we are getting from the Australian Labor Party was repeated in this chamber today. We have today on the front page of the Age newspaper from Melbourne a report saying that Kim Beazley has declared John Howard’s industrial relations legislation ‘a greater threat to civil liberties than the controversial antiterrorism bill’. What we have got here is a Leader of the Opposition who is so desperate that he will say or do anything to grab media attention to get a headline in relation to this. These sorts of outlandish, hysterical claims are in accord with what we have heard from other leaders of the labour movement.

Ms Annette Ellis —So what’s the problem?

Mr ANDREWS —Brian Boyd, of the Victorian Trades Hall Council, says, ‘This is about enslaving workplaces.’ What we have done in the last 10 years is to considerably free up workplaces.

Ms Annette Ellis —So what’s the problem?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER —The member for Canberra will remove herself from the chamber under standing order 94(a). You have been warned twice.

The member for Canberra then left the chamber.

Mr ANDREWS —Andy Gillespie, the President of the South Coast Labour Council, says that this will see ‘a real breakdown in society’. John Robertson, the Secretary of Unions New South Wales, calls this ‘a direct attack on families and the way our children are raised’. And then we have the Leader of the Opposition saying that this is going to lead to more divorce. Tomorrow we will be told that the industrial relations legislation is going to contribute to the global warming of the world. We had Janet Giles from Unions South Australia saying more workers would die of asbestosis related diseases because of this legislation. This is the overblown, hysterical campaign that is being run by the Labor Party. Bob Smith, a Labor member in the Victorian parliament, relates this to women and children being killed in America, and he went on to say that this is the road that the Prime Minister wants to take us down. This is absolutely bizarre. Mark these words and the sort of campaign that we are getting from the Labor Party. Workers Online, the official online journal of the labour movement in Australia, said recently that the federal government’s changes to industrial relations ‘could kill people’. How bizarre and how hysterical is this campaign—and, as the Minister for Foreign Affairs says, how offensive are these comments!

We had the President of the ACTU—and this is worth reminding Australians—shown on Lateline on 10 August, saying this about the ACTU campaign:

That would be fantastic for their campaign! This is shameful conduct. These are shameful words. But this is the level of debate that we are getting from the Australian Labor Party in this overblown attempt to scare Australians about these changes.

Rather than listening to this overblown rhetoric and the frenzied attack that the Leader of the Opposition and, before him, the member for Perth were leading today, we ought to compare the record of what this government has done for the workers in Australia—the commitment that this government has made to the workers of Australia—with that of the Australian Labor Party. When the Leader of the Opposition—the member for Brand, Mr Beazley—was the Minister for Employment, Education and Training in the previous Labor government, what was his record? His record was one million Australians unemployed, and there were 329,000 long-term unemployed people in Australia at that time. The teenage unemployment rate in Australia when Kim Beazley was the responsible minister was 34.5 per cent. More than one third of teenagers in Australia were unemployed when the man who is now the Leader of the Opposition was responsible for employment policies under the previous Labor government. And he wants to talk about a record in relation to what we have done for Australian workers and their families.

Opposition members interjecting—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER —A general warning is a general warning.

Mr ANDREWS —Indeed, the Leader of the Opposition said at that time—and I think this is very telling:

Mr Danby —What is the relevance of this?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER —The member from Melbourne Ports will remove himself under standing order 94(a).

The member for Melbourne Ports then left the chamber.

Mr ANDREWS —The relevance, I say to the member for Melbourne Ports, is that, when it comes to judging a government on its record of what it has achieved for Australian workers and their families, we proudly stand by the record that we have achieved over the last 10 years. That stands in marked contrast to the abysmal record of the previous Labor government. Let us remember that just recently, on 1 April 2005, in a speech at the Sustaining Prosperity Conference, the Leader of the Opposition said:

Well, they sure did. Real wages went backwards—went downwards—under the wage accord in the 1980s in Australia. He went on:

Here is the Leader of the Opposition, as recently as 1 April this year—and it was no April fool’s joke—making the point to the Australian people that he and the government that he was part of during the 1980s and the early 1990s had driven down real wages of Australians. And he has the gall to come in here today and carry on in the way in which he has about these changes that are being made. The reality is that there is even a false premise in the argument that has been advanced by the Leader of the Opposition today. In relation to the new Australian Fair Pay Commission, he says that these changes will drive wages in Australia down to those levels which are experienced in the United States of America. The minimum wage in the United States of America is about $US5 an hour. The minimum wage in Australia is almost $13 an hour, and then there are minimum wages for all the award classifications which rise to a worker earning about $1,100 to $1,200 per week.

In this bill we are not just retaining a minimum wage; we are retaining all of those award wage classifications. There will be minimum wage classifications for workers ranging from those earning about $500 a week to those earning $1,100 to $1,200 a week. What we have said and what is spelled out in this legislation is that the minimum wage—in being set by the Australian Fair Pay Commission in the future—cannot be reduced below the level at which it was set in the 2005 safety net review case by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. So the whole premise that the Leader of the Opposition advances his argument upon this afternoon is based on a falsehood—that is, that we are going to create something which is not part of this legislation, is not part of anything that the government have stated, is not part of our intentions and is not part of the bill.

The reality is that this government has brought about more jobs and higher wages for Australians over the last 10 years. The reality is that that has been supported. But it is not just something which we believe in. Paul Keating, in his famous address to the Institute of Company Directors in 1993, spoke about the vision he had for the model of industrial relations that he was working towards. He was the last Labor leader in Australia who actually had some gumption to have some policy, and who stood up for something. We have not seen much of that recently.

Barry Jones was right when he said that the frontbench of the Labor Party is made up of 16 apparatchiks, 10 union officials and four others. He was quite right about that. The reality is that, when union members constitute just 17 per cent of the private sector work force in Australia, we see that union members—union officials in most cases—constitute about 75 per cent of the Australian Labor Party. How in touch are they with the Australian people? But let me go back to what Paul Keating said. He said:

What are we doing? We are putting into legislation that which Paul Keating set out as his vision for industrial relations in Australia. Why did Paul Keating come to that realisation? He came to that realisation because of the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s. He came to the realisation that no elaborate, strict set of industrial relations laws would save Australians from unemployment if we did not have a strong economy. That is why he came to that realisation. To Mr Keating’s credit, he at least had the guts in 1993 to make the first changes to improve the industrial relations system in Australia and move into a new century, rather than clinging to a system established over a century ago in Australia to deal with the problems of the 1890s. Regrettably, the Labor Party that sits opposite does not have the same vision and does not have the same courage that Paul Keating had to argue his case and to take it forward in 1993. The reality is as Bill Kelty said back at that time:

Bill Kelty and Paul Keating could at least see what we needed to take Australia forward in the early 1990s. But what we have from the Labor Party at the present time is simply a determination to roll back industrial relations, not just beyond what we have proposed in this bill but beyond 1996 and the Workplace Relations Act—there is even a determination to undo some of those changes which Paul Keating started to put in place in 1993. Go to the Australian Labor Party’s policies. Go to their industrial relations policy and you will see a massive roll back—the term they do not want to use—of these policies that have been put in place by both sides of parliament.

I will finish with the words of a modern Labour leader that might once have rung true for the Labor Party. Tony Blair, in a speech to the Trade Union Congress in 1997, said:

That is what this is about—giving more Australians the chance of a job, giving those families who do not have a job the chance of a job, giving those 700,000 kids who are growing up in homes where no-one has a job the chance of a job. That is what we stand for, unlike the people on the other side who do not have the courage and do not have any convictions.