Mr BEAZLEY (Leader of the Opposition) (3:07 PM) —I move:

Once again, the Prime Minister is straight out the door. The moment a debate begins on industrial relations policy in this place, the Prime Minister is out the door. He will stand here in question time and provide no answers to the questions that are asked—questions which we on this side of the House merely ask because precisely those questions are being directed to us by ordinary Australians. They want to know what it is that the Prime Minister has in mind for them. He does not have the ticker to stand in this place or to stand before the glare of the public and explain the policies that he intends to pursue. He is out of touch, he is arrogant and he intends for the Australian people with this legislation the most fiendish mischief that has been visited upon them.

Those opposite complain that we intend to tear up this legislation. They complain that we will have not a bar of a single jot of it. The reason we will not have a bar of a single jot of it is that absolutely nothing in this provides a decent safety net for Australian families. Absolutely nothing in this gives job security to Australian workers. Absolutely nothing in this provides Australian workers with what they have had for 100 years—100 years of having a fair umpire to preside over the issues between them and their employers. And absolutely nothing in this provides protection to an ordinary worker by guaranteeing them access to the assistance of a union official when they want or need that assistance. They have in fact in this legislation, behind their honeyed words, criminalised an awful lot of ordinary union activity. If that activity is pursued in negotiations with the will of the employee—or even, for that matter, with the will of the employer—many of these areas will attract for both the employer and the employee a $33,000 fine.

Finally, they say that what this is doing is letting the market run free. They have the most intrusive ministerial fiat ever granted. A minister of the Commonwealth, under any piece of Commonwealth legislation, in war or peace, has an absolute fiat to interfere in every single agreement, of an individual or collective character, entered into in this country and to rule out conclusions. So, even if the employer and the employee, or the employer and employees collectively, agree freely to a particular outcome, the minister is capable of moving into that outcome and effectively criminalising it if they intend to pursue it. It is extraordinary legislation. It is not freeing up the labour market; it is actually bringing an iron clamp onto the labour market, the ministerial clamp that allows him to do anything he likes. The intention of the government here is not for a free market; the intention of the government here is to direct an outcome: to ensure that the weight of authority in the negotiating process on wages and conditions shifts massively across to the employer.

When this comes into place—and this is why we need a proper negotiation on this—the real outcomes will not be obvious to the Australian people. Nothing cataclysmic is going to happen overnight. When this legislation passes, the next day everything will be the same. But slowly, steadily, over the next two years, the conditions that Australians have been used to will gradually crumble underneath them, as though their working conditions have experienced an infestation of termites. Gradually, one by one, firm by firm, the workers will find themselves in a place where their capacity to earn a living wage, particularly if there is any moderation in the economy, will start to put them in the situation that they have in the United States and that they developed in New Zealand after the changes like this that they put in place over a decade ago. Large numbers of them will join that phenomenon—the phenomenon of a mass based working poor: people who cannot sustain through their lives the capacity to provide themselves with a home that they own themselves, people without the capacity to exercise choice for their kids’ education and people who will see their children deprived of a lifestyle that they themselves enjoyed as children in an earlier era. It will be a day of sorrow in many households around this country.

Mr Laming interjecting—

Mr BEAZLEY —This utter fool, this child of privilege who is interjecting over here, cares absolutely nothing for what will go on in the families and the households of his electorate. When the families and the households of his electorate experience what will happen under this, they will find when they go to their Liberal and National members—those worthless, supine idiots who have been the useful idiots of this particular transmission—a cold heart and a closed ear. They will not want to hear the reality of what is happening to ordinary Australians. This is why we need a debate, which is the first of these points; we need one so this can be clarified for the Australian people. The average across this nation of $240 a month in penalty rates—which is the difference between being able and not being able to pay your mortgage—that you earn now will not be earned. It will be gone. But you will work those hours, and you will be directed to work them. That is why we need this debate.

The second reason why we need to pass this motion is to get some explanation for the extraordinary propaganda effort, and the Orwellian language, that has been employed by the government to sell the unsellable. To absolutely everything that is claimed in that $50 million worth of advertising the opposite applies. When they say there is security, there is no security. When they say there is an opportunity to have your penalty rates protected, they are not protected. You can go through each of those propositions and you will find behind each of those advertisements a lie. We say those ads have not worked, but they probably have. I really do believe that, if that $50 million worth of sleeping tablets had not been dumped on the Australian population, you would be seeing in the polls the Liberals not merely slightly behind; you would be seeing them crushed. Advertising works. It always does. Otherwise, there would not be a whole industry built around it.

Then we come to the leaflet that was not distributed. Didn’t we find out something today? We found out today that the initial version of that leaflet was pulped not because it failed to have ‘fairness’ on the cover—and the cover of a propaganda pamphlet is now the only part of the entire effort of the government in this legislative process to include the word ‘fair’; that word ‘fair’ was taken out of the bill—but because they objected to the content. The content was also something that we drew attention to at the time. The content that was removed was any form of guarantee of things like penalty rates and access to decent arrangements in relation to unfair dismissal. That was taken out of the earlier version for the simple reason that there was no intention on the part of the government that people should be thinking seriously about those issues when they came to consider the legislation.

The loot goes into the pockets of those Liberal Party ne’er-do-wells who support the Liberal Party campaigns. These leaflets may not have been distributed, and these ads may be only semi-effective, but what has been really effective is the loot that has ended up in the back kick of the Liberal Party’s advertising executives. The Prime Minister decided to have a lend of one of the people who from time to time had done work for the Labor Party, and his entire 13-year effort did not come up to one year of Ted Horton’s. We must have this motion passed so we can get that proper debate. (Time expired)

The SPEAKER —Is the motion seconded?

Mr Stephen Smith —I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.