Mr BARRESI (2:50 PM) —My question is addressed to the Prime Minister. Would the Prime Minister outline to the House how flexible workplace laws help keep the economy strong? Is the Prime Minister aware of any alternative policies that would damage the economy?

Mr HOWARD (Prime Minister) —I can give an unequivocal response to the member for Deakin, who is doing a remarkable job as chairman of the government members task group on industrial relations reform, in saying that the hallmark of this government’s policies concerning workplace relations has been to produce greater stability. We have made three major changes to the industrial relations laws in the 11 years we have been in office: there were the Reith reforms of 1996, bitterly opposed by the Labor Party; there were the changes to the operation of Australia’s waterfront—we were told you could not possibly have any more than 17 or 18 crane movements of containers per hour, yet, as a result of the changes that have been introduced, we now have world’s best practice performance of something like 27 or 28 an hour; and then, of course, there have been the changes introduced by the government through the Work Choices legislation. All of these changes have improved the flexibility of the Australian economy.

The sad thing is that the alternative government of this country want to destroy that flexibility. They talk about fairness with flexibility or ‘forward with fairness and flexibility’, but the reality is that their policy would destroy that flexibility. Their policy would create a situation where, if 51 per cent of people in a workplace voted in favour of a collective agreement, the employer—the person who invests the money to employ the people and to start the business—would have no right to have a workplace agreement with any one of the remaining 49 per cent. They would introduce a system which says that, if you had 100 employees in a firm and 99 of them wanted to negotiate as a group with the employer, one person could say, ‘I want the union to represent me in the negotiation’—nothing wrong with that, no objection to that, no objection at all. But, under the other provisions of the policy, if there were not an agreement reached with the union representing that one person, it would then go off to this body called Fair Work Australia, where an arbitrated solution or outcome would be imposed on the employer and the 99 employees. I do not call that ‘forward with fairness and flexibility’; I call that backwards with inflexibility and unfairness—and that is a feature of the policy.

What is fascinating about this policy is that the Leader of the Opposition is not across the detail of it. Time and time again he was asked questions about the policy and he brushed them off. He said, ‘I have left all of that to the deputy leader; I am not quite across all the detail of it.’ My advice, through you, Mr Speaker, to the Leader of the Opposition is: you had better get across the detail of it very quickly, because when you are in the sort of position you occupy you should be across the detail of your policy. You should understand the implications it has for workers. You should understand that what you have done is to hand back the power of trade unions’ control over Australia’s industrial relations position.

The real story of Labor’s industrial relations saga is that the Leader of the Opposition was running around the business community saying, ‘Don’t worry, it will be all right: I will not be stood over by the trade unions.’ He goes along to his national conference, he hands it over to the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, she goes off and does a deal with Greg Combet and, lo and behold, the business community comes out shaking its head and saying, ‘This is the same old Labor Party, the mob that always cave in to the union bosses.’