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Legislative Council - Fifty-First Parliament, Second Session (51-2)
2007-11-21 Daily Xml
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MATTERS OF INTEREST

WORKCHOICES

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (15:42): We are just days away now from a federal election and, according to the Prime Minister, working families have never been better off. I want to talk today about the real truth about working families and WorkChoices. The Prime Minister's extreme industrial relations laws have taken away basic conditions from Australians, including penalty rates, overtime, leave loading and even public holidays. These conditions are now able to be bargained away in a one-sided negotiation between an individual employee and their boss. The laughably named 'WorkChoices' legislation is severely impacting on the lives of Australians who are already in a fragile situation, and with WorkChoices, in the immortal words of Karen Carpenter (slightly paraphrased) 'they have only just begun'.

The federal government is at pains to convince an increasingly incredulous public that there are no plans to take WorkChoices further. You just have to look at its record to see how honest this government is. I do not have to remind members of core and non-core promises. In the lead-up to the 2004 federal election the Prime Minister gave no hint of the implementation of these extreme industrial relations laws, no hint about AWAs and no hint about scrapping basic conditions. Yet, what did the federal government do? As soon as it gained control of the Senate after the election, without any warning it changed the industrial relations landscape in Australia. It could not be trusted then and it should not be trusted now.

Not that WorkChoices has proven to be electoral poison for the coalition: the Prime Minister has said he has given a guarantee in relation to there being no further changes. The Australian people have heard guarantees from this Prime Minister before and know exactly how valuable they are. His industrial relations minister, Joe Hockey, promised he would resign as a minister in a Howard government if further changes were made, although, interestingly, no mention was made by him whether he would do the same under a Costello government.

However, other ministers are on record as saying something else entirely. Peter Costello has called WorkChoices one of the government's great reforms, and in 2005 he articulated his vision for industrial relations reform, saying, `If you started with a clean sheet of paper you would have a minimum wage and then as much as possible free negotiation over that minimum'—so, minimum wage, nothing else, and a free for all bargaining between employers and employees.

He went on to add that we should be trying to move to an industrial relations system where the predominant instrument is the individual contract. Of course this legislation is lifted entirely from the stated aims of the HR Nicholls Society—the secretive and extreme organisation that exists solely to create a completely deregulated free market for labour, and counts among its past and present members not only the Treasurer but also Senator Nick Minchin and the Liberal candidate in Makin at this year's election, Bob Day. I wonder how many other members of this august chamber have been members of the HR Nicholl's Society—that secretive and extreme organisation.

Senator Minchin, of course, let the cat out of the bag last year, telling a meeting of the HR Nicholl's Society that this is evolution, not revolution, and there is still a long way to go: awards, the IR Commission and all the rest of it. Yet, somehow, the federal government expects working families to believe that it is not hiding plans to take these already draconian laws any further. This promise is becoming increasingly difficult to believe.

It was revealed on Monday that the federal government has repeatedly denied freedom of information requests for cabinet documents detailing the government's original plans for WorkChoices. The government is going all out to prevent voters from learning the truth about what it was originally planning before the 2004 election. You have to wonder: if it has no intention of taking further action on WorkChoices, why will it not release its original plans and repudiate them?

No matter how often the Prime Minister and his cabinet try to deny it, Australian working families could be forgiven for believing that, if re-elected, the federal government will take these laws to further extremes. One only has to look at the HR Nicholl's Society website to see what a Costello-led industrial relations system would look like.

Australians have simply had enough of these extreme laws. Their trust in this government has run out, and the polls are showing that they are likely to take their anger out at the ballot box. I will be there, with those voters, indicating my extreme anger at the government and I will be voting for Steve Georganas in Hindmarsh and for Labor in the senate.

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