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Kim Beazley: Debarking the Chihuahua

In this address to CFMEU members the Opposition leader describes the abysmal productivity of the Minister for Workplace Relations and how Labor intends to restore fairness to health, education and living standards.

	Kim Beazley

It is great to be here with you tonight.

I want to report to you from Canberra something that you will all be pleased and grateful to hear.

And that is this proposition: the union movement has received its last lecture on rorting from the Hon. Peter Reith, MP !

Thanks to the Telecard affair, we have had revealed to us exactly how tired, how arrogant and how out of touch are the ministers now governing this country.

I know you will all be pleased to hear that we have been having a bit of fun with Peter Reith in Parliament over recent weeks.

We've been reminding him of all the calumnies and vituperations and bombast he has heaped upon the trade unionists of this country in recent years.

Remember his Rort of the Day page on his ministerial website?

There he was accusing members of the Maritime Union of Australia of rorting at the very time he had handed over his Telecard to his son for his personal use.

In Parliament this week we asked him a question. It was in his capacity as Minister responsible for Workplace Relations, on the issue of workplace productivity - that is his own workplace productivity!

He used to be forever getting up and getting himself asked questions by his own side as an excuse to wallop the union movement for dropping back on productivity levels.

This was our question to him this week: "Can you confirm that in the 50 sitting days this year until 9 October you had answered 60 Dorothy Dixers in question time, a productivity rate of 1.2 per day

"Can you confirm that since the 9 October your productivity rate has fallen to just 0.44 per day?

"And this month, with no questions in four days, your productivity rate is zero - a rate even beaten by Wilson Tuckey.

"Minister can you think of anything that might have caused this dramatic fall off in your productivity?

"If these were crane rate on Australia's wharves, wouldn't you be calling in the attack dogs and men with balaclavas?"

Well, ladies and gentlemen, because of the Telecard affair the Reith Rottweiler has become a chihuahua.

And even the chihuahua has been de-barked.

Tonight I want to have a brief word to you about the most important issues facing Australians today -- how the Australian Labor Party can restore fairness to health, education and living standards in this country.

And then I want to go into some detail with you about the need to be eternally vigilant to the Howard Government's continuous attacks on the rights of workers and trade union members.

Over the past couple of years, growing numbers of people have said to me: If the economy is so good, as the Howard Government keeps telling us, how come my family cannot seem to get a decent share?

How does it come about that our living standards are falling, not rising? How come we are finding it harder to make ends meet?

And the answer is in part because this Government has been happy to preside over the creation of two Australias - made up of the small group doing very well indeed, and then the rest.

Whether it is the Howard Government's obsession with building up the richest private schools, or whether it's their determination to run down our great public hospitals, this is a Government acting on behalf of the few, not the many.

The people's wants from government are pretty straightforward in this country. They boil down to three basics:

• equal opportunities for a decent living standard, whether you live in the cities or regions.
• a good education for our young people
• quality care for the ill, the injured and the aged.

The issue of education encapsulates the whole sad and sorry approach of the Howard government.

The front page of the Sydney Morning Herald said it all this week.

It's headline proclaimed: "Cabinet is Almost Entirely a Private School Boys' Club."

It turns out that more than three quarters of the Federal Cabinet attended exclusive private schools.

Only three Cabinet members attended a government high school. Of the remaining 14 cabinet ministers 12 attended private schools such as Scotch College, Carey Grammar and Geelong Grammar in Victoria, and the King's School and Barker College in NSW.

Two Cabinet members went to Catholic schools, John Fahey to Chevalier and Richard Alston to Melbourne's Xavier College.

Contrast this with the Australian Labor Party front bench that truly reflects the experience of the broader Australian population.

The 29-member Labor front bench has 18 members educated in the public schools, and 9 who went to Catholic schools, and only two who went to other private schools.

This is truly a representative front bench, unlike our opponents. Some 70 percent of Australian schoolchildren go to public schools, about 22 percent go to Catholic schools and the small proportion left over go to the sorts of expensive private schools so familiar to Howard Government ministers.

Is it any wonder that the Howard government has so completely lost touch with people around the country.

They are trying to defend a situation in which 61 of our top private schools will share $56 million in taxpayers' funds, while our public schools, which educate most of the nation's children, are allowed to run down.

As I said the other day, it is about time John Howard wound down the window of the Prime Ministerial limousine and started listening to the concerns of Australian people.

The Reith affair is just the latest example.

Australians know that if it was some ordinary taxpayer that had been overpaid by the Commonwealth, or who had underestimated his or her income, even if it was by a few dollars, they would have people like Mr Reith breaking down the doors to get the money back.

We in the Labor Party can also take comfort from the fact that the Government's chief ideological spear-carrier is a much-diminished warrior.

As I said the other day, I think we can say Peter Reith's leadership ambitions are now permanently on hold.

And John Howard cannot escape unscarred by this affair. He kept quiet on this for months, and it took a leak to a newspaper to flush him out.

Well, John Howard prides himself on being old fashioned - everybody has to be proud of something. And there's an old fashioned view that our national Parliament is entitled to be told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That's one old-fashioned value John Howard is clearly prepared to let slide to protect his political skin.

There is one rule for the Howard Government and another for the ordinary taxpayers, and the ordinary families of Australia.

The Reith affair is just another sign of a government that has lost its way. Whether it is the GST impost on small business, or higher petrol prices, or burgeoning interest rates, or the decline in regional services, or our health and education, the Howard Government has given up even the pretence of governing for the battlers.

Under the Howard Government the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle is just getting more and more squeezed

What this country urgently needs is a new economic reform agenda that will increase living standards and create jobs over the coming decades.

But is that what we get from John Howard and Peter Reith?

Of course not. All we have ever had from them is union baiting, and confrontation.

John Howard may call him a star, but there's no denying that Peter Reith has had a fairly average run since he managed to get his 1996 industrial relations legislation through the Parliament.

People started seeing through Peter Reith even before this Telecard Ding-a-ling affair.

Peter Reith has not been able to persuade the Senate to stomach his 2nd Wave legislation.

And he has not been able to get Senate support to make his own unfair dismissal laws even more worker-unfriendly, or his plans to prevent pattern bargaining by unions (though not, of course, by employers).

The Federal Court has not agreed with him that employers have the unfettered right to restructure and reform their companies so that they can slash their employees' pay and conditions -- the plan pioneered by Patrick's, the stevedoring firm at the heart of the waterfront dispute.

The Federal Court's refusal to play Reith's game has led him to cast around for more favourable alternatives. In his 2nd wave, for example, he proposed that State Supreme Courts should have jurisdiction in industrial matters. When the Government set up a Federal Magistrates' Court to help cut the backlog of cases in the Family Court, he tried to hijack it -- and no doubt stack it --so that it could also deal with industrial relations.

We can enjoy his frustration at all this failure, not only because it has been caused by workers and their unions fighting for workplace justice.

While we may believe it is justice at work when we see the death throes of Peter Reith's leadership ambitions, we need to be watchful of his potential to continue to do damage to workers and their unions while they remain in the job. Let me give you two reasons.

We have a year -- maybe a little longer -- before the next election: a year, that is, before there's a chance to get rid of the most biased industrial legislation we've seen in Australia for very many years: legislation that is, clearly and unashamedly, aimed at reducing the cost of labour.

You here in the CFMEU know better than most the effects on working people's interests of Reith's 1996 workplace relations legislation.

You have felt its effects:

• its abolition of hard-won award conditions;
• the way it sets out to distort the traditional balance of workplace power, to atomise the workforce, to break down the ability of workers to act collectively;
• the way it seeks to prevent unions from protecting their members' interests;
• the way it attacks the power and capacity of the Commission.

You in the CFMEU appreciate better than most that union resources have had to be concentrated in the courts to defend your rights and interests and those of your members.

My point is that Reith probably has another year to pursue his agenda. The man has been nursing his agenda for years. Don't think for a minute that a spot of bother over his Telecard will keep him quiet for long.

While his second wave, his unfair dismissal proposals and his pattern bargaining legislation have all hit the wall, they are still on the Senate agenda. And, as you know, in an attempt to break through the Senate impasse, Peter Reith has been putting up separate bits of his 2nd wave:

• to outlaw even more award conditions
• to make it even harder for workers to take action to bargain their wages and protect their conditions;
• to break down even more the current inadequate safeguards against unfair AWAs.

The objective is absolutely clear: to carry on stacking the workplace odds against workers' interests.

True, unions have been quite successful in devising ways to protect their members from Peter Reith's attacks, even using his own legislation against him. But he has more plans for the unions too.

About a year ago, he put out a discussion paper on union activities. It was entitled Accountability and Democratic Control of Registered Industrial Organisations. A nice Orwellian name for what is basically a plan for making it even harder for unions to go about their business, imposing on them standards of governance and administration which ordinary corporations would find onerous.

Our understanding is that he will come into Parliament before the end of the year with legislation giving effect to these proposals.

In other words, unions and their members need to continue to be wary and vigilant. Peter Reith may have been batting close to zero for some time but his agenda lives on, he'll be looking for payback after his Telecard experience.

He has behind him, driving him on, a Prime Minister who has been an enemy of unions all his public life. We can expect that industrial relations will continue to be a battlefield, no matter how much social and economic damage ensues.

We have been working closely on the system that an incoming Labor Government will put in place if elected to office at next year's election.

We have to get away from the present industrial relations scene which has been described by a judge of the Victorian Supreme Court as "ritualised mayhem in which only the innocent are slaughtered".

The core of Labor's industrial relations legislation will be restoration of the powers of the Industrial Relations Commission, so that it can bring back fairness in the workplace, act in the public interest, and keep the industrial peace.

It is essential, especially as arbitration gives way to bargaining, that the law require all parties to negotiate in good faith. Our legislation will support the primacy of -- and we will give precedence to -- collective forms of bargaining.

But we will insist on good faith bargaining, whatever bargaining options are preferred.

Our legislation will recognise that the right of employees to act, organise and protect themselves collectively is a fundamental element of justice in the workplace.

And I am here to give you a firm pledge tonight: we will abolish Peter Reith's Australian Workplace Agreements.

They are his invention and, like all his other workplace inventions, they have a partisan purpose. The AWA is a form of agreement between employers and individual workers which is secret and unreviewable and which has been shown in very many cases to be unfair and less favourable than collective agreements.

It is a form of agreement that applies to less than 2% of the workforce, yet needs a $45 million bureaucracy to run it. The Reith AWA will go under Labor, and the bureaucracy will go with it.

The 2nd wave inquiry heard wherever it went how Peter Reith's onslaught on the award system was really just another way to devalue and reduce working conditions. Labor's legislation will restore the central role that awards and agreements play not only in preventing and settling disputes but also in encouraging work to be healthy, safe, non-discriminatory, family-friendly and fair.

The stakes are too great for the ideological games played by Peter Reith and his leader. Our workforce is now more atomised and casualised than at any time in our history. We have the second highest level of casual employment in the developed world. We are working longer hours than we were a generation ago.

Work processes and technology are changing at an enormous pace. The level of anxiety and insecurity among Australian workers is around the highest it has ever been in peacetime. We have a disorganised and under-funded training system.

When we consider questions like these, we realise just how narrow-minded the industrial world view is of the Howard Government and its Minister responsible for industrial relations. As on so many other issues, such as tax and privatisation, Peter Reith and John Howard are mired in the industrial relations debate of past times.

The debate used to be: confrontation versus cooperation; or arbitration versus bargaining; or collective versus individual. The new industrial relations debate has advanced beyond this. In a Knowledge Nation the central focus of industrial relations must be to create cooperative, consensual workplaces with a better-educated, better trained workforce.

This is the way the Knowledge Nation generates greater productivity.

So not only is it good social policy to have a fairer, more cooperative workplace, there can be no doubt it is good economic policy as well.

But this Government just doesn't get it. And in truth, it is not just Peter Reith's fault. It's John Howard who is really to blame. He just doesn't get cooperative industrial relations.

It is all part of a philosophy of a narrowly-focused government that cares about the few, not the many.

They promised to govern for all of us, but instead their slogan has become a pledge to govern "for all of us at the top end of town."

There is time to turn back this tide before our commitment as a nation to egalitarianism and fairness is lost for ever.

That is what Labor pledges.

And we will do it with your help.

Thank you.

This was an address given to CFMEU Mining and Energy division National Convention dinner, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 9 November 2000

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  Issue 77 contents

»	Games Workers Still Waiting on Closing Ceremony
»	Showdown: Howard Faces Court Over Rail Sell-Off
»	World Awaits Landmark Slave Labour Decision
»	American Voters Reject Vouchers
»	Illawarra Fights The Big Bastard
»	Retailers Rethink FairWear Retreat
»	Killer Holidays: Activist Fired for Taking Vacation
»	ANZ Faces Contracts Challenge
»	Cup Workers Score Heady Brew
»	Meals on Wheels Turns Mean
»	Wild Horses Get Maurie's Goat
»	Labor Council backs Souths Rally
»	Sisters Celebrate Four Years
»	Reith to Face the Music

»	The Soapbox
»	Sport
»	Trades Hall
»	Tool Shed

»	Nader no Fels
»	Sartor's Veladrome

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