Fed: Rudd's IR changes to end golden economic era: Abbott

AAP General News (Australia)
12-01-2008
Fed: Rudd's IR changes to end golden economic era: Abbott

By Melissa Jenkins, Don Woolford and Julian Drape

CANBERRA, Dec 1 AAP - Coalition MPs are lining up to trash the Rudd government's proposed
industrial relations changes despite admitting Labor has a mandate to kill off Work Choices.

Tony Abbott, the workplace relations minister between 2001 and 2003, said Labor's IR
bill signalled the end of decades of clever reforms.

He praised the reforms begun by the Hawke-Keating government, and continued under the
Howard government.

"The great thing about the last two decades of sustained reform is that we have seen
in recent years Australia taking on the best of the world and winning. Not just in sport,
but in business and industry and economics," Mr Abbott told parliament on Monday.

"My fear is that that golden era in Australia's economic history is about to end."

Labor's IR bill went much further than it promised in last year's election campaign,
particularly by allowing pattern bargaining, Mr Abbott said.

Pattern bargaining is a process where a trade union gains a new and superior entitlement
from one employer, and then uses that agreement as a precedent to demand the same entitlement
or a superior one from other employers.

The changes would lead to small businesses down-sizing and larger companies relocating
overseas, Mr Abbott said.

"I accept that the government has a mandate to, as they say, kill Work Choices, but
it certainly doesn't have a mandate to make a great leap backwards to 1970," Mr Abbott
said.

Opposition Workplace Relations spokesman Michael Keenan said the government was deceitfully
paying its debt to the trade union movement and the architect of the changes, Julia Gillard,
could become "the empress of unemployment".

The coalition won't oppose the bill's passage through the lower house, but reserved
the right to move amendments in the Senate after it had been scrutinised by an upper house
committee, he said.

Former ACTU secretary, Labor MP Greg Combet, said it gave him a great deal of personal
satisfaction to speak in support of the bill.

He said he'd seen first-hand the harmful effects of the Howard government's IR regime.

Labor's changes were a tremendous step forward for fairness and justice, Mr Combet said.

But they also represented significant economic reform.

"For the first time ... this legislation will bring into place an effective national
system of industrial regulation for the private sector," Mr Combet said.

The legislation relies on the corporations powers of the constitution rather than the
conciliation and arbitration powers.

This was an "historic shift" that meant ambit industrial disputes would no longer be
needed to bring the IR tribunal into play, Mr Combet said.

Debate on the Fair Work Bill 2008, which is expected to dominate most of Monday's lower
house proceedings, continues.

AAP mj/kms/tnf

KEYWORD: WORKPLACE UPDATE

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