18-November-2005
Articles, Workplace Relations
As in the Courier Mail November 18th 2005
The Howard Government’s WorkChoices is positive legislation.
It is the right strategy for Australia.
It encourages enterprise and co-operation, not exploitation.
It will strengthen the security of working families.
The Reserve Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the OECD all agree that it will create jobs, lift productivity and improve living standards.
It is not about Party ‘ideology’. The move away from a choking, centralised industrial system to workplace agreements started in 1993 with Paul Keating.
This is evolution, not revolution.
We face these laws because flexible, responsive workplaces are a necessary part of competing in the modern, globalised world we live in.
Let’s not forget that Australia’s economy has consistently out-performed most other developed countries for nearly a decade. Earlier reforms have driven this success.
Over the last twelve years the move by many Australian businesses, especially large business, to negotiate flexible industrial agreements designed to suit each particular workplace, has contributed importantly to this economic success.
However, to stay in front we can’t rest on our laurels. If we do we will go backwards.
We need to make it easier for many more businesses to get the benefits of workplace flexibility.
There are still too many roadblocks which discourage people, especially in small and medium sized businesses, from sitting down and agreeing on what works best for them.
WorkChoices aims to remove these roadblocks.
As we move to discussion and agreement making, and away from the old conflict-based industrial system, we are seeing a cultural change.
We are seeing employers treating employees in a way they themselves would like to be treated.
It encourages give and take, opportunities and reward for effort, flexible arrangements to meet different family and other employee needs. It encourages choice.
This is not a zero sum game stacked in favour of the employer. With flexibility and choice both employers and employees can be better off.
Flexibility unlocks productive opportunities in a business that would otherwise be lost.
For example, employees prepared to do a range of different tasks in exchange for more money per hour, or for flexible family conditions, may streamline operations and make not only the business more competitive, but make employees significantly better off at the same time.
These reforms will make it easier for working families to share the benefits of the economic good times while providing important protections for the vulnerable in tougher times.
Sadly, through this debate, the reputations of honest, hardworking small-businesspeople, who risk so much and shoulder serious responsibilities to keep a business going, have become casualties of concerted scaremongering.
Overwhelmingly, employers value and respect their employees highly. Most are ordinary family people themselves.
Yet, there are always five per cent ‘bad apples’ among employers and employees alike.
The answer is not to suffocate one hundred percent of businesses by regulating every minute of every day to stop the five per cent ‘bad apples’.
A better way is to free up the ninety five per cent bona fide employers to run flexible, adaptable businesses — and to deal with the ‘bad apples’ by protecting by law a strong safety net, looking after the young in negotiations, setting stiff penalties and providing easy access to a strong inspectorate to police malpractice and coercion.
These changes are not about removing conditions; they are about putting more conditions or choices on the table.
It’s about finding the combination of terms and conditions which best meet the opportunities and needs of the business, and the people working in that business.
Averaging a 38 hour week over a year may suit a tourist business with peaks and troughs in activity, but not a local factory with steady orders throughout the year.
Staggering starting and finishing times to help some mums deliver or pick up their kids from school may suit a retail store or accounting business, but not an airline.
What works for a parent may not work for a university student.
WorkChoices is intended to be horses for courses, not one size fits all. It is about the power of choice.
It is certainly not an attack on unions. Unions can still effectively represent their members, but they will have to earn their place in the sun like everybody else, and not impose themselves uninvited on employees and employers alike.
As a country, we face huge challenges with the ageing of the population and serious competition from around the globe.
Flexibility will help keep businesses adaptable and competitive against all comers, and help keep those older people, who want some work, in the workforce.
This secures and creates jobs, rewards performance and meets differing family or personal preferences.
Above all, WorkChoices is critical to a strong economy.
Andrew Robb MP
Chairman
Federal Government Task Force on Workplace Relations