Red Rag

Kevin Andrews has been caught promising all things to all people. Labor’s Stephen Smith accused him of flip-flopping — first saying awards would be adjusted downwards to the new minimum conditions, then saying they wouldn’t. When The Age sought clarification, Andrews’s office issued a statement that “stood by comments that implied workers on basic awards could have penalty rates and leave entitlements slashed. But the statement contradicted itself immediately, insisting that workers on awards would keep all their entitlements.” This is a basic element of the reform package. How can you trust a government that changes its mind within the same media release?

Labor is concerned that the predicted $20 000 000 cost of the Government’s IR propaganda campaign is a gross underestimate, now that Kevin Andrews wants the ads to run for twelve months or more. Stephen Smith wondered “just how outrageously they’re plundering the taxpayers’ purse,” calculating that “the GST campaign went on for three months at a cost of $44-million. So, on that basis if it’s on the same scale and goes for a year it’ll cost the Australian taxpayer $176-million.”

In trying to portray his reforms as nothing new, Kevin Andrews quoted from a 1993 speech by Paul Keating about the importance of bargaining at the workplace level — but he ignored a key part of the speech, in which Keating affirmed the importance of collective bargaining. Enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs) are made at the workplace level, while AWAs go further, pitting individual workers against each other — even those doing the same job at the same workplace. Keating responded with gusto:

[P]eople who are pushed onto individual workplace agreements will ipso facto be taken out of the enterprise bargaining stream. And what’s more, they will not get the benefit of the safety net because the safety net adjustments are going to go to, now, this Fair Pay Commission. …

They want to hop into some poor little character on six to eight bucks an hour. I mean, the stock market, the profit share and the economy are at a record high. The stock market is at a record. No. They still don’t want to pay someone $12 an hour. They want to take them down to eight.

New Zealand’s Alliance party is calling on its government to explain the results of that nation’s radical IR experiments — “New Zealand disease” — to the Australian public. Paul Piesse said, “The New Zealand minimum wage of just A$345 per week versus the Australian minimum wage of A$484.40, is a result of the effects of the Employment Contracts Act. The fact is that pay rates in New Zealand are 30% lower than in Australia having started from a similar base 20 years ago.” John Howard cites the New Zealand experience in support of his proposals.

As the ACTU took its campaign on the road, visiting Lismore to discuss the effects of the IR plan on regional areas, it received praise from an unlikely quarter — the head of Kevin Andrews’ Babysitters Club. Andrew Robb told the Daily Telegraph, “We’ve all been surprised by the extent of the ACTU campaign. They’ve mobilised people all over the country … they’re campaigning in a comprehensive way”.