KENNEDY:
Welcome to the programme Prime Minister. You've campaigned on industrial relations all your political life. Do you think it's all going to unravel now at the 11th hour in the face of what has been a formidable, persuasive and a very successful union campaign?
PRIME MINISTER:
Stephanie I want these reforms not out of an ideological obsession of my own. I want them because they will be for the long term benefit of the Australian economy. They will underpin the new burst of productivity we need if we are to maintain the low unemployment, the high real wages and the strong economy we now enjoy. There's a great temptation at the moment for people to say 'look John, things are going well. Unemployment's at an almost record low, wages are up, taxes are down, interest rates are low, the economy's humming along. Don't do anything just sit back and rest on your laurels. Do nothing and it will all keep going like that'. Well life is never as simple as that and the only way that we can maintain the prosperity we now enjoy is to find new ways of winning a further and new burst of productivity. And that is why I am committed to these changes. And that is why I will argue the cause, and I will accept that in the short term there will be criticism and there will be some political adversity. That always happens with a big reform. But there's no point in Government in just sitting there and doing nothing and just reaping the benefits of past reforms. You've got to keep generating the momentum that will keep the economy going.
KENNEDY:
But the Government's been caught flat footed hasn't it? This week the polls indicated that 60% of Australians are opposed to the changes. You really haven't sold your industrial relations agenda very well have you?
PRIME MINISTER:
Stephanie, this is very early days. It is always the case that when you have a significant reform and these are major reforms. They're not extreme, they're not radical, but they are significant. It's always the case that the critics, the negative story tellers get the first headlines. That always happens. It's a natural order of things. It happened with the GST. You remember the early days of that GST campaign. Remember Mr Beazley who was opposition leader then saying that on the 1st of July 2000 Australia could go into meltdown. Well of course, it didn't go into meltdown and the sun rose and people discovered that the GST wasn't the monster that it had been painted. But we had gone through a difficult period politically, and I would say to my colleagues there's going to be strong debate over the weeks and months ahead. But that is what one is in office to do. One is in office to do things for the long term benefit of the country, not just enjoy the privilege of being in office.
KENNEDY:
Are you satisfied that your Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews is doing a good enough job in selling the Government's IR agenda? Because up until now, it doesn't appear that he has been.
PRIME MINISTER:
Oh look I think that Kevin is doing an outstanding job. Every time I see him on television I think he answers the questions directly. He puts it's...
KENNEDY:
But the message quite evidently is not getting through.
PRIME MINISTER:
Stephanie this is early days. Anybody who thinks that this debate has been resolved by what has happened just over the last few weeks is deluding themselves. This will be a fairly long and it should be a fairly long argument. I don't mind engaging people in the detail of this because I believe in it. And I believe it will be for the long term benefit of Australia. Now we have very low unemployment and the workers of Australia can trust this Government to look after their interests. We've done so for the last nine and a half years. As Prime Minister, as a Liberal Prime Minister of Australia, I've presided over better conditions for working Australians than any of my Labor predecessors and I'm very proud of that fact and I don't intend to let them down. And I want them to disregard the fearmongering of the trade union movement, the fear mongering of the Australian Labor Party, those television ads that suggest that a person who has to look after a sick child can under our future changes to unfair dismissal laws, lose their job for example. That will be explicitly unlawful under the changes that we are making. I mean they're the sort of distortions that we have seen. Now I expected that and there will be more of it and it will get worse and people must brace themselves for that. But in the long run I believe the commonsense of Australian workers will emerge and they will take a look at the reality of the changes. And when they come in, they'll see and enjoy the fact that the changes aren't what have been painted and predicted by our opponents.
KENNEDY:
You've so far refused to give a guarantee that no worker will be worse off. You say that this is in the long term benefits of the economy. Why can't you give the guarantee to workers that they won't be worse off? It's quite a simple guarantee isn't it?
PRIME MINISTER:
Stephanie, nobody, whether you're John Howard or Kim Beazley or Bob Hawke or Paul Keating or Bob Menzies or Ben Chifley can give a guarantee that no single individual is going to be worse off in the future. Now I don't know what circumstances beyond the Government's control, what factors coming from other influences are going to affect people. What I can promise people is, and what I can assure people about is that these changes when implemented will produce more jobs and a stronger economy and across the community, higher real wages.
KENNEDY:
All right, well this weekend the Government is expected to roll out its own advertising campaign. What will those ads say?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well if they do come this weekend, they will provide some factual information. We're not running dramatisations of situations on television. We're going to provide some factual information, information in newspapers about the detail of these changes and we're doing that. We always intended to do it. We're doing it so that people can read what is in the changes, the detail of them. The legislation will be ready some time late September or early October, but the broad outline of the changes I gave to Parliament and people will see that the award system has been kept. They will see that there is a guaranteed minimum wage. They will see that there are guaranteed minima if you go in to a workplace agreement of an hourly rate taken off the relevant award classification. Annual leave, sick leave and the like. Now they will then begin to see that much of the fearmongering which has come from the ACTU is wrong, but they will know and I've never disguised this fact that we want to make it easier for people to go into workplace agreements because we believe that individual workplace agreements based on the best interests of the enterprise, which is after all good for both the employer and the employee, is the way to go in the future. We're living in a different world than the one that (inaudible) 10 or 20 years ago and we therefore need an industrial relations system that is appropriate to the 21st Century.
KENNEDY:
All right. We'll have to leave it there. Prime Minister, thank you very much for joining AM this morning.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thank you.
[ends]