7
PRIME MINISTER
TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER, THE HON P J KEATING MP
SPEECH AT THE ACTU CONGRESS, MELBOURNE,
27 SEPTEMBER 1995
AS DELIVERED
E& OE PROOF COPY
Well, Martin, Jennie, Bill, Members of the Executive, friends one and all it
is great to be back and I mean that. I always look forward to coming to the
ACTU Congress.
One of the happiest memories I have of the 1993 election was the meeting
I had with the ACTU Executive a week or so later. That wilt always sit in my
-mind as a manifestation of what it was all about coming home to our real
friends. Now I have always stuck with the unions. I believe in union people because
I believe in the things that most of you people do. You spend your working
days and your working week looking after the interests of ordinary
Australians. And it is hard going and it has always been hard going, but we
have done many things together and the model we have put together is so
sophisticated, in certainly western world terms, but what pleases me greatly is
not only has it worked but you all know how it works and why it works and
why the consensus and the cooperation that we have had between us does
really mean something and that the trust that we have built up between us
does really matter.
And I couldn't think of a healthier thing than the trust between the
Government of the nation and the workforce of the nation, or the leadership of
that workforce. And if you are about building trust, about a cooperative
partnership, is there any greater basis than this? Well I wouldn't think so and
that is why I am here, pleased again, to be able to talk about it.
The other thing I am pleased about is Jennie George gave me a kiss when
I arrived. But she won't be giving John Howard one.
And I have got to tell you how much pride it does fill me to find people like
Martin Ferguson, who has just given me a kind introduction, to know that after
having led the industrial movement, he will be going to the national
Parliament to carry on his life's work and to see that torch passed to another
great person in the labour movement Jennie George.
I congratulate Jennie on what is not simply a wonderful endorsement to be
the President-elect of the ACTU, a wonderful endorsement of a Labor person,
but a wonderful endorsement of a Labor woman. And I mean she has been
so good at it and I watched her in a few interviews recently. She has got
them coming and going, she knows all the angles and she is only limbering
up. When she really gets going and all the lines really start rolling through
her mind and, of course, I always find this in the election campaign for the
first week you are stumbling around, pulling the lines together, then you start
really refining them down and by the third week they're deadly. A punch in
every sentence and I am sure that is the way it will go here too.
But it does fill me full of pride to think that the trade unions in this country
have been able to elect a leadership group in this last decade that has meant
so much to Australia and so much to the labour movement. We will never
see it better than this. It doesn't matter how long we live, I don't think it has
ever been any better than this. There is no time when the Labor Party and
the industrial labour movement have had such shared objectives and have
done so much together and, again, in that relationship of trust. I
We have completely remodelled a middle-sized OECD economy from the
ground up its economy and its society and we have done it in the image of
labour, of industrial and political labour and we sit here today with 4 per cent
economic growth, 4 per cent employment growth, 2 1/ 2 per cent inflation and
one of the most fairest and decent wage and social policy systems in the
world and that is a tremendous achievement a great achievement.
And they are the things, I think, the values we have to inculcate in the
Australian community. That by cooperation you can do good things. If you
have, as I think we all have, faith in ourselves to do something good and
belief in our fellow Australians that with them something great can be
achieved, there are no boundaries to what can be done in this country.
I mean I wasn't surprised the other day when the World Bank came out and
said that on an asset basis we were the richest country per capita in the
world. And I said on an asset basis because that is not so on an income
basis. But you don't have to be an economist to know that the great wealth of
this continent, as large as it is spread over just 18 million people would
have to turn up a result something like that.
But this is the great opportunity we have been given just in four times our
lifetime there were no Europeans here and that the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islanders of this country had held this great continent in trust for us and
we have a remarkable opportunity to do something with it.
You know from the history of the labour movement in the 19th and early
century of people going off looking for nirvana in South America to make the
sort of social paradise, to build the model they didn't think they could build
here with the forces of reaction. Well I am glad some of them stayed at home
because we are able to build now a model that very few countries can
emulate. And when we are looking at ourselves you look at Japan, it is growing at
1/ 2 per cent a year at the moment. Western Europe is growing at around
1 1/ 2 per cent to 2 per cent. The United States is growing at around
2 1/ 2 per cent. We are averaging around 4 per cent. We have been growing
as high as 6 per cent. That means we are creating twice as much wealth and
twice as much opportunity as we would otherwise were we in some
straight-jacketed model, some model which says " let's not cooperate
together', but rather " let's let the people take the best and the devil take the
hindmost, the strong take the best and the devil take the hindmost, and we
will see what happens after that."
Rather than that, we have gone a long a path which says that employment
matters and I think the thing that is lost on many people, it is certainly lost on
our friends in the Coalition, that the Accord has always been a very clear
trade-off of wage restraint for growth. And the growth is the thing that
delivers the employment and the employment goes to the people who are
either at the bottom end of the queue or starting in the workforce. So it has
always been, in a sense, an internal trade-off for the trade unions of this
country. In a sense, restraining the top-end power of the ACTU constituency
to deliver equity and fairness in the bottom and the middle ranges of the
income scales and to guarantee to those people employment, so that we can
run a quite fast, high growth, economy and we can run it with low inflation.
Now, of course, under the changes we have introduced, we have now come
to a productivity model. We have come away from the strictures of a
centralised system which wasn't able, while we could get aggregate wage
adjustments from it, national wage aggregate adjustments, we weren't able to
get the within sector flexibility we have always known we have needed. So
we needed the award restructuring to proceed that. We put that into place.
Amalgamation of unions. That has got into place and we are now into an
enterprise bargaining system, which gives us the capacity to lift the earnings
and productivity of businesses and share it between profits and wages.
As well as that, for those not able to access the system, we have got a safety
net. We probably have the nearest thing to a permanent wages system, we
have had certainly in the twelve years of the Accord because we had so many
various wage models to take us through those difficult years of transition from
the uncompetitive economy, industrial archaeology of the early 1980s,
through the big collapse in our terms of trade in 1985-86, to the big
deprecation of the exchange rate, at the same time then trying to pick it up,
restrain the growth of the late 80s, to hold inflation down so that we knew we
wouldn't be back where we started in 1982-83.
Now we have come through all those wage systems. We have now got low
inflation and we all know it is much easier to run a wages system on low
inflation and, I think, we know that the system we now have together is a very
fair one. If you don't have enough bargaining power to get yourself an
enterprise bargain that increases your income, or at least where you would
get protection, real wage protection, you can fall back to the safety nets.
So it is, I think, a model, perhaps, in transition, but one getting very near to
the one that we are going to finish up with and that is one where enterprise
bargaining will be the order of the day. And, of course, one of the things
I said to you in 1993 and since and that is were we still hostage to the
centralised wage fixing system, how much easier it would be for a Coalition
Government to hop into Australian working people, to tear the hell out of it.
Whereas now we have developed a model that lives by itself and breaths by
itself, out there, in the industrial landscape in the workplaces of this country.
Because we can what the Liberals are about. They are always about the
same thing. It doesn't matter whether it is Stanley Melbourne Bruce in the
1920s, or the Earl Page's of this world, or any of the Labor renegades like
Joe Lyons, or Menzies, or Fraser, or any of them they are always about the
same thing: basically, cutting peoples' wages. And I don't quite know why
because the profit share is almost at an historic high. And you have got to
say well what do you want. Do you want the profit share beyond any historic
precedence and what is the point in that? Aren't the executives already
getting enough out of it? Are they milking the system as much as they can?
What do you want to cut the wages of working people for, other than spite
spitefulness, a sort of an ideological envy? But you see it with Jeff Kennett in
Victoria. You see it now in Western Australia. We have seen John Howard
endorse the Western Australian model.
Fortunately, with Labor in office, with the Federal legislation so many people
came back under the Federal award umbrellas. But, of course, with a
Coalition Government that option would still be there. But, in a sense, the
option would be to fall into their schemes so that they took a lot of these
protections away.
So, I think, that we have been able, through all of the vicissitudes and
difficulties of a re-modelled economy, to put an essentially fair wage system
into place. And, I think, that is the message that we have got to get to
Australians. That we have given Australians huge employment growth
2 million jobs since 1983. That our wage that we have adjusted the country
economically to low inflation, but we have done it fairly and decently. That we
have tried to protect the weak and the disadvantaged and, as a consequence
of all of this, we have a much more cohesive and united country and a much
more efficient economy.
This is an -extremely great achievement and I am quite sure, -rot even in the
halcyon days of the labour movement in the earlier part of this century and
last, such cooperation never really existed to this level and so precise have
been our objectives to go and do it together. And we have kicked other
milestones that, I think, we mightn't have even have thought were possible
back there in 1983 and a couple of obvious ones come to mind
superannuation is perhaps the most obvious. Because for those of us who
have got a lot of our working lives behind us, it won't mean as much as for
those with their working lives ahead of them.
But, even today, with a couple in their mid-30s in the workforce there is going
to be a substantial increase in retirement incomes for those people above the
age pension. And for those, of course, starting work now, it will mean
essentially someone on average weekly earnings will, at the end of their
working life, retire on a retirement income of about the same around
average weekly earnings in today's dollars. And that is real progress
because it is not very many times that any Government, or a trade union
movement, get the opportunity to put such a thing into place. And to do it in
the way in which we have, adjusting the wage systems over the years, now
putting some tax cuts aside to go into superannuation accounts, a relatively
modest contribution on the part of employees, will get us to 15 per cent by the
year 2002. We will see a huge pool of savings built and a set of protections,
for Australian working men and women in retirement, we would never have
got by simply the public budgets, by legislation and, certainly, not from a
conservative Government.
We have been able to do things like that and maternity leave is the thing we
have just done most recently. There are others that spring to mind,
child care, support for women in the workplace, the changed status of women
both in the country at large and in the workplace. All of these things have
come from the Accord and come from the relationship of trust that we have
developed together.
Now the Liberals, they don't understand any of this because, basically, they
don't have any faith in people, they don't see you as fellow Australians, but
rather some sort of class enemy, some sort of political enemy. But their story
is starting to fall on deaf ears because the business community know that
industrial disputation now is at the lowest it has ever been since they have
been keeping the records. They know it is 1/ 6 of what it was when
John Howard was last Treasurer. They know that the profit share is up and
the stock market is running at about 2,150. The day I was sworn in as
Treasurer, the All Ordinaries Index was 451, from memory. There has been a
five-fold increase, a four to five-fold increase, in wealth in the stock market.
They know these things.
They know that there is flexibility in the workplace. They know that they are
able to drag productivity out of businesses and sensibly share it between
profits and wages. And you have got to wonder now, how many of them want
to turn it up because I am finding, as I go about, that the endorsements that
one would formerly expect to see for the Liberal Party are just not there
anymore. That it has been on for too long now and it has worked and that
people have faith in it not just us, but the employers as well.
Now, Howard is out there doing what he normally does and, today, he is in a
difficult spot because he made a great mistake yesterday in saying that he
will open the cross runway at Sydney Airport, so as not to concentrate the
traffic on the two parallel runways. And you might say " well what has that got
to do with industrial relations". Well I will tell you it has got this to do with it.
This is a fellow who has been telling us for years that we are slack about the
micro-economy. He is going to be guy that cleans up the ports and wharves
and the rail system and all of the other things that we, he says, haven't been
able to do. You can say to them the turn-around time in the ports is the same
as European ports. You can tell them now that there are 18 people per ship
on the Austfalian coast when there used to be around 28. You can say these
things it cuts no ice with them because they say they are going to do the
tough things.
But the one major micro-economic reform to the airline system in the last
years, has been the opening of the third runway at Mascot. It is the
gateway to Australia. It is the key to Australian tourism. It is the linkages to
Melbourne and Brisbane and the other major ports in Australia. It is the
change which John Howard was out there arguing for, pressing us for, for
years and years and years, on the record.
Yesterday he said he now opposes it now that it is built, he wants to put a
cross wind runway across it which will mean that the safety margin falls to
pieces, that we would actually halve the traffic of the airport, and so the one
micro economic test, not even a test for him because we built it not him, for a
few votes in the seat of Bennelong, in his own seat, he is prepared to tip on
its head the one major micro economic change in civil aviation, yet have the
rest of Australia believe that he is going to be the guy that does it to wages,
the labour market, the waterfront, to shipping, to transport, to all the other key
areas of the micro economy in this country.
Not only has he said that, he has gone and said that he will down the asset
sales task force budget measure of selling the airports off by withdrawing
support for the sale of Kingsford-Smith airport while ever the government
doesn't exceed to his demand to have cross wind traffic. Now you know that
if you put a plane across two parallel lanes of traffic what you have got is a
recipe for disaster.
So, here he is telling the employers at the business lunches in Melbourne and
Sydney that he is the one to do the tough things. He is the one to make the
fundamental changes, but on a change where they are needling him in
Hunters Hill, where in that important headland for him between Lane Cove
and Woolwich in Sydney he thinks the pressure is getting too hot, what does
he say, he will tip the major civil aviation micro change on its head, he'll got
back to an unsafe airport, he'll actually punch a $ 2 billion hole in the surplus
by vandalising the government's asset sales program.
I can tell you this, there is blood in the water, and in politics you have got to
have a nose for it. I watched him in the Parliament today, it came in, we had
the vote on it, but normally sitting opposite me in the chair all cocky with
inane little comments, but where was he? He was down in the back end of
the triangle of the Parliament, back into the back of the horseshoe talking to a
couple of backbench MPs while the votes were taking on. The psychology
was all wrong, all wrong. I said to them ' where's you little mate? He's down
the back here.' And, of course, they were on the back foot on the wages front
because they knew I was coming here today and I know you have seen some
of our advertisements this morning and so have they, which underlines the
fact, of course, that the award protections which are there now in overtime,
penalty rates, holiday leave loadings et cetera, would go without
compensation under their model and it would mean that for people in certain
circumstances, in certain occupations, I gave the figures during the week
transport workers losing nearly $ 5000 a year, nurses losing more than $ 5000
a year by losing penalty rates and these things, or losing overtime payments,
that this would be a material disadvantage, a large disadvantage for a very
large section of the work force. To which they say ' we'll be keeping the award
protections', but only for people who don't change jobs. But 1.7 million
Australians change jobs every year. In the last three years 43 per cent of the
work force have changed jobs. That is 43 per cent of people that don't have
the option of award protection. Like for instance, all the higher education
people. Students, who leave and graduate, who come into jobs and there are
600,000 of those a year, no award protection. For half the year 11 and 12
leavers, about 200,000, no award protection. For the women joining the work
force, no award protection.
We are gradually getting these points out and they don't like it because,
essentially, it is the same miserable policy they have always had. It is
Jobsback, just dressed up in another way and it is about those things
tearing down wages for ordinary men and women through the loss of such
conditions without compensation.
We say we have a no disadvantage test. That enterprise bargains have got
to be run past the test and that you can vary some of these conditions, but
there has to be no disadvantage overall. No remunerative disadvantage
overall. They would never agree to such a test. We are also saying some
community standards just shouldn't change, like sick leave for instance. You
just shouldn't trade it away even though there are many things that can be
traded away providing there is a remunerative benefit in return.
So, this is there difference and we are starting to get them out. They were
feeling the pinch today on industrial relations and they are feeling the pinch
on this very important, I think, icon issue. That is whether Howard has the
bottle, or, put in the vernacular, the guts, to do the big changes in this
country. Whether he can take on the big issues and do them co-operatively
as we have done in places like the waterfront or in shipping and in transport
or in telecommunications or in civil aviation or in any of these areas.
Because when the first test has come, he has caved in for a few votes in
Bennelong because he has only got a three and a half per cent margin in
Bennelong. So, instead of walking along with confidence believing he might
win a national election, he is really worrying about whether he can hold the
seat of Bennelong and whether he can please the Gurghers of Hunters Hill.
He has not had a good day and, I think, this is a turning point in the dream
ride he has had to date. Many people have said well, the government has
been in office a long time, we want an alternative to be able to vote for and
the moment that Downer resigned Howard jumped straight in the polls, but of
course, with time the journalists have been saying to us ' is there an early
election on?' I've been saying no, no early election. I want plenty of time to
have a look at Howard. It is the same old Howard that we saw in the 1 980s
and the 1970s. He might be trying to airbrush himself and Andrew Robb
might be trying to airbrush him and wash away a few of his problems, but in
the end, when you peel it all off he is the same person. He wants to hop into
working people and when it comes to the big changes we called him in the
Parliament today " gunna Howard" he was gunna to float the dollar, but he
didn't. He was gunna deregulate the financial markets, but he didn't. He was
gunna knock over the tariff wall, but he didn't. He was gunna change the
micro economy, but he didn't. He was always gunna do these things and yet,
here he is, naked now coming up to a poll saying, for the shabbiest ot
reasons, let's cut back the capacity of our largest airport and let me vandalise
the budget surplus. All for a few votes in Bennelong.
I hope the public understand this, while at the same time he is saying he
endorses the Western Australian industrial legislation and he wants to see
these changes of the Western Australian variety in the Federal jurisdiction.
So, it is very clear what we are going to fight. It is very clear, I think, that we
can beat him because we'll beat him not just on these issues, but on the basic
issue that he has no faith in Australians and no real belief in Australia.
Howard is a person from that part of Australian history that has always seen
Australia as a derivative society. He doesn't even understand the
opportunities we now have. He doesn't see the imperative of our integration
in Asia. Four weeks ago he refused to see the General Secretary of the
Vietnamese Communist Party Mr Do Muoi, who the previous week had joined
ASEAN the Association of South East Asian Nations as a full member.
Who, two days after leaving Australia sat down in a meeting with the United
States Secretary of State Warren Christopher, but he wasn't good enough to
meet John Howard. And, all around the region now, we have got people
saying, ' What about the Federal Opposition in Australia if they are not
prepared to talk to the Vietnamese, will they talk to us?" I mean, what sort of
a relationship would the rest of ASEAN have with them? These are the sort
of obscurantist views, he is still fighting the Vietnam war or here he thinks
there may be a few votes in the Vietnamese community in western Sydney or
in Melbourne, just the same way as he thinks there might be a few votes over
at Bennelong with the airport. In just the same way at St Joseph's College in
Hunters-Hill, eight weeks ago he told a group of high school students, yes, he
thought he should put a ban on uranium sales to France when he knew his
policy was the very opposite.
You see, there is no strength there and there is no purpose and there is no
understanding. To think that now here we are with a growth economy, a
productive economy, a stripped down one, one that can now engage itself in
Asia in the fastest growing part of the world, where we are making bilateral
relationships the likes of which we have never had with these old societies
like Indonesia and Vietnam and China and, of course, the great relationships
we have built up over the years with our biggest trading partners Japan and
Korea it is lost on him.
So, these are the reasons why I think the Australian community are not going
to take him. He is out of his age and he is out of his depth. Worst of all he is
weak and sneaky and they don't like sneaks.
I know you see most of these things in him that I see, but what I see in you is
the good things about Australia-the things that we have done together and
the things we do believe in together. The building blocks we have put into
place, where we have taken this country from an industrial backwater with old
derivative technology to a modem industrial country, which is still changing,
still evolving, where we have set up partnerships not simply between the
government and the industrial wing of the Labor movement, but also with the
farm organisations, also with industry, where product innovation is the order
of the day, where the education system is the thing that pumps our product
innovation along, that great liberator of education. These are the things that
have remade Australia and they are things we have done together and they
are not academic things, they are not esoteric things, they are real things that
have been put together because of trust between us and the faith we have in
our fellow Australians to make adjustments and to see a better way.
We in the Labor movement always think we do represent the best instincts of
Australians out there because the Labor Party is a collection of little branches
spread across the country, joined by people who have no other reason for
joining it, no ulterior motive but the advancement of the nation. You people
represent working Australians in trade unions, you do so simply for their
advancement. They are very decent and pure motives and it is why, I think,
at our grass roots we have been able to always produce good policies. And
you have had the leadership. You have had great leaders in these years and
leadership is everything in an organisation and in the ACTU you have had a
great clutch of leaders who have seen the opportunity and steered the boat
the right way, in their own right and in partnership with the government.
That is why I am pleased to be back today to say to you that you did keep the
faith for us last time. You did fight the unwinnable election. We did win it and
we have kicked into place since the industrial legislation, we have seen home
enterprise bargaining, we have stitched up superannuation now to 15 per
cent, we have put in the maternity allowance, the home child care allowance,
the generalised child care rebate and we have seen since the election,
680,000 jobs created and fulfilment of the most solemn commitment we made
at the poll and we have seen the target we set in Accord Mark VII exceeded
in two and a quarter years. So, it was worth it. It was worth it to win that last
election just as it will be worth it to win the next one. Because the thing we
must remember, people talk about the golden age of Australia in the 1950s
and the 1960s and when you looked around it was a fairly ordinary world. It
was a bit golden for us because we were selling food to countries that
couldn't feed themselves. We were selling wool to people who couldn't clothe
themselves and we had a ray of sunshine shining on us, but there was a lot of
darkness around. This is not the world today. The world today, there is sun
all over the place east Asia is growing as never before, the Indian sub
continent is growing as never before, South America is growing as never
before there is a real light shining out there and Australia is now part of that
broader sunshine and we are not just sitting there with some sort of natural
endowment or benefit that gave us a 10 or 15 year benefit which then washed
away as these other great countries caught up and passed us like Japan and
Germany in the post war period or the United States or some of the countries
of east Asia. Now we are out there in our own terms in the broad sunlight of
world growth, of broadly spread world growth and opportunity and we are
earning our freight amongst the community of nations in the area in which we
live, not as some sort of European enclave, but as a part of the Asia-Pacific
region ourselves.
It has never been a better scenario for us and that is why it would be a
tragedy to see this scenario darkened by an obscurantist reactionary
government that doesn't understand where we are at all and has no capacity
to keep the co-operation of the kind we have going.
So, I ask you to keep the faith in the Labor Party. Keep the faith in this Labor
Government and know that the things we promised you, we have done, but
also know we have done it together and we can keep on doing it.
Thank you