STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator KOVACIC (New South Wales) (13:30): The Business Council is warning that Australia is on track for the worst decade of productivity growth since records began in 1960, with productivity having gone backwards for the entirety of the Albanese Labor government's time in office. There are so many forces that shape productivity, and no serious person in this place should pretend otherwise.

But neither should we pretend that the industrial relations system Labor has spent four years constructing is somehow incidental to this significant problem. At its core, productivity depends upon people at the enterprise level being able to make decisions to invest, innovate, organise work and respond to changing circumstances. Yet Labor's instinct has been to move in precisely the opposite direction—away from enterprise, away from flexibility and away from direct arrangements between employers and employees toward greater centralisation, greater prescription and substantially greater power for the union movement.

There is a very important distinction here. Protecting workers is one thing; designing an industrial relations system around the institutional power of unions is quite another. Labor has increasingly blurred that distinction.

When workplace law becomes more complex, bargaining becomes more remote from the individual enterprise and businesses are required to navigate an ever-expanding architecture of regulation and union involvement. There are then economic consequences. This is not an ideological assertion.

The Business Council is now explicitly warning that the accumulated weight of workplace relations changes and regulation is taking its toll and is calling for simpler, more flexible laws and a restoration of enterprise-level bargaining. If productivity is genuinely a national priority, the Prime Minister must be prepared to consider the government's industrial relations agenda— (Time expired)