Greg Combet slams Tony Abbott's climate change, workplace policies.
Date
September 6, 2013
Concern that Tony Abbott could win control of the Senate has driven former cabinet minister Greg Combet to make a late entry to the election campaign to attack Coalition policies on workplace relations and climate change.
The former ACTU secretary and climate change minister lamented Mr Abbott's promise to bring the workplace relations pendulum back to the "sensible centre" as a "con" and described the Coalition's "direct action" approach to climate change as "absolute crap".
Mr Combet was considered a future Labor leader, but he resigned from Cabinet after Julia Gillard was toppled by Kevin Rudd in June and then announced his retirement from politics.
"Despite [workplace relations minister] Bill Shorten's and the government's best efforts, industrial relations hasn't been widely debated in the campaign and I remember the experience of Tony Abbott when he was minister for industrial relations in 2001-4," Mr Combet told Fairfax Media.
"I think this is one of the areas where people are going to find, if Abbott wins, he'll be pretty hard line.
"When he was IR minister he brought bills into the parliament to remove protection against unfair dismissal for millions of people, he tried to reduce compensation for people who were found to be unfairly dismissed, he made it much harder for us to try and get pay rises for low-paid people through the wage case, he was constantly bringing bills in to try and undermine collective bargaining and he brought legislation in to take basic entitlements out of the award system.
"All of these were precursors to WorkChoices, essentially. Not many of them got through the Senate, though he introduced them multiple times and created double dissolution triggers which weren't followed.
"He also set up the Cole Royal Commission into the building industry that ultimately cost $65 million and led to the Building and Construction Commission that made life very difficult for a lot of workers in the industry."
Mr Combet said that as someone who had been a union official for well over 20 years, and been ACTU secretary for eight years, "I'm concerned for people and what they'll confront under an Abbott government".
"The last time the Coalition gained control of the Senate was 2004 and it ended up with WorkChoices. That's the record and that's what you'd expect a Coalition government led by him to set out to do again.
"Abbott's been criticising the Fair Work legislation that Labor implemented that protects people, when it's a little known fact that labour productivity has been improving quite significiantly over the last couple of years and is almost three times as high under the Fair Work legislation than it was under WorkChoices."
On climate change, he said: "We've now got the benefit of the clean energy package and the carbon price being in place for over a year and, putting politics aside, it's worthwhile considering facts – and the facts are showing us that emissions in the national electricity market are down and that emissions from the emissions-intensive power stations in Victoria are down significantly and that renewable energy generation is up 30 per cent.
"Abbott's campaign has been, to use his words, absolute crap. We've got a responsibility to respond to the science in a credible way and the government has and Tony Abbott's proposing to unwind it."
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/greg-combet-slams-tony-abbotts-climate-change-workplace-policies-20130906-2t8zm.html#ixzz2e5sGK05Z
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