IR laws were the crowning glory of the Howard government, and Rudd is the first Australian PM to have such a reform repealed. There will be pain for Australians as the Whitlamesque Rudd further attacks that which holds Australia together.
The politics of division may be successful. Obama and Clinton have certainly come far on no more than opposition to decent policy. As Rudd has shown, one can achieve power without policy. What Rudd has failed to show is if one can wield power without the tool.
The Workchoices legislation allowed flexibility at the workplace which allowed growth without corresponding inflation. Some had to work harder, but the payoff was that they got more pay. Mr Howard's achievement as PM was to provide working Australians with a real wage growth exceeding 21%. The Hawke/Keating governments made a fall of less than 2%. Rudd's beginning is inauspicious.
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No worker worse off under new law - Gillard
By Denis Peters, Jane Bunce and Melissa Jenkins
DEPUTY Prime Minister Julia Gillard has promised no worker will be worse off after laws banning new Australian Workplace Agreements passed parliament today.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd declared Work Choices "dead and buried'' as the laws, the first step in dismantling the Howard government's unpopular industrial relations system, passed with opposition support.
Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard repeatedly refused to promise in parliament that no worker would be worse off from the abolition of AWAs.
But Ms Gillard later gave the guarantee on television.
"Our bill today is about making people better off, and it will,'' she told Sky News.
"And I can give the guarantee that no worker from the bill we have passed today into Australian law will be worse off.''
Parliament descended into uproar immediately after the laws passed when Ms Gillard took the unusual step of moving a motion celebrating the end of Work Choices.
When the opposition failed twice to stop Ms Gillard speaking, Liberal and National MPs walked out en masse - leaving deputy speaker Peter Slipper, a Liberal, vainly calling for them to come back.
Ms Gillard denied her motion to have parliament agree that individual statutory agreements would never be reintroduced was a stunt.
"We thought Australian working families should have the security of knowing whether Work Choices is dead forever or there was some risk it could come back in the future,'' Ms Gillard said.
"Unfortunately, when we asked the Liberal Party today did they want to join us in signing the death certificate for Work Choices, they made it very clear. They want Work Choices exhumed in the future.''
The government agreed to 37 amendments, mainly technical, in its eagerness to have the interim laws through parliament before it rises for the seven-week pre-budget break tomorrow.
Deputy opposition leader Julie Bishop described the government's acceptance of amendments as a humiliating backdown for Ms Gillard.
She said one of the amendments, allowing an easing of arrangements for the signing of Interim Transitional Employment Agreements (ITEAs), meant statutory individual agreements could go on forever.
The amendment would allow eligible employers and employees to continue under ITEAs even after the permanent arrangements were brought in next year, because this was only a nominal expiry date, Ms Bishop said.
"It is not true, as Labor keeps suggesting, that there will be no individual statutory agreements in Australian workplaces after 2010 or even 2012,'' Ms Bishop told parliament.
"They can go on indefinitely.''
Mr Rudd said his government had honoured another election promise with the legislation.
"On our side of the chamber we stand proudly by the fact that in this legislation, we have honoured to the letter what we committed to the Australian people before the election,'' Mr Rudd told parliament.
"Today we declare this shameful chapter in the history of Australia's workplace relations to be dead and buried.
"And today with this legislation we begin the process of burying the rest of that Work Choices omnibus once and for all.''
The union movement, which has fought tooth and nail against the individual contracts since their introduction in 1996, declared workers could now regain their workplace rights.
"A ban on new AWAs will begin to restore the rights of Australian workers taken away by the former Liberal government's Work Choices IR laws,'' ACTU president Sharan Burrow said.
Gillard has ignored me on this issue
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