Business leaders back call to learn car sector lessons

SID MAHER AND RICK WALLACE
FEBRUARY 13, 2014
THE AUSTRALIAN
BUSINESS leaders have seized on Joe Hockey’s warning that the nation must heed the lessons of the demise of the car industry and seek a new culture of competitiveness to renew calls for further industrial relations and tax reform and cuts to red tape.
The Treasurer ignited a political furore when he confirmed reports that workplace relations conditions had been a factor in Toyota’s decision to end manufacturing in Australia from 2017.
Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott said despite plenty of warning signs over the past five years, “the former government did not do enough, and in fact put further lead in the saddlebags of our economy with flawed workplace laws, more regulation and new taxes such as the carbon and mining taxes”.
“I think the lesson we’ve got to learn is when people say it’s getting too hard to do business in this country, they mean it,” she said.
Ms Westacott said while the government was moving to reinstate the Australian Building and Construction Commission, and had moved on rights of entry, it needed to limit matters for bargaining to workplace terms and conditions and not allow them to extend to bans on the use of contractors and labour hire.
She said greenfield agreement rules had to be expanded to allow for employer-only agreements where good faith bargaining had failed.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief operating officer, John Osborn, said the nation must focus “on those things that we can change — such as abolishing the carbon tax, reforming workplace relations and lowering the cost of energy”.
The Treasurer seized on the Toyota decision to declare that the nation had to learn the lessons of the car industry’s demise.
“The last thing we should do is put our heads in the sand and think that there aren’t lessons out of what happened to the motor vehicle industry for other industries,” Mr Hockey said.
“We have got to be realistic about the way we approach, not just workplace relations, but the way that we approach the regulation of industry, the way we approach taxation,” he said.
Mr Hockey said the culture of enterprise had to change. “It is not a case of workers versus employers — it is a case of Australia challenging the rest of the world. We have got to be aspirational. We want to compete with the rest of the world.”
However Toyota, which had been blocked by the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union from moves to renegotiate generous workplace provisions at its Melbourne plant, repudiated suggestions in The Australian Financial Review that the company had blamed the union for its decision to pull out of Australia in a December meeting with Mr Hockey.
Bill Shorten and Opposition Treasury spokesman Chris Bowen seized on the Toyota statement, with Mr Bowen saying Mr Hockey had been caught out “in an outright fabrication today and his attempts to blame workers for Toyota’s decision to cease manufacturing have been exposed as complete fiction”.
Graham Spurling, the former head of Mitsubishi Australia, backed the federal government’s tough-love industry policy and accused governments of both persuasions of perpetrating a lie that Australia could retain car assembly operations.