Gillard says PM knew IR laws would hurt

The Howard government knew their Work Choices reforms would hurt working-class Australians, opposition industrial relations spokeswoman Julia Gillard said.

Ms Gillard said the latest biography of Prime Minister John Howard by academics Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen showed that cabinet members who approved the introduction of the laws in 2005 were aware some workers would be disadvantaged.

Ms Gillard told reporters that the controversial Work Choices legislation had stripped away wages and conditions of Australian workers.

"Mr Howard and his government have always maintained a fiction that they didn't know these laws were going to hurt Australian working families," Ms Gillard said.

We have information form the heart of the Howard Government that they always knew that Australian working families would get hurt

The book, John Winston Howard: The Biography, reveals that the prime minister pushed ahead with the legislation and put concerns aside in order to bed it down well before the next election.

The book says one cabinet minister recalled then Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews telling Mr Howard and the cabinet "that there was no getting around some workers losing out".

But timing took precedence, it says.

"Howard wanted to begin the process of getting the legislation through parliament, conscious that the government had a long way to go in selling the merits of the changes," the book said.

"Australian workers and their families are entitled to say to Mr Howard `you knew that this was going to happen to us, you planned it, this is your fault'," Ms Gillard said

She described the introduction of the IR laws as a "cold-blooded, calculated, premeditated act".

She said the company recruited by the Victorian government to save 380 call centre jobs in Bendigo had used federal industrial laws to slash new workers' pay by up to $120 a week.

The Bracks government signed a deal five months ago with the company, Excelior, claiming it as the saviour of the AAPT centre in Bendigo.

But it has emerged the centre's new workers will be paid up to $124 a week less than workers on an existing union deal and be denied a 17.5 per cent leave loading and six weeks' paid maternity leave, according to News Ltd newspapers.

"The Victorian government can't control the way in which a private company runs its industrial relations," Ms Gillard said.

"But it is further evidence of the way these laws allow people to be treated - at the end of the day companies respond to the laws of this country, and it's the federal government that makes the industrial relations laws."

msn July 21, 2007