Friday, 21 November 2025

E&OE

It’s good to be here at HRN. But before I start I just want to acknowledge the President Frank Parry KC, my former parliamentary colleague and now Treasurer I understand Eric Abetz and Eric, when I took on this portfolio someone gave me advice which was make sure you call all the former IR ministers and chat to them. There was just one problem-you were in the middle of an election so I left you alone so you saved me the effort but we’ll now talk, deal? Great.

Of course, to the PC’s greatest critic - Peter Costello. Every one has been raving about your speed and you are right Peter. The PC has been MIA and seems to be in the WPP on PR.

Which is my productive way of saying the Productivity Commission has been missing in action and seems to be in a witness protection program on productivity reform. You are 100% right but there is something deeper going on because what we need now more than anything is institutions that will stand up and fight for this country.

The HR Nicholls Society was founded to drive the debate for industrial relations reform and prosperity when I was in primary school. Yes I know that means that some of you were not in primary school. But of course the world has moved on, is different, so we must move with the times to define the future.

Australia is being held back by a lack of courage and conviction because there are too many people managing it who lack core belief.

And I use the word managers very deliberately.

Once upon a time we had people who owned private businesses who knew that when they opened their mouths in the public square they put their own hard work and sacrifice on the line.

Today most publicly listed companies are led by what can be best described as corporate bureaucrats. Managers, not leaders.

So don’t expect them to step up. And if industry super capital won’t bring them to heel, the lack of incentives for them to show leadership will.

Because there are no incentives.

This is a central problem of our age.

If you want to find business leaders – go to small business or family businesses. Where people are taking a risk with something they own.

Few politicians are better. With the greatest of respect, generationally many politicians had their apprenticeships in the early 2000s where their choice was whether they went with a normal or novelty size cheque.

They spent the inheritance of the reforms of the 80s, 90s and 2000s without understanding why the coffers were full in the first place.

And in place of things worth fighting for, they have bought the technocratic lie that more bureaucracy and efficiency can solve all of our problems, rather than persuade the public that tough choices today can make for a better tomorrow.

New speak and easy lies have replaced simple truths:

  • Borrowing from the future is apparently not inflationary.
  • Taxing the productive side of the economy is apparently without consequence.
  • You can replace baseload power with renewables, just like you can replace heavy freight with bicycles.
  • Standards of living rise even when you require more inputs for less outputs.
  • Wages can rise disconnected from productivity.

So when I read Peter critiquing this morning the “modern award” system as “arcane” in Ewin Hannan’s column in the Australian, I did chuckle because I gave him a slightly less newsworthy quote to Ewin arguing the rhetoric of modern awards highlights how much our industrial relations system is a throwback to a bygone era like those romanticising a time of when coal power generation was a new thing.

And since 2007 the Labor government has done a political time warp, turned back the clock and arguably taken us back to the 1970s to the point that the Australian economy is hindered by an industrial relations system that was built for that sort of era: needlessly complex, favours established interests and undermines worker’s wages, and employment.

And nowhere are the consequences more real and clear than in this State. A State in desperate need of salvation from the cartel that runs it and fuelled by an industrial relations system designed to incentivise cartel-ish behaviour and corruption.

And between Federal and State Labor we have the dual wheels of the cartel kickback circle of life working wonders every day for them.

State and Federal Labor governments get elected with the campaign resources of the unions. Federal Labor governments compel worker’s wages into industry super funds they indirectly control. The super funds finance publicly commissioned projects from state governments and compel union labour and inflated wages. Unions get kickbacks from delivering projects and donate those resources to Labor to stay in government. And it just keeps going.

It is all hiding in plain sight. The mafia would blush in thinking they could be so audacious to design a scheme like this.

Where capital and labour used to fight, they are now on the same side. And the hubris has got to a level that democracy is now just a plaything for them.

As Geoffrey Watson has outlined to the Wood Inquiry this week, the attitude of the CMFEU in Queensland is to tell public officials they’re in charge.

It is no different in Victoria. The cartel behaviour is so entrenched that, like all corrupt systems, few have an interest in exposing it. And as my colleague James Paterson has observed Anthony Albanese is now Victorianising Australia.

The consequences are real. Analysis from the Australian Industry Group shows that 8 in 10 jobs across the nation are created by public spending. Only 2 flow from private investment.

In Victoria it is 9 in 10. Only 1 in 10 jobs flows from private investment in this state. Victoria is changing the very foundations of its economy from private independence to one of public dependence.

Let us call it out for what it is. It is ruinous, unsustainable, inflationary, and can only lead to declining living standards and social division as more people fight over scarcer resources, all fed on the altar of political survival. And the response from the Allan government is to legislate more rigidity including a compulsory two days a week working from home situation.

Now make no mistake, and I want to make this crystal clear: I am actually very rabidly in favour of work from home. I favour it because it is the lived embodiment of workplace flexibility. It is something we should be leaning into. People want choice, it shows people do want flexibility. Data from the recruitment company, Seek, found 76 per cent of Australians would only return to if they received a significant pay rise, and in one in four would couldn’t be convinced to return to the office for any pay increase at all. But it only works when its in the mutual benefit of employees and employers by mutual agreement.

You can’t have these sorts of standard being imposed which of course aren’t universal anyway particularly, having served as Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner, under the so called banner of rights.

The Allan government is seeking to legislate it with scant regard for the consequences ranging from the impacts it will have on workplace safety, the impact it could have on people who are living in abusive relationships and where escaping domestic violence might be leaving work. Imagine telling a victim of domestic violence that their home must now legally become their workplace. Meanwhile in their rapacious appetite for revenue they are increasingly seeming to use it as a backdoor for the State Revenue Office to get the dead hand of land tax over a principal place of residence.

And a lot of these issues aren’t much better federally.

We have record insolvencies, a cost of small business crisis, tight credit, and complex industrial relations system that undermines employment, and punishes employers who try to get it right, but simply can’t, even when the Department who’s portfolio responsibility can’t get it right.

We have general protections that is now so generous that people stop complaining about unfair dismissal and extortion.

We had the nation’s retailers seek to give workers a 35 per cent blanket pay rise if they would accept simpler workplace relations. Instead the Federal government legislated to stop the pay rise, force complexity so they could feed the unions and ensure the cartel kickbacks continue flow.

So it is fair to ask: what are we going to do about it?

Today, I’m going to break it to you, is not a day for big policy announcements.

I’m learning apparently I need them signed off by Shadow Cabinet. I think my colleagues might appreciate that.

My approach to industrial relations I will flag will be different from my predecessors. Most in the past have focused on getting the right policy landing in time for an election. And I want to make it clear I will of course absolutely be doing that.

My approach will be future-focused solutions for industrial relations. If the future of Australia’s economy can be fuelled by nuclear power, we should be looking for equally innovative solutions in industrial relations that are about how we build a focus on simplification, empowerment and alignment to promote harmony.

My focus is on how we build the movement to advocate for reform, because Industrial relations should be a platform for aspiration, not an obstacle course of compliance.

When I lost Goldstein in 2022 we did a lot of sober assessment. Two cycles earlier I’d won it with the largest majority in the seat’s history. Now it is the most marginal Liberal seat in the country, but at least it is Liberal unlike every other one we lost at that election.

We started by acknowledging our strengths and weaknesses for ourselves and our opponents, as well as what was within our control and what was not.

What became evidence to me very quickly was that the biggest problem we had was not the absence of good policy or ideas – although we debate the relative components of that and there was some absence as well. It was the lack of the channels to communicate them in the modern world.

The world where people learn what is happening based on what they read in the morning newspaper and what happened on the nightly news for the previous few hours is gone, with the greatest respect to the journalists in the room. Increasingly persuasion is relational, fragmented and based on connection. And so the basis of any campaign, and particularly one if you wanted to defy political gravity in 2025, had to start by acknowledging this central point.

So while I get that we need a new industrial relations system that stops the bleeding and builds the future of growth, and I love the policy papers that people produce and must be published – it is not where I’m putting my initial effort. Politics is a game of people organisation and mobilisation. They’re good at it. And we ain’t. And if you aren’t mobilising people these days you’re not persuading people.

So there will be people in this room that want me to simply adopt a policy paper. If we go back and prosecute old debates on the union’s turf, they’ll just waiting with their baseball bats and intimidatory tactics. They own that field. Our job is to build a new field – one where the majority of employers and workers can finally play.

We need a new playing field for industrial relations that focuses on mobilising those who benefit from simplification and cooperation.

And more importantly we need to mobilise a nation of employers sufficient that they see we are fighting for them enough that they want to fight for what we are espousing.

Because I know which is more persuasive and effective in making the case for change between an academic paper with a glossy cover and the lived story of a small business owner who recently told me in Western Australia, that they had to pay somebody five different rates of pay based on the time for simply cutting a piece of fruit. That’s the modern awards system.

I also know that despite my charm and good looks, the small business owners is a better public advocate than I ever will be.

And the is particularly important for where the future direction of employment will head. When I cast my eye out to 2028 one of the most notable evolutions in employment is likely to be the integration of artificial intelligence. No one quite knows what the impact will be, or how disruptive it will be.

What we do know is that it presents a potential reset point in how people will work, it will change the structure of the employment market and the biggest opportunities are there for small business. And we need to seize on that. AI won’t wait for us to modernise workplace laws. If we don’t adapt, the future of work will happen to us, not with us.

And the employment market is increasingly moving from the security of a salary to adding side hustles, shared equity schemes and small businesses.

Australia will not reach its potential as a nation solely of salary earners. We need policies that actively incentivises Australians to back themselves and their future wealth creation that enlarges a small business constituency.

That is what I want.

To actively drive policy to enlarge a small business constituency on a scale this nation has not seen before.

Because, as said with the greatest respect Peter, nothing is more likely to lead an Australian resentful of over-taxation and regulation that completing a quarterly BAS.

When we have a nation of BAS-haters we have an Australia that is independent, that is confident and resilient, and that is ready to push back against industrial relations tyranny designed to favour Canberra, corporates, organised workers and organised capital – not the overwhelming majority of employees and employers.

Because the current expectation of the Albanese government is that small businesses have an HR, legal, tax and industrial relations department sitting out the back to help them with every new regulation they pile on. That’s not real. That’s not how small business works and we have to get them to speak out.

So today I am not here to announce some policy. I am here to say: I need your help. Because I want to build a movement, so when we have something to say that people want to back it in, fight for it and more importantly, to fight for change.

So when we have our policy settled, and people see that we are fighting for them, they will want to fight for us to deliver.

Because our destination is clear: an IR system that encourages employment, empowers workers, rewards initiative, and gives Australians the confidence to back themselves and set up their own aspirations, their own dreams, and of course a small business.

We also know that this can only be delivered under a Liberal-led government. But we need the small business owners of Australia to hear it, to see it, and to believe it is possible.

And we know the cost of failure. An outdated, rigid system of complexity designed to favour intermediaries, brokers, lawyers and ciphers who profit off declining living standards, cartel kickbacks and punishes ambition.

The choice is simple. I am going to fight for the future and I hope you’ll join me with this task.

ENDS