GRANT GOLDMAN: Well at the November election the Rudd lead Labor party promised to make changes to the workplace relations system and to workers rights. We’ve been waiting a while but its in place. We’ve been waiting, there’s been consultation and high expectations I suppose but Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have stipulated the new National Employment Standards finally. We do have the Deputy Prime Minister on the line right now, good morning Julia Gillard.
JULIA GILLARD: Good morning.
GRANT GOLDMAN: Haven’t spoken to you since you’ve gained government. I spoke to you before about the possibilities and all that and just wondered how you’re enjoying it?
JULIA GILLARD: Well it’s a fantastic opportunity and a privilege and what I most like is all those policies and plans we put out before the election, actually bringing them into being. It’s a very satisfying feeling to know that you said to people before the election you were going to deliver on your promises. You were going to do things like get rid of Work Choices and then to be able to knuckle down and do the work that makes that possible.
GRANT GOLDMAN: Well you really have to do that in government these days don’t you? Because there seems to be an ever watchful eye from the people of Australia these days. So if you don’t come up with the goods well then you’re probably not going to stay there?
JULIA GILLARD: Well it’s very important to this government to be delivering on what we promised. We went to the Australian people and certainly we said we’d be getting rid of Work Choices and we want to deliver on that promise. But across government in the recent Budget we are saying look these are the things we said we would do and we’re doing them. We don’t think it’s appropriate to have these sort of old delineation between core and non core promises if we’ve made a promise then we are out there delivering on it.
GRANT GOLDMAN: Yes I thought that was a bit strange that core and non core promise. I mean a promise is a promise at the end of the day isn’t it?
JULIA GILLARD: A promise is a promise and in the election campaign we made the Australian people a number of promises. Obviously we promised to bring an Education Revolution, we promised to tackle climate change, we promised to get this nation ready for the challenges of the future. We promised to get rid of Work Choices. And I think across government you can see those promises being delivered.
GRANT GOLDMAN: Yeah, so a 38 hour week, it gets interesting doesn’t it? I know the new Employment Standards according to some just mean employees could lose their jobs at a faster rate should the economy go bad. That’s according to a business advisory group, Employers First Chief Executive Gary Brack you might know him said he was no fan of the government’s ten point plan described by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as a safety net for working Australians. What he is saying is that employees will loose their jobs at a faster rate maybe you could have a thought about that?
JULIA GILLARD: Well look I simply don’t agree with that analysis. If we look at our employment market, what the real pressure out there at the moment is, is lack of skills. We know when we speak to employers the thing that they’re screaming about is that they can’t get skilled staff and that they’d be putting more people on if there were people coming to the door with the right skills.
Now this nation does have a skills crisis it’s really the result of more than a decade of neglect, so we’re investing strongly in skills training. We’re investing in 450,000 new training places; we’ve got the first 20,000 of them out there already.
And then in workplaces I think Australians are entitled to a decent safety net at work and I must admit I don’t meet too many employers or employer organisations who say to me the key to the national economy is making sure 16 year old kids can be ripped off in their first job. People actually don’t say that and I don’t think that is an economic key but it’s certainly what Work Choices allowed. It allowed people most at risk in the workplace to be the people who boar the brunt. There are no penalty rates…
GRANT GOLDMAN: There is no doubt about it that; for the Coalition that was a major error on their part and I think that privately now they’d probably concede that. Just on the 24 months parental leave, Mr Bracks said small business would have problems although I am thinking about parental leave from what I’ve seen. Particularly if you have a good employee and they want to go off and have a baby you say ‘good luck we’ll see you back in 12 months or so’ it is unpaid after all and it’s not coming out of the pocket of the employer.
JULIA GILLARD: In a world where skills are short and people are desperate to retain skilled labour, I think employers and employees are all looking to find new ways of better balancing work and family life and making sure people come back to work after having a baby. We’ve basically said with these new National Employment Standards we think that there is some new and better ways. Already at the moment when a baby comes, both parents have an entitlement to 12 months unpaid leave but at the moment they can only take that in the first 12 months of the baby’s life and they can’t take it co-currently, which means realistically they would make a choice and in the ordinary course you’d say its most likely mum would stay at home for 12 months and dad wouldn’t really take any of that entitlement.
GRANT GOLDMAN: Mind you in the traditional world that I grew up in, it seems a bit strange for a father to take 12 months parental leave.
JULIA GILLARD: In this world though I think many fathers would think about it and we I think have made it more possible by saying lets sequence those two 12 months periods. So new baby comes, mum stays at home for the first 12 months and dad might consider staying home when the baby’s a toddler for the second 12 months. There are obviously many men out there in modern Australia who want to be very active hands on fathers and that’s one way of giving families that kind of option.
GRANT GOLDMAN: Yeah.
JULIA GILLARD: Now its all about choice there’s no one way of doing this. Families are always going to come to different conclusions about what’s the best way of putting work and family life together. But we think that is a new and important option and it’s in our new National Employment Standards. We’ve also put in our National Employment Standards a right to request an extended period of unpaid leave, so if mum to take a typical example stays home for the first 12 months, she’s able to request the second 12 months and then both mum or dad are able to request flexible work if they’re caring for a child who’s under school age.
GRANT GOLDMAN: Yeah.
JULIA GILLARD: Now the employer isn’t obligated to say yes to those requests. Obviously reasonable business grounds and common sense has got to be brought to bear. But the evidence shows from overseas where these schemes work if where you have a system where people actually sit down and have the conversation in their workplace often things seem possible, that wouldn’t have been thought about if you didn’t sit down and work through it. And for many jobs with modern technology it is conceivable to do sections of them from home in a way that just wasn’t possible even as recently as five or ten years ago.
GRANT GOLDMAN: Looks like a lot of people are very keen to go over the total yard stick of the National Employment Standards in detail and we’ll do that shortly ourselves as well. Good to talk to you this morning and congratulations on your work so far.
JULIA GILLARD: Thank you very much.
END