Brad Norington and Ewin Hannan | November 28, 2007
FLAWS in the ousted Howard government's workplace laws and its failure to woo public support for them attracted strong criticism from employers yesterday.
Despite many of them originally supporting the changes, business groups said John Howard had gone too far with Work Choices.
Their chief complaint yesterday was that Mr Howard had removed a decade-old "no-disadvantage test" and scrambled too late to replace it with an inadequate "fairness test" in the face of public opposition.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry said many companies had been frustrated with Work Choices because of the complicated process to gain approval for agreements.
ACCI chief executive Peter Hendy said the administration of the Coalition's fairness test since May had caused widespread disenchantment among employers. A huge backlog of AWAs awaiting approval by the Workplace Authority was also a problem.
"If it was just a few hundred (in the) backlog you would say it is the individual employers' problem, but when it involves thousands, that is systematic," Mr Hendy said.
National Retail Association chief executive Patrick McKendry said Work Choices became a major negative for the Howard government, with employee concern about the laws and employer frustration with the legislation's complexity making it virtually impossible to sell.
"Work Choices was undoubtedly a negative for the government," Mr McKendry said.
"It was almost impossible to (sell) the message that this was a natural and evolutionary change to IR in this country ... that message was lost.
"If it ever, ever got told it never got through and, by the time we got to the end, it was not only seen as a major break, but one that was mired in lot of regulatory and bureaucratic red tape." Mr McKendry said the ACTU campaign against the laws succeeded in creating significant apprehension among employees, especially over Australian Workplace Agreements.
"Employers were behind the eight ball at the start because they had to do a lot of explaining as to what the nature of the agreements were about," he said.
"There was an initial and sometimes irreversible apprehension on the part of a lot of staff when the suggestion was first initiated that they strike an AWA bargain. This was a new world and a lot of employers got to the point where they said, 'we haven't got the time to do this'.
"They'd ring the (government's workplace) hotline and get conflicting advice between calls. So there was a lot of mystery associated with it at the end that people couldn't be bothered with."
Australian Industry Group chief executive Heather Ridout said the unions waged a successful fear campaign that generated a public backlash against Work Choices. "The whole problem was with the way that Work Choices was drafted," she said. "The original no-disadvantage test was about half a page in the metal industry award.
"In the current one, it's 75 pages plus. The nature of the law itself made it more complex."
Ms Ridout pointed out that her organisation did not join other employers in funding advertising supporting Work Choices.
