Good riddance to AWAs! Only rarely do employees have the opportunity to negiotiate their pay.

All of the workers in your local shopping centre have to accept the AWA offered or look elsewhere for work. Even Santa has to sign an AWA that specifies a flat hourly rate and the ability to be rostered on any time between 8:30 am and 11:30 pm. You wonder which drunken yobbo will be trying to sit on Santa's knee at 11pm. We all know that the Spotlight workers were forced to sign AWAs that removed ppenalty rates in return for increasing their pay by 2cents an hour with a nett effect of reducing take home pay by $100 per week, so earning $400 per week instead of $500 per week.

Every financial advisor in this country tells investers that company profits are at their highest ratio since the 1920s and increasing and that wages are at a low ratio and falling. WorkNoChoices just allows company profits to increase at a greater rate.

The Government's Industrial Relations legislation is unpopular because it is terribly written legislation that leaves many people worse off.

People are more concerned about the growing economic apartheid between the haves and have nots rather than this ivory tower 'right to flexibility' perversion.

You will never convince anyone of this argument other than fellow Young Liberals. The general public has too much commonsense and know when their being sold a pup. Move on from the IR debate. You've already lost.

Why don't you talk to some foot soldiers of Telstra and see if they're happy with their AWA work culture. The work related suicides are only the tip of the iceburg. There is a very real simmering anger in Telstra employees.

These workers are being pushed to desperation. Would you really want your children working in this environment?

Our country has to become smarter - not be wage competitive with growing asian economies.

Ah, Fascism with a smiling face---all in the name of "freedom" of course.

The basis of WorkChoices - ensuring that employers make sound decisions regarding who they employ and how they treat their employees based essentially on the economical viability of the company (giving them the best possible chance of maintaining and growing profitability, thus being the position to offer better wages better conditions, and increased employment opportunities) was reasonable enough. But Kevin Andrews did such a hatchet job of introducing it that it will be years before the public again accepts the need to recognise that laws making life difficult for employers ultimately make life difficult for anyone.
In almost every portfolio this man has been given he has managed to give the Coalition government a bad name, the Immigration department being his latest disaster zone. http://www.andrewsmustresign.com/

Thanks for that polemic, Felicity McMahon, Liberal party member. It would seem that you have never heard of common law contracts. Your fallacious assertion that everyone will be forced onto collective agreements is totally wrong. There will be nothing stopping an employer from employing someone on a CLC which has award conditions that provide minimum conditions as it's base. The employer can then add incentives or flexible arrangements on top of that minimum.
I think you lost the argument when you argued that Australian worker's agreements should be dragged down to the same level as a third world nation, India. Even the US does not stop enterprise bargaining if a majority of the workplace want one. yet this Government wants to paint this right as a union stalking horse. Do you think the IR laws in the United States are bad for worker productivity?
Labor's IR laws restore the status quo back to where it was before Work Choices. No one would argue that Australia's economic performance was shabby pre 2006