Victorian Trades Hall Council. The voice of Victorian workers since 1856.

While Tony Abbott flounders around making up his mind about when he is telling the truth and when he is not, he has never hidden his views about workplace relations.

He might claim “the phrase Work Choices is dead” (press conference December 2009 when he took over as Liberal Leader), but he has often revealed he would love to bring back individual contracts.

Recently Abbott said: “I’m not John Howard and our [IR] policy won’t be the same as it was in 2007” and “the point I was trying to make [in my budget reply speech (13/5/10]]… was that we will work within Labor’s frameworks…” (emphasis added)…yes we want to make it more flexible and more workable, but we really will be working within the Gillard framework that the Labor Party has put in place” (emphasis added).

Why can the arch-conservative, Howard-clone Tony Abbott so comfortably and blatantly hang his future IR policy on the Fair Work Act? Why doesn’t he enunciate his own IR policy framework?

Because he doesn’t have to.

The ILO has already ruled back in March 2010 that the Fair Work Act contains many of the anti-worker, anti-collective bargaining, anti-union rights that were in the original WorkChoices legislation.

All Abbott has to do is ‘splice-in’ a few add ons to satisfy his big business connections and he has WorkChoices Mark II (ie is off the back of WorkChoices Lite!).

It is a sad indictment that Federal IR Minister Julia Gillard continues to repeat the ‘big fib’ of her government – that is “WorkChoices is dead”.

Tony Abbott put the right emphasis on the issue – the “phrase” is no longer useful but the “framework” definitely is.

Many voters have become disillusioned about what the current federal government has delivered. Not least is the thousands of workers across the country who are finding out the hard way that the Fair Work Act is not what it’s cracked up to be.