KERRY O'BRIEN: Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd joins me now live from our Brisbane studio. Kevin Rudd, you're anxious to persuade voters at the coming election that you're an honest man and part of an honest party. How honest was your national conference?

KEVIN RUDD, FEDERAL OPPOSITION LEADER: Well, we had lots of debates at conference. If you were engaged in the uranium debate, for example, Kerry, I've got to say things got a bit close and a bit willing there at some stages. I wasn't absolutely confident that when we went in there for the final vote, that it was necessarily going to get across the line.

KERRY O'BRIEN: So you have to have Bill Shorten stick his head up and remind people that if they vote the wrong way, it will undermine your authority and you will lose the election, so you win the vote. Is that the basis of winning a vote for policy?

KEVIN RUDD: No Kerry, your question was, "What's the honesty of the conference?". Let me give you an example there. I wouldn't have a clue what Bill Shorten was about to say in that debate. That was a matter for him. I didn't have a clue of what anyone else was going to say in the debate. It's a democratic process. I didn't go around and script anybody or counter-script anybody. It was argued with passion on both sides of the argument and resolved with a fairly narrow majority.

Look, I mean the bottom line is all conferences, all political parties go through these sorts of processes. Some are better than others but I think we came out of it well with a forward, positive plan to take to the Australian people, a comprehensive plan for Australia's future.

KERRY O'BRIEN: A simple proposition. You say that John Howard shifted the balance on workplace relations too far in favour of business. Aren't you now guilty in response of tilting the balance too far back in favour of unions?

KEVIN RUDD: Absolutely not. One of the core failings of Mr Howard's system was the abolition of an effective independent umpire and we believe that that is one of the core missing elements in the current system.

Australians are a fair people. They actually know that you've got to have business out there with flexibility to generate profits, to generate growth and all those other things which are important to keep the economy ticking over. But they also believe that you've got to have a fair go for working people and part and parcel of that is to have a reasonable independent umpire who can actually ensure that the laws of the system are being upheld, that when it comes to enterprise agreements, for example, that basic minimum conditions are being upheld as well, as opposed to Mr Howard's model, which at the end of the day is the law of the jungle.

Just to conclude on this point, I mean, he seems to think that there is a high morality involved in something, in an industrial relations system which says the only fair system is where it's one individual employee against an entire firm, management and enterprise. We come from a different side of politics. We don't share that view and I don't think the Australian people think it's fair either.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Alright, you're making a big deal about the fairness of the umpire but you're getting rid of one umpire, replacing that umpire, as in the Industrial Relations Commission, with a new structure and you are going to be able to appoint all the people who will be a part of that new structure. How do the Australian people know you're not going to stack the deck? In other words, that the umpire will not be independent, the umpire will be coming up with verdicts that you want?

KEVIN RUDD: Well, when it came to putting together Fair Work Australia, our new worker umpire, we were mindful of the fact you were going to have to have a judicial arm to it, which we made of independent judicial officers. That's part of it.

When it comes to other elements of the system, we have to make sure that the laws which are contained in the Act of Parliament which will underpin Fair Work Australia are upheld by properly qualified individuals who staff the body.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But who's going to appoint them?

KEVIN RUDD: Well, the government of the day appoints them, as they do at present. At present, you have this alphabet soup of entities, the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, the OWS, the oeA, the Fair Pay Commission, so called. All of these things are vehicles for current appointments by the current Government. It's a mess from the point of view of employers, let alone employees. But your core premise of your question was, we're replacing one independent umpire with another. Kerry, right now what is called the AIRC - in terms of being an effective independent umpire, it's a dead duck. Everyone knows that. It was killed, shot dead. We're actually creating an independent umpire.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But the core of my question was, I'm not arguing the virtues one way or another, that's a separate issue of how you've structured it. My question is, how are the Australian people going to be able to gauge any guarantee from you that when you appoint the people who are supposedly going to be the independent umpires, that the process of appointment is a process of integrity and that the people who go there are not going to be stacked more towards, if you like, the unions? Or more towards the workers than to business? And are genuinely fair both ways?

KEVIN RUDD: Well, I give you this as an absolute guarantee here on your program. I will not be prime minister of this country and appoint some endless tribe of trade union officials to staff or ex trade union officials to staff the key positions in this body. That's not my intention. That's not the way in which it's going to work. What we want is people of fairness and of integrity, of independence who can get the balance right here. You will have that, of course, by definition in your judicial arm of this body. But in terms of the other parts of the body, the enforcement arm etc., you are going to have to have a system which is properly staffed.

I will not stand by and have this body either become the agency of ex trade union officials or ex officials from employer organisations, for that matter. People will be appointed on their merit but I'm not going to turn this into an employment agency for retired officials from the ACTU. End of story.

KERRY O'BRIEN: And will that be a transparent process and one where the integrity of the choices can be seen?

KEVIN RUDD: Absolutely. Let me make a parallel with this. When it comes to the future composition of the board of the ABC, I'll be instituting a parallel process so we don't allow the politicisation of the board of the ABC. I'm passionate about the integrity of public institutions. Public institutions have been prostituted by this Government so much over the last decade that we've actually got to draw a line. We need to restore the integrity of institutions so that they are put beyond the reach of partisan politics.

Here's another guarantee for you. I will not make an appointment of any former politician or political staffer to any position on the board of the ABC. We've got to restore the integrity of institutions like the ABC fully. We've got to also make sure that bodies such as the future Fair Work Australia is properly constituted as well. That is my intention, that is how we're going to do it.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You're clearly determined to paint John Howard as a man of the past and Labor as the party with the fresh approach. That was sitting there right underneath you when you got up and spoke. When you strip away the marketing flim flam, where's your fresh approach on workplace relations when the widespread consensus is that you've simply gone back to the past, lock, stock and barrel in terms of the broad framework and in terms of the principles underpinning your broad framework of industrial relations?

KEVIN RUDD: Well, we have a fresh approach on these questions. We will ensure, for example, that you cannot conduct industrial action unless there is a mandatory secret ballot. That's a fresh approach. Secondly, when it comes to the future, we're going to ensure that when it comes to anyone who takes industrial action, you can't have a sweetheart deal with employers in order to get paid strike pay afterwards. Thirdly, we're going to be sure you can't have industry-wide industrial action, which strangles an economy.

And on top of that, when it comes to provisions such as the establishment of an integrated uniform national industrial relations system for the entire private economy - let me tell you in the past, Labor has been always committed to the retention of independent state industrial systems with conflicting laws. We've committed to one which will be unified, either by way of referral to powers to the Commonwealth or by harmonisation. These are all steps forward. And I've got to say, in the recent debate in the last 24, 48 hours, people seem to have lost sight of those significant changes on our part.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Dean Mighell is a trade union official who calls a spade a spade. You've just seen what he had to say at the Labor conference in Michael Brissenden's story. There's no doubt what he's expecting from a Labor Government. The power to coerce his word coerce employers into agreements restoring lots of conditions, quote, "That's going to be fun," he said. And that was in the context of pattern bargaining. He expects a return to pattern bargaining. Do you endorse pattern bargaining, where whole industries are brought into line with an enterprise agreement model that's been imposed, coerced whatever word you want to use - negotiated, with a single company?

KEVIN RUDD: That's not the approach that we support at all. When it comes to Dean Mighell, for example, and his comments, I found those - which I just saw for the first time reported on your program tonight - completely unacceptable. I'm not going to have trade union officials, quote, regarding it as "fun" running around the place intimidating employers. Dean Mighell is right out there as far as I'm concerned. And while I'm on your program, his comments the other day attacking the Prime Minister, using filthy language, were in my view unacceptable and not reflective of the sentiment of the Australian labour movement. That sort of approach is outdated, wrong and belongs to a different century.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You've been attacking consistently this Government for its performance on productivity. Where are the productivity gains in this? Business says it won't create one extra job. They raise the prospect on the other hand of more jobs going offshore.

KEVIN RUDD: Well, I'm glad you raised the productivity argument because let's look at the history of labour productivity over the last 10 or 15 years. When we introduced enterprise bargaining in our industrial relations reforms in the last half of the 90s, we had productivity growth surging at 3.2 per cent per annum. In the five years or so following Mr Howard's introduction of AWAs in the first place, that started to fall back to something like 2.2 per cent growth per annum. this is Labor productivity.

Guess where it stands today? Now that we've got these new laws, 1.5 per cent per annum. The entire logical case which Mr Howard advances that somehow his system of industrial relations has generated higher productivity growth as opposed to that which grew out of an earlier period simply is not there in the numbers.

And there is no logical case for him to advance there at all. If you look at conservative labour market economists, they've argued the same, that this sort of industrial relations system based essentially on individual agreements doesn't of itself generate greater productivity growth. The numbers just don't stack up.

KERRY O'BRIEN: For well over a year now, Labor has been promising to tear up AWAs if you get into office and at the moment, there is something like 700,000-odd of those agreements. And it's very clear that the West Australian Labor Premier, Alan Carpenter, is nervous about that prospect in a state where AWAs, he says, are now virtually the norm in a number of industries, and he singles out mining. Can you guarantee that no person now on an AWA will be worse off after you have ripped up their contracts, including all those people in the mining industry doing incredibly well out of the boom?

KEVIN RUDD: When we put out our transitional arrangements and that's still to come some time down the track let me make it very clear that we will ensure that anyone who's currently on an AWA will be no worse off when it comes to their take home pay and conditions. We're confident we can engineer transitional arrangements along those lines. Let me add one further point to your question. You said before there are 700,000 AWAs. For the benefit of the viewing audience, let's put this in context across the entire national economy.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Briefly.

KEVIN RUDD: Right now in the Australian economy, hang on, we've got something like 38 per cent of all employment which is contained in enterprise agreements, we've got 31 per cent under common law individual agreements, we've got 19 per cent under awards. Guess how many per cent are under AWAs at present? Somewhere between 3 and 5 per cent. So the whole argument that the sky collapses because we change the law under AWAs frankly falls on its face against the numbers, both there and also on the productivity numbers I ran through before. It's an illogical case. Mr Howard knows it and he froths and bubbles on television in the hope that someone actually believes it.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Briefly, sadly briefly, on uranium, Mr Rudd, we don't have much time left. Uranium and nuclear power. Regardless of how you justify it, will you at least acknowledge the contradiction, if not the hypocrisy, that Labor supports the export of as much uranium as you can sell for nuclear power overseas, acknowledged with guidelines, but you reject nuclear power and waste storage out of hand for Australia.

KEVIND RUDD: There's no contradiction in that at all. Do you know why? We have a rich array of energy options in onshore Australia. Other countries to which we sell uranium do not. Therefore, for other countries there may be no other energy future other than nuclear power. For Australia there is. Mr Howard, because he's been caught napping on climate change and having denied climate change is a factor in this country and for its future for the last 11 years, four or five months before an election says, "Gee, we've got to look as if we're serious about this, let's whack on a debate about nuclear energy". It's driven by politics. And if I was in the coal industry watching this, I'd be concerned about Mr Howard hauling up the white flag when it comes to the future of clean coal.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Mr Rudd, we're about to lose our line to Queensland but thanks very much for talking to us.

KEVIN RUDD: Thanks for having me on the program, Kerry.