The great Australian Labor prime minister Bob Hawke was renowned for his ability to bring people together. After taking office in 1983, Hawke applied a consensus approach to government, bringing business and trade unions together to moderate wage growth in exchange for increases in the social wage through the introduction of Medicare, increased family payments and compulsory superannuation.

Hawke’s Accord changed lives. It laid the foundations for three decades of continuous economic growth that drove living standards to new heights.

When people work together, they can achieve great things. Effective leaders point the way to a better future by encouraging people to co-operate. Unfortunately, Scott Morrison’s model of governing is grounded in conflict, not consensus.

The Prime Minister prefers a fight to an outcome. Whether he is dealing with trade unions, Labor premiers, climate scientists or anyone who disagrees with him, Morrison’s first instincts are partisanship and division.

His political approach is built on confrontation. Too often, he allows his appetite for conflict to close avenues of constructive collaboration. For example, Morrison’s years of rejecting advice to act on climate change held back investment in cheaper and cleaner energy and cost our nation jobs in manufacturing and other areas.

And throughout the Covid-19 pandemic he has refused to co-operate with state governments to improve quarantine facilities, instead picking fights with Labor premiers for political gain.

A Labor government will change the culture of government. We would pursue collaboration as the path to progress.

I want to lead a government that harvests the goodwill of all Australians to build a better future. Instead of setting people against each other, I want to encourage them to recognise their shared interests.

For example, businesses and trade unions often have different perspectives about workplaces. But one thing they both support is job creation. Successful businesses provide good, secure jobs, and smart workers understand their security relies on the success of their employer.

Labor wants business groups and trade unions, along with interest groups and other levels of government, to work together to advance job creation and economic growth. We’d start by inviting employers and workers to a national jobs summit to identify barriers to full employment, tackle job insecurity and create a new agenda for national productivity.

Wages growth will be central to that agenda. With inflation outstripping wages growth, the real wages of Australians are going backwards. We must work together to boost productivity so employers can lift wages without reducing their profitability.

Investing in the skills of Australians can drive real produc­tivity gains. A Labor government will rebuild the TAFE system, which has been starved of funding by the Morrison-Joyce government. We’ll fund 465,000 free TAFE positions and 20,000 new university places in areas of skill shortage such as tourism and hospitality, nursing and other care industry jobs as well as traditional trades and skills required in emerging industries. Labor’s Made in Australia Skills Plan will ease the skill shortages that are holding back business growth and create new opportunities for more than two million Australians who are unemployed or underemployed.

To ensure training courses match the needs of industry, we will create Jobs and Skills Australia to work with employers, TAFEs and other training organisations. Jobs and Skills Australia will be modelled on Infrastructure Australia, which I created in 2008 as infrastructure minister in the former Labor government to work with states and industry to prioritise proposals for big road and rail projects according to their potential to boost productivity.

I know collaboration works. As a minister and deputy prime minister, I used it across a range of areas, creating the Urban Policy Forum and Regional Development Australia as well as the Australian Council of Local Govern­ment, which gave councils input into federal government planning and investment decisions. Morrison has excluded the nation’s mayors and councils from these discussions by abolishing the Council of Australian Governments. That makes no sense.

One thing I know from my time in government is that the best way to understand the needs of an individual community is to talk to the local mayor. Federation reform is also important and I have a record of working with state governments across the political spectrum to achieve economic reforms that have advanced the national interest.

Co-operation is not just a fine-sounding concept. It actually improves the quality of decision-making. It serves the public interest. After a decade of policy inertia under the Coalition, collaboration offers our nation the chance to secure a better future.

This opinion piece was first published in The Australian on Thursday, 30 December 2021.