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State Treasurer Michael O'Brien has ramped up demands for a far-reaching industrial relations overhaul if Tony Abbott wins the election, including a return to individual contracts and restrictions on union access to workplaces. In a significant intervention just days into the federal election campaign, Mr O'Brien used a speech to the Australian Industry Group to warn that retrograde workplace relations changes since the dismantling of WorkChoices had left Australia with a ''pre-Keating'' industrial landscape. Mr O'Brien said Victoria was ''more fully exposed than anywhere else'' because it had relinquished its industrial powers to the Commonwealth during the Kennett years. ''Unfortunately if those [federal] industrial relations laws are bad ones it means there is nowhere to hide,'' Mr O'Brien said. ''So what we do need to see coming out of whoever wins the next federal government is a real commitment to putting fairness and productivity at the heart of [industrial relations].'' Mr Abbott has been working hard to neutralise industrial relations as a political issue, releasing a series of reforms in May described by the business lobby as ''modest'', including a Productivity Commission review of the Fair Work Act ahead of the 2016 election and the restoration of the Australian Building and Construction Commission. But the policy, which emphasised workplace productivity in industrial agreements, did not include the reintroduction of individual contracts. Unfair dismissal laws and penalty rates were also unchanged. In a speech to the National Press Club on Wednesday, ACTU president Ged Kearney will demand that Mr Abbott say what the Productivity Commission will look at if the Coalition wins government on September 7. ''Tony Abbott should be upfront with the Australian people and release the terms of reference for his Productivity Commission inquiry before the election - so we know exactly what is at risk,'' Ms Kearney will say, in a speech that will also defend the importance of penalty rates to Australian workers. Mr O'Brien told Fairfax Media the reintroduction of individual contracts with a no-disadvantage test should be considered. ''With the Fair Work Act, we've seen not just a retreat to pre-WorkChoices … but we've seen a retreat beyond even the reforms that were agreed to by [Howard government industrial relations minister] Peter Reith and [former Democrats leader] Cheryl Kernot [in 1996],'' he said. The federal government also this year introduced right-of-entry changes to the act that designate workplace lunch rooms as official meeting places between union officials and workers. Mr O'Brien, a former industrial relations lawyer, said: ''People should be able to go about their business on their worksites without being required to attend meetings or getting harassed in their kitchen while they are trying to have lunch.'' With Clay Lucas