Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has given qualified support to John Howard's calls for a Coalition government to roll back Labor's IR reforms.

Saying the Gillard Government had swung "the pendulum to the other side", Mr Abbott endorsed the former prime minister's comments that Australia "has to wind back the re-regulation of the labour market".

Until now Mr Abbott has shied away from workplace reform, fearful of a repeat of the anti-WorkChoices campaign that helped topple the Howard government in 2007.

Last night on ABC TV's 7.30, Mr Howard said he would leave the tactics of labour reform to the Opposition.

But he said that "at some point this country has to wind back the re-regulation of the labour market".

"It's blindingly obvious that one of the worst mistakes Julia Gillard has made is to re-regulate the labour market. It is affecting our productivity and it will therefore affect our competitiveness," Mr Howard said.

Asked on Radio 3AW if he endorsed Mr Howard's remarks, Mr Abbott described Mr Howard as a "very, very shrewd observer" and added: "Essentially he is right."

"I think there is no doubt that the [Labor Government's] Fair Work legislation took the pendulum from one side and swung it right back to the other side," Mr Abbott said.

Asked if he meant deregulation of the labour market, Mr Abbott said: "I think we need freedom. I think we ought to be able to trust the businesses and the workers of Australia to come to arrangements which suit themselves."

Told that it sounds like "a version of WorkChoices", Mr Abbott moved to distance himself from the description.

"Look, we've gone over this time and time again. The fact of the matter is that it's in the past. It's absolutely in the past. We want to tackle the problems of now, not to dwell in the past."

Sorry, this video has expired Watch John Howard's interview with 7.30's Chris Uhlmann

The Howard government's WorkChoices laws provided for individual bargaining between companies and workers as well as excluding businesses under 100 employees from unfair dismissal laws.

Asked how his vision of workplace laws is different from WorkChoices, Mr Abbott said: "We want the businesses of Australia, the businesses that are currently under terrible pressure ... we want them to come to us and tell us how government can make it easier for them to compete and employ."

The issue has become a thorny one for Mr Abbott since former Liberal minister Peter Reith earlier this month raised the question of deregulating the labour market - particularly in the retail sector - and vowed to campaign on the issue.

At the same time, Coalition industrial relations spokesman Eric Abetz called on the Government to bring forward its planned review of the Fair Work Act given a Productivity Commission report which found ''bricks and mortar'' retailers could use more workplace flexibility to compete with online shopping.

But Mr Abbott said an Opposition policy review into industry "will be about trying to look at the extent to which the current Fair Work laws are making it harder for businesses to compete and for people to be employed".

"Now if that involves changes to workplace relations, well, we're only too happy to consider it. But they've got to come to us with the problems that they think the existing workplace law is creating," he said.

Government attacks

The Government has seized on Mr Abbott's comments, with workplace relations minister Chris Evans saying the Opposition Leader now favours a return to WorkChoices.

"What they're talking about is the flexibility for employers to tell employees that they are going to work for lower conditions," Mr Evans told a press conference in Brisbane.

"What he's saying is that we'll return to individual agreements, where the most vulnerable workers lost penalty rates, lost overtime, lost annual leave loadings and saw their take-home pay reduced.

"Penalty rates are a core part of the take-home pay of firefighters, nurses, cleaners, retail workers, cameramen - a whole range of people rely on penalty rates as part of their income.

"Mr Abbott is now using words like flexibility and freedom for employers, which is code for WorkChoices."