OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott will defy business calls to make it easier to sack workers, revealing he has no plans to change Labor's unfair dismissal laws.

Despite individual contracts once being a bedrock Liberal Party policy, Mr Abbott said he was not about to throw the industrial relations "textbook" at unfair dismissal laws. "It's not something we are getting a huge number of complaints about," he said.

"In the end, our approach with workplace relations is to solve problems rather than throw the textbook at the issue. If businesses aren't coming to us in large numbers saying unfair dismissal is a significant problem, we are probably able to say we will keep the situation under review rather than make any significant changes."

As the Liberal leader prepares to unveil his workplace relations policy, his refusal to reform unfair dismissal laws is a blow to Labor's hopes of running a scare campaign but will anger some conservatives.

Currently, small business employees cannot make a claim for unfair dismissal in the first 12 months of employment.

Mr Abbott is expected to establish a royal commission into union corruption if elected prime minister, along with a crackdown on union power including the right to enter workplaces and the matters unions can negotiate on when striking workplace agreements.After describing WorkChoices as "a mistake" in public forums last week, Mr Abbott said he would like to make individual flexibility agreements "more flexible".

These agreements are not individual contracts that can undercut award conditions but flexibility provisions within existing enterprise bargaining agreements. "They've promised much but delivered little," Mr Abbott said.

Council of Small Business Australia president Peter Strong said the award system and penalty rates were more of a headache for operators than unfair dismissal.

"Looking at the figures there's not a lot of unfair dismissal claims," Mr Strong said. "There's about 16,000 claims a year. About half of those were rejected.

"When you are caught up in unfair dismissal dispute it's terrible but it's not like there's 100,000 of us being dragged through it."

Prime Minister Julia Gillard yesterday seized on Mr Abbott's interview in The Sunday Telegraph and his "aspiration" to reduce the tax to GDP ratio."If he wants to reduce that by a percentage point, that's a $15 billion reduction in revenue in a year," she said.

"He'd have to take an axe to payments on childcare, to carers, to students."

It's understood Fair Work Australia will announce a new pro bono scheme for independent legal advice to self-represented parties in unfair dismissal hearings.