Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Shortland for her question. Today in the Senate, the Liberal Party voted for the continuation of Work Choices. In order to do that—to vote for a continued industrial relations extremism and a continued ripping off of Australian working families—it tried to hide behind creating an inquiry. One of the terms of reference of that inquiry is—would you believe it!—the ‘economic and social impacts from the abolition of individual statutory agreements’. This has come from a political party which, in government, deliberately did not want to know how Australian workplace agreements were hurting working families.

They could have collected this data, analysed it and released it but they did not want to know how bad these agreements were. They did not want them to come to public light. Given the members of the Liberal Party used to get up in this place and screech on about how good AWAs were for working families, for women, for young people—for all Australians—you would have thought they would have comprehensively analysed the data at their disposal. But, of course, they did not. What we do know is that, in May 2006, the Office of the Employment Advocate revealed that it had been reviewing AWAs to determine how many were stripping away what the former government deceptively and contemptuously called ‘protected award conditions’.

I welcome the Deputy Leader of the Opposition’s new-found interest in things like annual leave loading, because the data showed this: under the government of which she was a cabinet member, 64 per cent of Australian workplace agreements cut annual leave loading. That is how much she cares about annual leave loading—64 per cent of those agreements cut annual leave loading. Then, 63 per cent of them cut penalty rates. Does she now care about penalty rates because she has made the short walk from here to there? She clearly did not care about them then—63 per cent of those agreements, no penalty rates.

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