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

I thank the member for Flynn for his question. I know that he is deeply interested in ensuring that there is fairness in Australian workplaces and that there is an end to Work Choices. In the lead-up to the 2007 election, the Labor Party campaigned that if elected we would get rid of Work Choices and replace it with our Forward with Fairness plan, published in documents like this—this is the policy implementation plan—from August 2007. In these policies we promised two things very specifically. We said that every Australian worker would be able to rely on National Employment Standards and that those National Employment Standards would deal with redundancy—that is, that people would be able to get redundancy pay and no-one would be able to have that stripped away from them. Of course, one of the principal vices of Work Choices is that it meant that people could have their redundancy pay stripped away with not one cent of compensation. Very specifically in this document we said that we would institute an ability for good workers, people who have proved themselves, to make an unfair dismissal claim, and we said in our policy, very specifically in this document, that we would make special arrangements for businesses with fewer than 15 employees. Two promises, one on redundancy and one on unfair dismissal, are contained in the Fair Work Bill. This is a government that believes in making a promise and then delivering it.

I am asked about any obstacles to the delivery of these promises. Mr Speaker, can I say that I thought last December that perhaps the Liberal Party had seen the light and would enable the government to deliver these promises. In particular, I remember reading the front page of my Australian newspaper on 13 December last year. I read these words:

… Labor took a proposal to change the unfair dismissal laws to the election and won … So we must respect that.

See this speech in context