Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Hansard source

I certainly am speaking about the legislation, Madam Deputy Speaker. To bring people who have lost loved ones on the roads into the galleries of this parliament and use them in a political campaign is low-rent at best. There is not a word about safety in this document. There is not a word about the link between high pay and safer roads. We know—and the coalition has pursued this for many years—that, to increase safety on roads, you need to increase infrastructure funding to improve the Australian road network. That is an ongoing task and it is something I agree with members opposite about. It is an ongoing task, particularly in rural areas where large transport firms operate more regularly. In fact there have been, sadly, many terrible road deaths in my own electorate on the freeway which connects Melbourne with Adelaide—not all of them have involved heavy transport, but many of them have. It is an ongoing battle. It is an ongoing issue which needs to be given a lot of attention—and, I must say, state governments across the country have given it a lot of attention. There remain many roads, however, which need to be improved and there are additional measures we can look at to improve road safety. Shifting more freight off roads and onto rail is a good idea. It is something we should be pursuing and giving consideration to.

But this bill is not about that. This bill is about attacking entrepreneurs in our society—those who seek to become small businesses and not employees. We know the Labor Party have never liked independent contractors. They voted against the legislation in the mid-2000s which defined independent contractors and gave them their own set of laws. This bill is about is dragging those people into the employment net so they are accessible for union membership. We saw Mr Sheldon and his mates last year in the Qantas dispute; we saw their behaviour in relation to a great Australian company. They went on TV day after day bringing industrial mayhem down on that company, trying to drag it down. They will run around and sign these people up, not to increase their safety—no, no, no—but to increase the numbers and the power within the Australian Labor Party. That is what this bill is actually all about. We know of no better example of that—no further proof is needed—than the transfer of this bill from the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport to the 'minister for big union mates'. That is what happened the week before this bill was introduced into the parliament. That is exactly what has been sought—

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