Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

The reason that we need to move the suspension of standing orders is that we need to debate the censuring of this Prime Minister, because he has been asleep on his watch, while thousands of Australian workers have lost their jobs. There is also the fact that the government cannot even see that this is such an important day, such a tragic day. They cannot explain why we would want to move a censure motion to have a debate in this place. We wanted to censure the Prime Minister. They chose to deny us that, and so, of course, we are debating this.

But let's be very clear. In December, we saw a Treasurer goad an iconic company about them leaving our shores, and they decided to leave. Yesterday, we saw Toyota follow Holden out the door, leaving thousands and thousands of workers without jobs and leaving hundreds of thousands of workers without any certainty for the future. (Time expired)

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