Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

Well, I hope you have some. I hope you have a humane element in your body. If you did, you would say to those workers who are working in those workplaces, 'We want to make sure the occupational health and safety issues which your union and our employers have identified are actually what they should be, and we want to get rid of those businesses which don't look after the interests of the working people of this country and have slack working practices.'

I was also on the executive of the Northern Territory Trades and Labor Council, which I was very proud to be. People in this country, even those members opposite, do not know this but most Australians, if not all working Australians, owe their working conditions in some form or another to the work of trade union officials and trade unions. Let us be very clear about it, unlike the members opposite: we on this side of the chamber do not say, because we are proud of the trade union movement and are members of trade unions, that we are going to walk away from the fact that those trade unions work extremely hard for the benefit of working Australians, that they look after the interests of working Australians and do so with an obligation on them by their members to make sure they look after them appropriately. That is the job of a trade union official and that is what they are bound to do.

This Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014 seeks to amend the Fair Work Act in response to the Fair Work Act review. The panel which undertook the review made 43 recommendations. Prior to the election, as with other promises made by this government, the coalition promised to implement the recommendations of the review without change. Surprise, surprise—this, as with so many other promises, has been broken. The government has gone beyond the panel's recommendations, despite promising not to, and the central recommendations are not being implemented without change. This bill, like so much of what this government does, is a poorly disguised vehicle for attacking the conditions of workers and the right of unions to represent them. Consequently, we oppose central elements of this legislation.

We know—and even those on the opposition would understand and recognise the truth of this statement—that the Howard government was thrown out largely because of its very, very poor industrial relations record and, of course, the legislation which it had the gall to pass through this chamber. It was a record of attacks against the rights and conditions of Australian workers. The then opposition leader said Work Choices was 'dead, buried and cremated'. In part, this bill is a resurrection of some of those dead principles. It seeks to undermine workers' rights to fair representation and fair treatment in the workplace.

This government has quickly established itself as a government with total disregard for Australian voters and for the promises that were made to them prior to the election. That is the guts of a lot of this. You must have honesty and integrity. I saw at a book launch this morning where the Prime Minister spoke about integrity and what we should be doing. What he should be doing is being honest with the Australian people. That is what he should be doing. And what he should be doing is apologising to the Australian people for those things he said before the election, the promises he made before the election, and the lies that have been told subsequently, and apologise to the Australian people for his and his government's behaviour. His and his government's behaviour not only in the context of this piece of legislation, where, as I said, promises remain broken, but also of course the pronouncements about no cuts to education, no new taxes, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST, and no cuts for the ABC or SBS. We all know what this Prime Minister should be doing. He should get up in this parliament and apologise to the Australian people for the lies that have been told.

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