Craig Thomson (Dobell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to talk about Work Choices and the effect it has been having in my electorate of Dobell, particularly in light of the flip, flop and flapping that we are seeing from the opposition on this issue. In my seat of Dobell over 30,000 people commute every day to Sydney. That puts the people of Dobell in a very different market situation to many other people and makes them far more vulnerable to the effects of Work Choices than perhaps some in other electorates. Unemployment is at over eight per cent in the seat of Dobell, so we do not have a pool of labour that can use its market position in any sense. So when the unfair Work Choices legislation came into effect it affected the citizens of Dobell far more than it did some of the other citizens around the country.

Of concern to me and to the families in Dobell is the position of the opposition. We are not quite sure where they are in terms of Work Choices. We have the deputy leader out there one day saying that she needs to fight to the death on AWAs. Yesterday she made a press statement and quite clearly no-one could understand what her position was. We know the Leader of the Opposition will take any position that gets him a couple of votes in the caucus room because he is just concerned about his job and whether he will still be the leader next week. And what about the member for Wentworth? What position is he going to have on this issue? In his position, he is so far removed from reality and ordinary people that he certainly cannot understand ordinary working families and the pain that they have. What we have here is an opposition that is all over the place in terms of Work Choices.

We as the government have a clear mandate from the Australian people. Work Choices was the single most important issue in the last election that was voted on by the Australian public. It is something they want to have changed and, even with all this indecision, this flip, flop, flapping, that we have from the opposition, we still have them in the Senate trying to draw this process out and make it longer than it necessarily needs to be. What we need from the opposition is for them to accept that they actually lost the last election. They lost the election largely because they were out of touch with the Australian people and largely because of their position on Work Choices. They need to take a reality check, move ahead and ensure that the position that the government put forward before the election is one that can go through as quickly as possible and is one that will not in any way be slowed down by the opposition. It is one that we need to have as quickly as we can.