Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

As the honourable senator knows, the government has ensured that in Work Choices there is a guarantee that workers cannot be sacked for unlawful reasons, and they have been set out in some considerable detail in the legislation. That is what provides the workers of this country with protection against unlawful termination. The Labor Party is still harking on about its unfair dismissal social experiment, which has been a failure for the men and women of Australia who have sought employment and have been denied employment until we were able to remove that from the statute book. Make no mistake: the unfair dismissal provision only came into legislation under the Keating government. It was not as though it had been there forever and a day; it had only come into the Commonwealth legislation as a social experiment by the Keating government, something which demonstrably failed.