Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the explanation.

You would accept the minister’s response if it had some accuracy behind it, but the reality is that in the last estimates round all the outstanding questions asked of DEWR in respect of why they have not responded were answered this way. The heads of the departments said that all the answers had been provided to the minister’s office. They are sitting in the minister’s office being unanswered to us and to the Senate. The minister has the answers, which go to the question of the operations of the Work Choices legislation, the most vicious attack on working people’s terms and conditions of employment we have ever witnessed in this country. We have known that this attack reduces the wages and conditions of Australian workers and the government has known it too. The government knew it in the first round of Senate estimates when they provided the statistics to demonstrate that categorically. Since then they have stopped collecting the statistics and stopped answering our questions, yet the minister has the answers but just does not want to pass them on.

Up until the minister now, the minister and everyone else in the government have been saying how fair the Work Choices legislation is. When we asked questions, over two rounds of estimates, which went to that detail, what did we get back? No answers were received by the Senate. The answers simply went to the minister’s office, and the minister then used that information to draft amendments, because what those answers will tell the minister is that the government were absolutely wrong. Work Choices is unfair. Work Choices does reduce the wages and conditions and the family circumstances of working people in this country.

It is inappropriate that the minister continues to sit on the answers and not provide them to the Senate committee, especially when we are on the eve of another round of Senate estimates. That will be two rounds of Senate estimates without having the questions answered. We will go through another one; the questions will not be answered. On top of that, we have a Senate inquiry into the proposed amendment legislation on Work Choices. How is the Senate and how are Senate committees expected to do their work properly if these very fundamental questions about the operation of Work Choices are not provided to the Senate to enable us as a Senate committee and the Senate as a whole to use that information in our deliberations? It is completely unsatisfactory. The minister’s response that somehow these questions have taken up enormous amounts of time and resources, I must say, does not ring true because every department, in every instance, has done the work and provided the answers to the minister. The minister is simply sitting on the answers. The government do not want to provide the answers to the Senate because they know it proves what the opposition has been saying about Work Choices since day one. It is time the minister convinced the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations to come clean and present to the committee the answer to the questions.

Question agreed to.