Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the minister for that clarification. The difficulty that we have on this side, Minister, is that the Prime Minister promised to recall the parliament before Christmas and did not. So just because there is an election policy does not mean that it necessarily translates into the legislation that is before us. What this now highlights is that AWAs—those obscene, nasty agreements that were a blot on the industrial landscape!—are now, under Labor’s own legislation, going to be allowed to continue indefinitely. I would have thought social justice and all those other terms that the Labor Party bandied about during the election campaign would have demanded that AWAs be abolished, got rid of holus-bolus because of all these terrible sins that they committed—how they ripped workers off. Labor is now saying that all those AWAs, even the AWAs being made today, I assume, can continue indefinitely, irrespective of what Labor may have said about AWAs in the past.