Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

You are not scratching your head, perhaps, but the level of confidence in the community in the decisions taken in this place is at an all-time low. Not even you could deny that. It is actually factual. Instead we have a tax on working people and on the rights of ordinary Australians to go about their business, to be fairly paid, to be not ripped off at work and to go home safe. This government thinks that it is a real legend for cracking down on unions. Sorry, but you are really letting the country down.

We will be moving a series of amendments to this bill. My colleague Senator Faruqi will be doing that when the time comes. The time will be very soon, because we are being guillotined on this. One of the amendments we will be moving is to make sure that this bill does not go ahead until we have the level playing field of a national anticorruption body. You want integrity? Then don't be selective. Don't in fact just bully one sector. Why don't you actually bring in integrity across the board? That is the amendment we will be moving. We don't want this bill to pass at all. We think it stinks. We think it is an attack, we think it is politically motivated and we think it will hurt genuine, ordinary workers. But if it does go ahead—and it looks like you have sewn up the numbers for that to happen—then at the very least have the decency to be fair-minded and to ensure that the so-called integrity in your bill's name, in the biggest misnomer in the universe, is actually going to be across the board with a national integrity commission brought in. I will leave that to my colleague to introduce.

When we have the chance to be making decent policies that improve people's lives, protect workers and—hey!—even address climate change, address financial inequality and actually fix the real problems that are out there, we have a government just kicking unions because they think it is politically popular, they think it is a nice favour for their corporate donors and, frankly, they have nothing better to do.

Well, wake up. This is why the Australian public is so disenchanted with politics. It's why the vote for big parties is the lowest it has been in history, and it does not help social cohesion, let alone economic outcomes for communities or environmental outcomes for the planet, to be descending to this sort of debate.