Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks, President. Senator Sterle, despite the Chicken Little predictions about the economy closing down from Senator Cash and her colleagues—I heard Senator Cash interjecting about small businesses. I'm very pleased to tell Senator Cash that, in the most recent figures, there were nearly 2.6 million small businesses in Australia, 2.7 per cent more than the same time in 2023. So wages are up, unemployment is low, jobs are up, small businesses are up—every single thing that Senator Cash and her colleagues predicted would go wrong as a result of our laws has been disproven, and in fact Australians are getting higher wages and more jobs as a result of our reforms.

We know the Liberals will always stand in the way of positive changes to Australia's industrial relations laws. What we've also heard recently is from the new shadow minister, the member for Goldstein. He has labelled working from home a form of apartheid. That is the current view of the coalition on workplace relations. (Time expired)