Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

And I would like the minister to come to the dispatch box when he replies in this debate and to say, on each and every occasion that he refers to these laws, ‘Work Choices’, because that is what the government has always called them. But of course the cover-up does not stop there. Yesterday in question time and again today, we tried to get the truth out of the Howard government—the Prime Minister, the Special Minister of State—about the magnitude of its taxpayer funded advertising campaign, and we still do not know the truth: how much money this government is prepared to spend to dig itself out of the political pit that Work Choices has tipped it into.

What we do know is that the aim of the campaign is purely political. The Prime Minister admitted that when he announced it last Friday. He said, in justifying the campaign, that there is ‘Labor and ACTU propaganda floating around’. There was no pretence then that it was a genuine government information campaign; it was going to be what it is: propaganda, pure and simple, in the interests of the Howard government. On the question of it being a political campaign, we do know that this government has polled and polled and polled to design this campaign, and it has never told us how much that polling has cost Australian taxpayers. The minister refuses to say whether or not he has seen that polling, and the Prime Minister has alluded to continuing that—

See this speech in context