Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I am just reminding everybody of the Work Choices propaganda that Australian taxpayers paid for—$2 million on those booklets and then $110,000 to store them from October 2005 until 28 September 2007, more than 3½ million of them. And, on the topic of pulping fiction: whoever is the Harvey Keitel-Winston Wolfe character of the Howard-Costello government, whoever used to do the clean-up jobs, then ordered that these booklets be pulped—and they were pulped, immediately before the election campaign started. But we found 436,000 of them that the clean-up job missed, and we are ensuring that today they are pulped, just like the Rudd Labor government will pulp Work Choices.

On the question of pulp fiction, the Manager of Opposition Business is today trying to get away with the biggest fiction of them all: he is trying to pretend that members of the Howard government, Howard government ministers, did not know that Work Choices could hurt Australian working families. He is trying to pretend that the only Australians who did not know Work Choices could hurt working families were the Australians sitting around the Howard government ministerial table. Apparently they are the only ones who missed out on the news. The member for Higgins, hunched over Ian McLachlan’s wallet note—apparently he missed out on the news.

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