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

The party of Work Choices, right on cue! They have never met a rip-off they are not prepared to defend, even when the people they are ripping off are businesses who are caught in this processing nightmare. Now, at the average rate of processing countenanced by the Howard government, these agreements would take 8½ months to process. Let me tell you who needs to be apologising to Australian businesses. It is conceivable that, after five, six, seven or eight months of delay in processing, a small business in this country could be told that its agreement had failed. If you were told that your agreement had failed a fortnight after it was made, you would pay up the back pay. It might be a bit inconvenient, but you would deal with that. If you were told it had failed eight months after it had been made then that quantum of back pay could break a small business. That is the shambles that was Work Choices, brought to this country by the Liberal Party of Australia.

They sit there and pretend that they care about Australian business when they are responsible for this red-tape nightmare. Like other messes left by the Howard government, we will clear this up. We are accelerating the rate of processing so at least employers and employees know what is going on. Of course, today we have passed the legislation which ends the making of Australian workplace agreements—the first step in getting rid of Work Choices, which failed working families and failed businesses.

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