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

I am endeavouring to explain to the Leader of the Opposition the way in which the Work Choices laws that he supports operate. Let me explain to him the way those laws operate. An employer can make a greenfields collective agreement and just impose it on people unilaterally. That can happen under the laws that he supports. An employer can present an employee with a take-it-or-leave-it AWA which strips away basic award conditions for no compensation or no proper compensation. They are the laws that he supports. People can make collective agreements under Work Choices and, because the benchmark for those collective agreements is the so-called flawed fairness test, which the member for North Sydney spent $121 million of taxpayers’ money advertising—

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