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

I thank the member for Hasluck for her question. Of course, she chairs the House of Representatives committee that is conducting an inquiry into pay equity. As a result she would be well aware that the workers who suffered the worst under Work Choices, as the statistics undoubtedly show, were women workers—rip-offs of women workers, working Australians, that were endorsed by the Liberal Party, by the Leader of the Opposition and by every member of the Howard government, and that are still endorsed by those people.

Apart from their endorsements of the rip-offs of working Australians, of course, they endorsed a shambolic system that was bound up in red tape. The member for Hasluck has asked me to provide an update to the House on the question of the processing of employment agreements. I am pleased to do so, because Work Choices was bad for Australian workers, enabling them to be ripped off, and bad for business, which had to intersect with a red-tape nightmare. As a result of changes that the Howard government made to Work Choices last year, the Workplace Authority started with a backlog of 54,000 agreements—54,000 agreements sitting in a ginormous pile, unable to be processed because of the shambles and red tape of the Howard government under Work Choices. Small businesses and big businesses—businesses that employ people—were waiting desperately for an answer but, because of the shambles of the Howard government and its Work Choices laws, they could not get one. That queue blew out to more than 100,000. It fell to this government to clean up the mess that the Liberal Party created for business with this huge backlog.

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