Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

We have 600 pages against their 1,500-page Work Choices legislation. If you want to make the difference between 1,500 pages on the one hand and 600 on the other, I would say that most people could understand the difference. Small businesses will have the confidence to employ new staff with the balanced fair dismissal laws and, by encouraging productivity based enterprise bargaining, the fair work legislation will over time foster both productivity growth and wages growth, to the benefit of both employers and employees and to the long-run benefit of economic growth and job creation.

Beyond the detail of the legislation, what this is about is a question of principle. For a long time, we on this side of politics have stood for fairness in the workplace. For a long time—a very long time—those opposite have stood for a set of industrial relations laws which would rip away basic conditions from working families. That is why, when they got half a chance with control of the Senate, they did it; they ripped those conditions away. Each one of those sitting opposite who were in the parliament at the time stood up here and voted for the passage of Work Choices. The Leader of the Opposition, the member for Wentworth, did exactly the same, and now he pretends he does not believe in those principles. As the Treasurer said before, with the member for Wentworth, the Leader of the Opposition, watch not what he says but what he does. What he did on 12 occasions was to vote for this extreme industrial relations legislation. What he said yesterday is that he will not do it again, and I think the people of Australia would understand the difference between those two sets of principles. The difference is clear on this, and working families across Australia know this very well. At last we have the prospect of fairness and balance in the workplaces of Australia, which gets the balance right between working families and workers, and their employers on the one hand against the Work Choices regime that it has replaced. But, if those opposite ever chance to be back on this side of the House and in government again, we know for certain, given the debate that goes on internally, that this political posturing which they have engaged in, which says that they will not bring in Work Choices again, is purely that—political posturing. Any return to the treasury bench would guarantee a return of Work Choices, however they may posture on the way through.

I would say to the House, and through the House to the nation at large: working families under the legislation which has been introduced by the Deputy Prime Minister will have a fair and balanced set of laws for the first time in a long, long time. The only way to ensure that those laws are properly passed is for them to gain speedy passage through the Senate and for those opposite not to engage in the normal double-timing tactics that they have engaged in in the past, pretending to be supporters one day but in their heart of hearts resolving to oppose it when next they get the chance to do so.

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