Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

Once again we have the Deputy Prime Minister coming into this House and really gilding the lily on the circumstances of why we find ourselves in this situation. She talks about the Liberal Party moving to amend the Safe Work Australia Bill 2008 in the Senate but, of course, the Liberal Party does not have the numbers in the Senate. In the Senate you need to make an argument and you need to get other people to agree with you. Nobody else in the Senate agreed with the government on Safe Work Australia. Not one other member of the Senate outside of the government parties—not the Greens, not Senator Xenophon, not Senator Fielding; none of them—would agree with the government on Safe Work Australia.

The problem with the Deputy Prime Minister is that she always refuses to engage with senators about their amendments. I offered that in very good faith to her on a number of occasions. Every time the bill came back to this House I was very happy to talk to her about these changes. The changes are relatively minor. But what we find is that, because of the Deputy Prime Minister’s intransigence, because of her arrogance, because of her refusal to sit down and talk to the senators about these changes, she is now in this position. We have come to this impasse because of the government’s intransigence.

I just want to go through the amendments, because they are relatively sensible. I would like to inform the House again of what they are, because once you look at these amendments you realise that it is an extraordinary thing for the Deputy Prime Minister just to say, ‘I’m not interested in talking to the senators; I insist on having my way.’ What is the government’s Senate strategy? Is it just going in there and standing over them and saying, ‘We insist on having our own way; we’re not going to negotiate; we’re not going to give you anything’?

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