Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Australians might be easygoing people, but there is one thing we will not move on and that is having our sense of the fair go attacked by a government. As the member for Longman indicated a minute ago, it all started back in 2004 when control of the Senate went to John Howard. I remember that sad day when a Queensland National Party senator made that phone call to John Howard indicating joy that the current Leader of the Nationals in the Senate, Barnaby Joyce, had been elected. It is a great sense of bookending justice, I suppose, that we had some Queenslanders responsible for a descent into madness in control of the Senate and then we had in Kevin Rudd a Queenslander restoring sanity.

Work Choices went too far. The Labor Party knew it. The unions knew it and those people who never get it wrong—the Australian people—knew it as well. Unfortunately, not everyone in Australia understood it. The Liberal Party obviously did not understand it.

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