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

I thank the member for Bonner for her question and know that she is very concerned to ensure that working people in her electorate have fairness at work and that the employers in her electorate have all the flexibility they need to get on with their businesses. In the lead-up to the 2007 election the Labor Party published its workplace relations policies, and in the election it received a clear mandate from the Australian people for those policies. I remind the House that our election policy clearly stated:

A Rudd Labor Government will introduce a simple system for determining who can bring an unfair dismissal claim based on three circumstances:

• an employee who is employed by an employer who employs 15 or more employees must have been employed for 6 months;
• an employee who is employed by an employer who employs fewer than 15 employees must have been employed for 12 months …

That is on page 19 of Forward with Fairness, our policy implementation plan published in August 2007. The fact that this policy was well known to the Australian community and was campaigned on by the Labor Party was acknowledged by none other than the Leader of the Opposition. The Leader of the Opposition on 13 December last year said—this was recorded in the Australian newspaper and not denied by the Leader of the Opposition—in his words, not mine:

… Labor took a proposal to change the unfair dismissal laws to the election and won. So we must respect that.

In the Fair Work Bill debate that is unfolding in the Senate, we ask of the Liberal Party no more and no less than this: to back the words of their leader—apparently a test too hard for them. We are asking them for no more and no less than this: to back the words of their leader. Of course, their leader has also said Work Choices is dead, but now we see in the Senate the Liberal Party doing everything they can to maintain the Work Choices rip-offs.

Yesterday in question time I unveiled a new rip-off from the Liberal Party. When in government they ripped redundancy entitlements off working people and in opposition they wanted to do the same trick. They wanted to rip redundancy entitlements off working people. The Liberal Party had put forward an amendment which would have changed the definition of ‘small business’ for the purpose of redundancy arrangements and would have ripped redundancy entitlements off working Australians. When I presented this to the House—

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