Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

You should listen. He said, ‘Anyone can go to jail if they get the right lawyer’—and, boy, has the labour movement got the right lawyer in the Deputy Prime Minister! Work Choices died at 2.30 am this morning, and the only people trying to revive it are the Australian Labor Party. The Prime Minister talked yesterday about putting the electrodes back onto the body of Work Choices. Well, let me tell you: the only people applying those electrodes are ‘Dr Rudd’ and his companion ‘Dr Gillard’. There they are, trying to revive it for political purposes.

We can have debates here about policy and we can have debates here about politics, but what we have here today is a debate about nothing more than pig-headedness. What we have are a government that brought their legislation so incompetently drafted, so pathetically prepared, that they have already agreed to 225 amendments—and they thanked the Independents and the Greens. ‘Thank you, Senator Xenophon,’ the Deputy Prime Minister said. She was so sanctimonious about that. The reality is that the key amendments here are the amendments we supported—the changes to right of entry and the changes to greenfields sites. Those are changes that we fought for, and they would never have been achieved without our advocacy. But what is holding us up? Why are we still here? We are here because the Deputy Prime Minister is so colossally stubborn, so vain, so determined to wring the last bit of political value out of this.

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