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

I love to hear the laughter from the other side, because they know. There are a couple of very experienced trade unionists on the other side here, and they know that the trade union movement has no interest in unfair dismissal. They know that they are about to see the death of Work Choices become a revival of Work Choices at the hands of the Deputy Prime Minister because she is too stubborn, too pig-headed, to agree to a sensible, realistic change to the definition of small business—something that will make a bad change less bad, something that will result in fewer job losses, something that will preserve employment in small business—and because she is too stiff-necked to bend to that amendment, even though she has agreed to 225 others. We saw the whole movement to change the industrial relations laws that the union movement put tens of millions of dollars into. They spent so much time advocating it, and now, thanks to an incompetent lawyer, they are going to run it into a brick wall.

We have talked about ambulance chasers in this place. The real problem is when you pursue a political goal and then discover you have run into a brick wall. That is exactly what the Deputy Prime Minister has done. The only reason we are here today, the only reason the government is not compromising, is that it wants to make one last pathetic political attempt to prop up the incompetent, bungling state government of Anna Bligh. One last pathetic point, then you will have to go back to your friends in the union movement and say: ‘We’ve crashed the whole plan. The whole project has been crashed over the difference between 15 and 20 full-time equivalents.’ That is what you have crashed the whole project over.

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