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

I move:

That amendments (31) to (34), (94) and (136) be disagreed to.

The Leader of the Opposition calls me stubborn. Stubborn in pursuit of an election mandate; stubborn in pursuit of delivering a promise—well, I’ll take that. I cannot wait to see the bumper stickers from the Liberal Party at the next election: ‘Don’t vote Labor, they’re too stubborn in delivering what they promise to you.’ I cannot wait to see those on the back of every Liberal members’ car at the next election.

Yes, we are stubborn in doing what we said we would do because we believe in telling the Australian people the truth. I understand that the concept of telling the Australian people the truth does not resonate with members of the Liberal Party. I understand that they struggle with that, because they did not tell the Australian people the truth about Work Choices. As recently as 13 December last year, the Leader of the Opposition was saying:

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

Clearly, if that had been a statement of truth then we would not be having the debate that we are about to have now about Labor’s unfair dismissal laws. So this is the side of the House that is stubborn in telling the truth and stubborn in delivering its election promises, and over there we have promises given and not delivered personally by the Leader of the Opposition as recently as 13 December 2008.

Compared with the carry-on that we have seen from the other side, let us be clear about what the amendments are. We went to the last election and we said that we would bring unfair dismissal laws back to this country so that good workers, if they were unfairly dismissed, had recourse and remedy—something Work Choices basically stripped away for Australian workers. We said we understood that there should be special arrangements for small business and small business should be defined as fewer than 15 employees. Why? Because that is the known definition under the workplace relations law for redundancy and we wanted the system to be simple and the same—special arrangements for small businesses on redundancy and unfair dismissal, same definition. We took that to the election and we are seeking to deliver it, stubborn in pursuit of delivering what we said we would to the Australian people.

The reason the argument has boiled down to this is not that the Liberal Party sees some great magic in the number 15 versus the number 20. Indeed, last night in the Senate they were advocating 25. Their position in government was that workers should not have any entitlement to contest their dismissal. The only reason we are debating this here today is that they had to comb through for something that they could get the support of the Independent senators on so that they had something over which to keep twisting and turning and opposing the Fair Work Bill, so that they could stand another day, another 24 hours, in defence of Work Choices. That is all it is about.

Then the Liberal Party moved two other very silly amendments in the Senate as part of this twisting and turning in defence of Work Choices. It made a nonsensical change to the objects of the act. In a bill that talks about enterprise level bargaining throughout, for whatever reason they thought they would change it to ‘enterprise level or workplace’—a change that does not make any sense, and we are rejecting it. And then, in their desperation in the Senate, unbelievably, the Liberal Party moved to strip out of this bill protections for independent contractors from being discriminated against because they are not members of unions. This is what the Liberal Party moved to take out of this bill, to strip the words ‘independent contractor’ out so that all freedom of association provisions for independent contractors would be gone. We will not stand for those kinds of silly amendments and we are rejecting one of their independent contractor amendments through this motion.

All this is about, all it has ever been about and all it ever will be about is that this side of the House believes in fairness and decency at work and the Liberal Party does not. This side of the House fought Work Choices and we always will. The Liberal Party is the party of Work Choices and always will be.

See this speech in context