Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am talking about the Appropriation Bill, Parliamentary Secretary. The tradition has been that you can talk more broadly on challenges for the economy. I would have thought industrial relations was a challenge for the economy. You are the parliamentary secretary for Western Australia, are you not? Big strikes are up—and this is the big difference here. It is going to create that resource bottleneck, which Glenn Stevens talks about, that you do not want to create in the economy.

We need to have a balanced look at these laws, and I think the Deputy Prime Minister has gone too far with the Fair Work laws. The leader of our party has said very clearly that in some aspects the previous government went too far on workplace relations. Unfortunately, what we have seen is the Deputy Prime Minister paying back significant debts—and we saw some of those debts earlier this week with the donation figures in the papers. She has taken this—

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