David Bradbury (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If that suits you, Madam Deputy Speaker, I withdraw. What the opposition and particularly the Leader of the Opposition stand for is opposing things—oppose, oppose, oppose. If you really want to have a look at what it is that they stand for, when you strip away all of the hot air that is the opposition of the opposition, they stand for one thing and that is Work Choices. They stand for ripping away the standards, the conditions and the wages of working people. They did it when they were in office and the sad reality is that they failed to hear the message the Australian people sent them at the last election, and that was: ‘Get your hands off our penalty rates, get your hands off our unfair dismissal protections and get your hands off the protections that mean that we are not forced to go into workplaces and bargain one-on-one with an employer that has vastly superior bargaining power.’ They were the messages that they sent to the former government. The failure of this opposition to hear those messages is something I intend to spend every waking hour between now and the next election informing and advising my community about. I seek leave to have the graphs I referred to incorporated in Hansard.

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