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

I know the facts are not helping the opposition, but screaming does not change the facts. So let us listen to the facts for the first time. Section 431 does not enable a minister to just get out a sheet of paper; the minister would have to have the evidence before them that would enable them to come to the conclusion about the national economy. In terms of advice and the extension of procedural fairness, the obligation may extend to hearing from the parties affected, and when the declaration is made it is subject to judicial review. So if the minister makes a declaration—bearing in mind that this has never been done in Australia before—it would very likely end up before a court, and a court would be able to traverse all of the facts and all of the circumstances.

If the government had taken that course, it would have been a step into a legal unknown in the sense that this section had never been tested before, and inevitably, given the circumstances of this dispute, it would have ended up in a court case. So rather than putting the nation in the grip of that legal uncertainty for week after week and month after month—which the Leader of the Opposition is clearly recommending—we used the section of the act that has resulted in industrial action being terminated and planes getting back into the sky this afternoon. The Leader of the Opposition is trying to peddle this falsehood because he is desperately unhappy that the Fair Work system has worked to terminate this industrial action. He is always barracking for his political interest rather than the national interest. The performance of the opposition today has been truly shoddy indeed.

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