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

As I have explained to this parliament in the past, when we replaced Work Choices and its dreadful rip-offs of working people, when we replaced the fact that people could be dismissed for no reason, when we replaced the industrial laws that had hurt working women the most, when we replaced those vile laws from those opposite, the Leader of the Opposition and the opposition generally, what we did was create the Fair Work Act and fairness and decency at work. What we also did in relation to the provisions for registered organisations was effectively bring them from the former legislation into new legislation—that is, there was no substantive change to the provisions for registered organisations.

The offences in Work Choices were against working people. They were about working people having their penalty rates ripped off, they were about working people being unfairly dismissed, they were about working women being unable to secure equal pay, and the list went on and on. So we fixed all of that, but, as for the registered organisations provisions, they appear in the Fair Work legislation—or they did appear in the Fair Work legislation—effectively in the same terms as under the former Howard government. Then, of course, in the recent period—

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