Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a pathetic display from the member for Corangamite. What an outrageous slur against the people in this parliament who are standing up for working people, not like the people on that side of the parliament. Let us not forget the party of Work Choices, the party of dividing and conquering the Australian workforce, the party responsible for the slowest wages growth that we are now seeing since the wages price index started being kept in the 1990s. What an utter disgrace for them to lecture us for our decision, for our responsibility, for our obligation, for our moral obligation to stand up for the rights of working people in this country because we are the only party that will do that.

You people on that side carry on against the union movement of this country, the hardworking union movement of this country, with slurs against the CFMEU. The CFMEU have more integrity in every single officer of the CFMEU than anyone on that side of this parliament. Every official of the CFMEU spends their life standing up for working people, standing up for pay and conditions, standing up for the rights of working people to organise for safety. Anybody who has ever been to a work site immediately after a worker was killed on that work site with the CFMEU, with the officials who have to go and talk to the widow of that worker, know exactly what it means to be a CFMEU official or a CFMEU delegate.

Those silver-spooners on that side of the parliament do not care about working people. They would rather stand in here and abuse the hardworking officials who represent the interests of working people every day than actually look at the national interest. They should be ashamed of themselves, and I know that they are going to be because the people of this country will not put up with their rubbish. I think the member for Corangamite is going to find out pretty soon that the people of Corangamite are not going to put up with this sort of behaviour.

Look at them. What do they want to do? They want to cut penalty rates. They want to weaken collective bargaining in this country. Look at WorkChoices. What was that but the privileging of individual bargaining—so-called—ahead of collective bargaining. It was a disgrace then and it is a disgrace now.

Fancy this ridiculous campaign against us for having the temerity, as we have the right to do, as we have the responsibility to do, to stand up and say: when it comes to free-trade agreements, we want to see free-trade agreements, we want to see trade liberalisation but we want to do it in a way that ensures that the benefits of that liberalisation are shared by everyone in this community and that means standing up for Australian jobs. No-one on this side of this House is ashamed of standing up for Australian jobs. No-one this side of the House is ashamed of standing up for skills, qualifications and safety. In fact it is our obligation.

Those people on that side of the House, on the government side of the House, should take a good hard look at themselves when they criticise us for doing our jobs, for asking questions about the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement. To call us racist, to carry on as though somehow the party of the initial visit to China—the visit that occurred before Kissinger's visit—the party of the introduction of the integration of the Chinese iron markets for example, the increase in 1984-85 in the export market to China under Bob Hawke, the party of Paul Keating, the party of Kevin Rudd and the party of Julia Gillard and her Australia in the Asian Century white paper is racist is as ridiculous and insulting as it is irresponsible because we are not xenophobic and racist merely because we stand up for Australian jobs. We will always stand up for Australian jobs.

If you want to look at an example of a ridiculous approach to China, just look at the government's dithering on the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Those opposite could not work out what to do with it. They were utterly hopeless and embarrassed us in front of the entire world. They finally saw the light and did what Labor had been suggesting for many months, which was to sign up to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, not before time.

Why were those opposite behaving that way? Perhaps it was because they are the party that is from the intellectual tradition of Billy McMahon, who thought that our support for the relationship with China was an asset to the Liberal Party because the Australian people would not want to see a relationship with China. It is utterly ridiculous to criticise us for doing nothing more than our job, which is to look after Australian jobs. We actually make sure that in this country—one of the richest, one of the wealthiest countries in the world—we do something about the increasing income inequality, the increasing accumulation of capital, about the fact that wages growth is slow, about the fact that there are 800,000 unemployed country in this country for the first time in about 20 years and about the fact that unemployment has had a six in front of it since their first appalling budget from May 2014. Those are things from which we do not resile. Those are things from which we will never resile. We will always stand up for working people. We will always stand up for a strong economy and nothing that the people, those craven people from the Liberal Party will ever stop us from doing it.

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