Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is rare to be able to speak twice in your first term in the address-in-reply debate. The last time I spoke during the address-in-reply debate was actually my first speech, and that was the result of an election. We all came back into this place and, when it was our turn, we spoke during the address-in-reply debate. It is very rare to speak twice in a term to the address-in-reply debate: it is very rare because what the government did, in asking the Governor-General to recall and open the parliament again, is rare. The last time it happened in federal parliament was when Queen Elizabeth was in town and it was a special occasion. It may never happen again. It is definitely rare that within one term of parliament we have had two openings of the same parliament.

You would think that it would have to be a pretty serious reason as to why we would need to reopen our parliament; it would have to be something pretty serious or something that urgently needed to be dealt with. The rationale that we were given by the Governor-General, because he was asked by the Prime Minister to reopen the parliament for the second session, was:

The cause for which I have recalled the parliament is to enable it and, in particular, the Senate to give full and timely consideration to two important parcels of industrial legislation—the bills to provide for the re-establishment of the Australian Building and Construction Commission, and the bill to improve the governance and transparency of registered organisations.

That was the justification that was given for why we reopened this parliament and why we were all recalled. Yet, the second reason—the registered organisations bill—does not appear to be on the government's agenda anymore. It is not listed for debate. It was listed for debate and then taken off. It has been completely dropped. This government has decided that it is no longer important to talk about registered organisations. It has dropped the matter entirely. It is no longer on the government's Notice Paper, yet it was relevant enough for the Governor-General to be asked to reopen parliament for this issue—another example of how this government is playing politics and using this parliament to pursue its own agenda. It is too clever and too tricky by half. Sometimes it feels like you are at a National Union of Students debating conference rather than the Australian parliament, because of the way this side is trying to use procedure to push its agenda through.

It is not the first time that we have seen this government try to play games to push its agenda. Since coming to power, it has put forward multiple pieces of legislation that are not about ensuring safer workplaces and that are not about ensuring that we protect your rights at work. In fact, as I will say later in my speech, what is going on in our workplaces is the worst that it has been for decades. Wages are down, workplace health and safety incidents are up, people cannot find full-time work and workers are being exploited. All of this is going on on this government's watch.

Rather than tackling those serious issues in our workplaces, this government has instead gone after a movement—a Labor movement—because of this government's blind hatred for the movement, whether it be the trade unions and the workers or whether it be the Labor Party. If you step through what this government has done and how it has used our justice system, how it has misused this parliament, how it has used question time to ask questions, and how it has portrayed people here in this place and in the media, it is all about one thing and one thing only—to try and destroy its opponents. It is a cynical attempt by this government to set up a narrative and a case to destroy its opponents.

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