Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

and at the same time was negotiating with that employer's company to sign an enterprise business agreement that took away the maternity leave rights of the workers who worked for that particular business and required that all the workers' super got paid into that business's super fund?

A government member: It would never happen.

Nobody could imagine it, could they? But it might ring a bell for one person in this House. It is our old China over here, the Leader of the Opposition, because that is exactly what the Leader of the Opposition did when he was the AWU secretary: he travelled with the Pratt family, who owned Visy Industries, to Cuba, to Argentina and to Easter Island, and signed, as the National Secretary of the AWU, an agreement with Visy Industries that removed maternity leave rights and turned them into unpaid paternity leave for the workers of Visy Industries, and required the workers' super to get paid into the Pratt super fund.

We are going to make that illegal, but there is more. Amazingly, he took now Senator Kimberley Kitching and her husband, Andrew Landeryou, on that trip. You can just imagine them at the Plaza de Mayo, at the presidential palace: smoking the Cuban cigars, Ms Kitching doing her best impersonation of 'Don't cry for me Argentina' over the balcony to the rather bemused tourists below, who must have been wondering what was going on. The thing about the Labor Party and particularly this Leader of the Opposition is that the Leader of the Opposition is not unlike the Perons, pretending to be the workers' friend while actually selling them down the river. Look at what he does, never what he says.

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