George Campbell (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will call him Senator Heffernan to appease you, Mr Deputy President. Let us look at what has happened over the past few weeks and where the government is at. Let us look at the immigration amendments. The bill is being rushed in here to appease the Indonesians and to take the pressure off in terms of migration from West Papua. We have seen disarray in your party room.

We have seen coalition senators on the Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee unanimously support a recommendation rejecting the bill. Every coalition senator on that committee signed up to that committee report rejecting the bill. What have we seen? We have seen the Prime Minister and the minister for immigration scrambling for the past week or so trying to patch the thing together and stitch up a deal, trying to get something by the end of this week so that the Prime Minister can fly off to Indonesia next week and meet with Yudhoyono. He wants to be able to tell him: ‘Everything’s sweet. We fixed it for you. We have finally been able to deliver what you wanted.’ Now it is looking more and more like that may not happen.

We had the fiasco of child care. We had Jackie Kelly come out and say that she would not run at the next election if Peter Costello were the leader because of his position on child care. We had the situation with independent contractors. We had Senator Barnaby Joyce again threatening to cross the floor and saying that your policy is a mess. He said:

Some employers will be pushing people to become contractors, who for all intents and purposes are just employees. Once they become contractors they lose such rights as workers compensation and superannuation. For what benefit? Usually none ...

Now we know why they get pushed into those positions. We were told. When Senator Johnston was on a shipbuilding inquiry in Western Australia with me, we spoke to Austal. I asked the managing director of Austal in the inquiry why he had changed his employees over from being independent contractors to being employees, and he said: ‘Because we had problems with the tax department. They realised we were rorting the tax system, so we had to put them back on as employees and employ them under AWAs.’ They were using the guise of independent contracting in order to avoid paying proper taxation. We have seen the fiasco in the past couple of weeks over the amalgamation in Queensland.