Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Hansard source

Labor will be supporting the government’s proposal. We do so because, as we said from the beginning, whilst the original bill purported to protect outworkers’ terms and conditions, in practice it did not. It is interesting to note that the government refused to respond to Labor’s propositions on this and has been faced with the embarrassment of its own senators, on examination of the bill, agreeing that part 4 should be removed because it serves no useful purpose. So really the proposal that is now before the chamber is an embarrassing backdown for the government, demonstrating that the errors inherent in the legislation which were pointed out to the government were in fact proved to be there. The government now has to delete aspects of its original bill in light of the Senate committee and its own backbench demonstrating this to be the case.