Andrew Murray (WA, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I cannot leave that unanswered. Firstly, in its final shape the Workplace Relations Act 1996, as passed at the end of 1996 and as applied from 1997, was not an act in which the government got everything they wanted—they know they did not—and it was not an act in which the Democrats got everything they wanted. But if you are going to shift from there to surmising that because we did not get everything we wanted we were going to have a dummy spit, we did not. The whole history of the Democrats in this place has been consistently to support, in all sorts of legislation, both reasons being given for decisions and review processes. The minister has been here long enough to know that that has been the case with us many times. But I think that is an irrelevancy.