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

Mr Temporary Chairman, I can confirm that. I have just tried to look through the documents circulated in the chamber that are certainly on the desks in front of me and I cannot find anything. Here we have a government that put in 336—I think it was—amendments but it was some 30 minutes, I think, before the original Work Choices bill was debated. This is a government that has had to bowl up further tranches of amendments in relation to its Work Choices legislation because it could not get the drafting right. We now have yet again the government coming up with amendments between the House and the Senate, because they cannot get themselves organised to actually make sure that the bill is an appropriate form before it comes into this chamber, and then tabling a supplementary memorandum at this point in the debate. It may well have been circulated in the chamber, but certainly the opposition does not have it and the spokesperson for the Australian Democrats does not have it, although I understand Senator Siewert, the spokesperson for the Australian Greens, now has it.

This is yet another example of the way in which this government rushes this industrial relations legislation through. It is poorly drafted, with all due respect to the officials who are here. They are under time constraints that the government imposes because of its political objectives. It is simply further confirmation that this bill is all about politics: it is about pollsters first, advertising second and then the text of the legislation at the end of it. Here we have, again, the government belatedly introducing more amendments, and supplementary EMs in relation to those further amendments.