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

What an extraordinary contribution! This is a government—and we know this from Senate estimates—that spends millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on focus groups, testing their message. We know that the whole reason all of a sudden that ‘Work Choices’ is not being used anymore is that you know that your polling and your focus groups have told you that people do not like it. You come in here and say, ‘We act in the national interest’—this is an entirely politically driven bill. This is all about getting you out of trouble before the next election; that is the intention. And we know that millions of dollars have been spent on market research in this area and in others to try and get your message right.

Through you, Mr Chairman: the government cannot come in here and try and pretend that they are all about the national interest. What we have seen is the government testing their message—doing market research testing, using consultancies to a range of market research firms and focus groups. And what have they come up with? They have worked out: ‘We’ve got a little bit of a problem with Work Choices, so we’ll ditch the name, we’ll spend millions more dollars on more government advertising and we’ll come up with some “fairness” test that we’ll try and ride to the next election to pretend to the Australian people that we aren’t actually about people’s rights and entitlements being stripped away.’

I notice that, for all of the rhetoric that the minister engaged in, in response to my question, there is no ruling out of focus group testing, market research or polling in relation to the fact sheet and utilising that information for the purposes of amending it. It is a simple question: yes or no? And you do not rule it out.