Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am sorry, Senator Joyce. I did not mean to misrepresent you, but I was listening quite carefully. I will enjoy reading your speech and I hope you do not try to change it too much before the rest of us get to have a look at it. I will leave your contribution to one side. I think that is probably the safest thing for all of us.

As chair of the committee that inquired into the impacts of this bill, I want to make some comments. Normally, as chair, I would probably have been a little bit higher up the list, but as the opposition and the minority party’s reports were only tabled not so long ago I wanted to have an opportunity to flick through at least those reports so I could have some constructive response to them. I have had the opportunity now to listen to a number of senators’ contributions. If I have time, I will try to wade through some of the issues that they have raised, to put some of their concerns to rest.

First, let me simply go to the conduct of the inquiry. I know it was said by Senator Fisher and some others that this was a rushed inquiry. I do not know by what standard they are actually judging this. If it is the way they acted while they were in government, it was a very leisurely inquiry. You could even imagine us as having put our feet up. We did not get that opportunity, but it was a very thorough inquiry. We had public hearings in Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra. This is for a roughly 100-page transitional bill, which had some very specific objectives and achieves them. Make the comparison to Work Choices itself, which was around 900 pages of incredibly complex legislation with an explanatory memorandum that went over 1,000 pages, as I understand it, and then on the very day we went into the committee stages, 30 pages or so of technical and substantive amendments were put on the table after we had gone through our inquiry. For the inquiry into Work Choices, for the extent and length of that bill and the issues that it went to, we were allowed two days in Canberra. Two days in Canberra! It never went anywhere else. If the opposition are actually making a claim that this inquiry was rushed compared to what they did while they were in government, I say they ought to hang their heads in shame and apologise for the way they abused the Senate processes. And it was not just Work Choices. There was bill after bill after bill, as I am sure everyone on this side of the chamber remembers only too well.

This was a comprehensive inquiry where we took 55 submissions from organisations and 268 individual submissions. While you will always get people who say they would like more time, it was important for this government to move quickly to remove some of the potential abuse that may be happening in the workplace at the moment. I will get to that a bit later if I have the time. The purpose of this transitional bill is to give effect to a major election commitment of the government to establish a new fair and flexible workplace relations system and to have sensible transitional arrangements to that system. This is a transitional bill. The short title of the bill is derived from the workplace relations policies released in Forward with Fairness and the 2007 Forward with Fairness policy implementation plan. I make that point because this bill, more than any other, has been subject to detailed consultation with employers, unions and other interested bodies through the consultative mechanisms that the new government has set in place. It was also detailed to minute levels in the policy platform that this government went to the election with. There are no surprises in this bill. There is nothing new in this bill. This was in the public domain as policy before the election. It was not in the detail or the form of the bill itself, but every policy issue was canvassed and was put before the Australian people before the election.

I think, after Senator Kemp’s contribution today about the golden years of the Howard-Costello government, one has to remind the new opposition that they actually lost the election. After hearing Senator Kemp’s contribution, I wonder how that could have been. Maybe these were not the golden years as he would like us to believe and, clearly, the Australian people did not think so.