Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

It seems that those opposite have closed their minds to what I have been talking about. They are in fact not listening to the issue that I am actually going to, which is when you can take protected industrial action under our, fair system—unlike Work Choices, where the Liberals opposite subscribed to a system that ensured it would strip wages and conditions from employees. What the Rudd government is delivering is a fair industrial relations system which will ensure that the contents of agreements will be able to include matters pertaining to the relationship between (a) the employer and the employees, and (b) the employer and any union to be covered by the agreement—and the expression ‘matters pertaining to the employment relationship’ has been used for over a hundred years and brings with it established legal principles. Those established legal principles will ensure that the content that can be bargained off will then be a matter for the parties to the agreement to bargain over. It will also be a matter that that content will ensure that issues within what has been established over a hundred years—