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

I think it is very hard to go behind the communique, once published, and talk about the merits of individual matters as discussed or provide a blow-by-blow description of what might happen in a ministerial forum. What is important is that each of the relevant state and territory ministers would have had advisers. They also had the Deputy Prime Minister there, who has carriage of the matter. There was also all the work that led up to the intergovernmental agreement in the first place—the detailed work that went behind all of that.

Although I do not have any firsthand knowledge of it—let me make that plain—I find it difficult to then start to mount an argument that it was about rejecting the Senate on the basis that the ministerial council did not like the Senate’s position. Quite frankly, the position they got to was through the intergovernmental agreement. There was a historic agreement to sign up to harmonised OH&S laws. I think that point alone should not be missed. To try to put issues to individual state and territory ministers I think makes it even more difficult, but to ascribe to them a view that they might somehow not treat the Senate in a particular way misses the point of what they have actually tried to do.

They have signed up to a significant historic agreement and they have asked the Senate to turn that into legislation—through the carriage of Ms Gillard—in this place to reflect the agreement that they have reached. They think, I suspect, that it is a historic agreement. I tend to agree with them that it is pretty historic, having worked in state government in Queensland and having looked at—