David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to rise in support of the Fair Work Bill 2008. It gives all of us on this side great pleasure to see this bill finally in this place. This bill is the product of many months of consultation, negotiation and drafting by the Deputy Prime Minister, her team and her department. I congratulate the Deputy Prime Minister on her enormous energy, commitment and hard work in bringing this bill together, winning the support of all the key stakeholders and securing its passage in the House of Representatives.

Along with the stimulus package bills which we passed in the last session and the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bill, which is still to come, I believe this is the most important bill that we will debate in the Senate during this parliament. The Prime Minister and all members of the Labor Party who went to the last election pledged to tear up the Howard government’s unfair and extreme Work Choices legislation. It was the central plank of our platform. It was the key issue we put before the Australian people. In his policy speech, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, devoted more time to workplace relations than to any other single issue.

The 2007 election campaign was, of course, the culmination of two years of campaigning against Work Choices by the Labor Party and the wider labour movement, of which we are proud to be a part. I pay tribute to the Your Rights at Work campaign run by the ACTU under the leadership of Sharan Burrow and Greg Combet, a campaign which did so much to mobilise public opposition to Work Choices. I pay tribute to Kim Beazley, who insisted that the right response to Work Choices was a firm promise to scrap it, to tear it up and to stake our future as a party on that pledge.