Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Exactly—the Leader of the Government in the Senate also interjects. He admits that all decisions in government funnel to one point—that is, getting a job. Yet this bill is anti jobs and, what is more, they know it. The government know that it reduces flexibility and they know that it reduces employability, let alone privacy. The privacy of employees is being invaded by unions. How is that, Senator Sherry? The right of entry is now open slather for any union, not just the union that may oversee that workplace. Any union can now march in. Worse than that, unions will have access to any employee records held by the employer. The unions can just go to those records whether the person is a union member or not. That is the sort of advancement we have in this bill. That was not the mandate from the Australian people. We have Ms Gillard on record as saying that the right of entry rules will not be changed and that the right of access to records will not be changed from what it was under the previous government. But that has all been turned upside down. It is as fake as the Prime Minister saying that he is an economic conservative. He now rails against economic conservatism, which must be a great relief to Senator Carr and Senator Cameron because they could not have kept up the pretence any longer. For those two particularly, this idea that the Labor Party is economically conservative was really too much to take. So there we have it, to their great relief: the other side are not economic conservatives. Much to everyone’s surprise they are not economic conservatives after all, and they have not kept their word on the so-called Fair Work Bill. Everything they went to the election with is not what it is in this bill. The poor aspect of it, the cruel effect upon their own workers, is the fact that jobs will be lost, in greater numbers than is already occurring.

How can the so-called Labor Party, which began under the ‘Tree of Knowledge’, as they try to sell it, and which I should add is but a dead stump today—it began with the shearers—say that they are all for the workers? Let us consider why it would be that the Labor Party are introducing a bill that they know will accelerate the already frightening unemployment figures. There is only one reason: they are dominated by the unions, who themselves profess to be for the workers but we know they are not. They are for themselves. So this is an exercise in paying back the unions. This is a bill that has gone too far beyond its mandate, and it is going to cost jobs for one reason—because everyone across there has to belong to a union. They are told. They have no sense of their own personal freedom, as we have over here. What sort of sense is that? You are told which union to belong to. You are told what legislation to introduce. If you were given $65 million by the unions—$65 million in third-party advertising, if you like—and individually $9.2 million was given directly to the Labor Party in campaign funds, you are in debt. You are in debt to the unions and this bill is the payback.