Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Hansard source

We will get back to the substantial issue here. I agree with the Labor Party that the small business people are clever; they are not dumb. I also believe that workers are clever and are not dumb. When you think about it the Australian public are also quite smart. Maybe what the minister should do tonight is tell this chamber how he is going to go to the public with a double dissolution around the number 15. Tell us how you are going to do that. Are you sure that when the Australian public voted at the last election they were voting for 15 employees as a definition of small business?

The whole idea about the Senate is that you review and you scrutinise. A government has a mandate but the Senate also has a mandate to review and scrutinise. So you just cannot say that it was 15 and we had it as a policy going through the election. The Australian public did not vote for you for that. We all voted on a couple of issues in the last election, one was Work Choices and Family First is on the record as voting against it. And the majority of the Australian public were against it. The second issue was the environment. Those two issues were pretty important at the last election.

This Senate is doing its proper job. When this bill gets passed in this chamber, in whatever shape or form, it will send a signal that Work Choices has gone. But we need to make sure that we actually use the proper process. You cannot circumvent it. You cannot try to take shortcuts. That is when you get problems. That is what happened last time when there was a majority held by one party in the Senate. There was the lack of scrutiny and lack of genuine debate going back and forward. It is good that we can have these debates—15, 20, 25, effective full-time; these are important issues we must get right.

The GFC that the Prime Minister mentions so often frightens small business too, and a lot of them are family based businesses. We have to get the balance right with this particular legislation that impacts on all Australians in some way. These are the workplace laws for this country and we should make sure that the Senate does its job by scrutinising what the government puts forward. It is extremely important and we should all have a very high regard for that.