Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for School Education and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Abetz, what I have said on several occasions in this debate is that the Commonwealth government was responding to large-scale state government redundancies regardless of the government of a particular state. As I have mentioned, there are other states that are encompassed within these measures that do not happen to be Liberal-National Party states.

In response to the actual comparison that you suggest: as I pointed out to you earlier, there are countless comparisons across our workplace relations system that could be made. What is occurring here is a major endeavour by the government to introduce more consistency, more common standards. We do not profess that we are achieving 100 per cent consistency for all Australian workers; although, let me remind you, the Fair Work Act did make some significant advances on a uniform national workplace relations system—something that the previous Liberal government had talked about for quite some time but made very little progress on.

Talking about workers and lose-lose, again I am somewhat surprised by the audacity of Senator Abetz, given the record of the former Howard government in the lose-lose scenario. I mentioned just one example earlier about how new employees could have imposed upon them Australian workplace agreements that had no no-disadvantage test during one significant component of our history.

But I am also surprised when Senator Abetz belittles some of this debate with references to 'justice juices'. I was listening to the earlier debate about the fair entitlements guarantee, when Senator Abetz was talking about 'lollies' in reference to workers made redundant with extensive entitlements. The point here, Senator, is that in this bill we are making some major advances in improving uniformity in respect to transfer of business arrangements and we do not claim to be addressing all areas that might be relevant.