Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

If this has all emanated non-controversially out of the review panel, clearly the review panel's recommendations have been deliberately ignored in relation to the name change—and there is no doubt about that. The most courteous way of putting it is to say that it has been ignored, when every single submission to the review suggested the deletion of the name 'Fair Work'. The president of Fair Work Australia recommended it. The panel recommended it. It is hardly ever that I would find myself on a unity ticket with the Maritime Union of Australia. There is widespread support. The only thing stopping that change is the vanity of the Prime Minister herself.

But I was not talking about the name change in relation to the questions that I was posing. I was posing those questions in the general term, because some of the proposals that are before us this evening, in this rushed, shambolically put together legislation, do not find their genesis in the Fair Work Act Review Panel's recommendations. Indeed, they do not find their genesis in any of the submissions made to the Fair Work Act Review Panel.

It seems that an ex-union boss had a chat with another ex-union boss and, as a result, they agreed that certain new positions ought to be created. As a result, you have got to rush that through the parliament. As a result, you cannot even allow the Law Council of Australia to make a verbal submission to the Senate committee. This is the parliamentary process of which I speak. This is the parliamentary process which we were promised in the so-called new paradigm. The promise that was made, signed, sealed and delivered by the member for Lyne in particular and by the member for New England has been broken day after day after day with their complicity, with their silence and, might I add, with the complicity and silence of the Australian Greens—so full of promise and yet so very shallow when it comes to delivery. I ask the parliamentary secretary again in relation to those aspects of the bill that do not find their genesis in the Fair Work Act Review Panel's recommendations: how does she justify the government rushing them through the parliament without proper consultation?