Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Employment (Senator Abetz) to a question without notice asked by Senator Cameron today relating to the Fair Entitlements Guarantee.

Senator Abetz today spoke about a 'time machine'. Listening to Senator Abetz today took me back to 2001, and statements by the then federal president of the Liberal Party; he described the Liberal Party as 'mean, tricky and nasty'. If there ever was an example of meanness, trickiness and nastiness, it was the Leader of the Government in the Senate today.

It also took me back to some critiques that were made by another federal president of the Liberal Party, Mr Brian Loughnane, when he said the Liberal Party should 'stop being ideological'. He said they were ideological. There is one area where this government is completely ideological: when it comes to working people. They want to rip away the rights of working people. They want to get rid of penalty rates. They talk about flexibility; and flexibility for the coalition simply means reducing wages, reducing conditions and forcing workers to have one-on-one negotiations with their employer.

Senator Abetz today spoke about my questions being 'silly, stupid and dumb'. Let me say this: I do not think it is silly to bring to the attention of the Senate that an Australian citizen was misled by a letter written personally to that citizen. I do not think it is stupid to defend the rights of an individual Australian citizen to take at face value a written reply to a question that they asked of a senior government figure. It is certainly not dumb to hold Senator Abetz to account for writing a letter to an individual worker who was concerned about ensuring that—if he was made redundant and if his company went bust—his family would get some support from the government.

What did Senator Abetz do? He wrote back to Mr Pierre Rault on 17 July—a pretty quick response for some politicians. He must have gone, 'I have got to stop this,' because he said, 'You have been somehow misled to believe that we are going to abolish the entitlements guarantee.' They are not going to abolish it. But then what did he do? He said, 'You can be assured that the coalition would not seek to do anything that would water-down these important protections for Australian workers.' Well not only are they watering them down but they are cutting them back to the core. Many workers in this country have agreements where they have negotiated redundancy entitlements with their employer of x amount of weeks per year. The maximum these workers will get under this government's proposal—as based on a lie to these workers—would be 16 weeks. I have to say to you that Senator Abetz went on to say, 'We were explicit in the policy. But for the changes proposed in that document, we would not make any other changes. We have not flagged any changes to the slightly modified entitlements guarantee that currently exists.'

This is a misrepresentation to that worker. It is a lie to that worker. And no matter how Senator Abetz tries to employ his legal training to be tricky in his responses, to talk about no retrospectivity, this is nothing more than a deception and a lie in writing to an Australian worker that was worried about his rights and his family's future. It is absolutely reprehensible that Senator Abetz would get up here and try and dodge his way around what is a clear and specific commitment. How can you trust this government with anything it says? And now the public know this government cannot be trusted; it is a government that was elected on lies. (Time expired)