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

Senator Brandis, these issues were not debated or ventilated during the election campaign because you were too busy on the backfoot. You were too busy carving each other up, as you have constantly been carving each other up ever since you have come to government. This is another example of where you cannot control and you cannot manage the processes of the Senate. We have had a continuous speakers up here filibustering for weeks. We have had statements-in-reply to the Governor-General for a whole week last session. Opposition senators were getting up and actually waffling on about nothing of any import to this bill.

They were not prepared to bring this on because the numbers had not been put in place. That is fundamentally what it was: the numbers had not been put in place. The trade-offs were still going on. Who knows what sort of trade-offs are in there? I have seen one amendment that is supposed to be coming up. I tell you, it does not really fill me with any enthusiasm that there is going to any looking after of working people when this goes through. But this is not something that we should be surprised about, because this is an anti-worker government. This is a government who have WorkChoices in their DNA. They have WorkChoices in every bone of their body.

This is just another way they are trying to diminish working people's capacity to bargain and negotiate with their employer in some kind of level playing field. It is never to level the union movement, given the power of the people who put brown paper bags in the back seats of their Bentleys and then hand them over to the Liberals in New South Wales. They the people who are calling the shots: the developers in the building and construct industry and the big business in the construction industry. They bankroll the coalition day in and day out for election campaigns around this country.

If you want to talk about thuggery, just look at what you are doing to the democratic process tonight. The democratic process is clear. There have always been processes that are followed in this place. When you see an opportunity to disrupt the democratic process so that you can have another shot at working people's capacity to bargain, working people's wages and conditions and working people's penalty rates, that is what you will do. This is not about the rule of law. It is about handing over more power to the people who bankroll the Liberal Party and National Party.

If you really had some control over yourself, Senator Brandis, you would not have ended up having to make embarrassing statements to the Senate today that show your incompetence and your lack of capacity to handle your job day in and day out. You may laugh, Senator Brandis; but I can tell you that when you were making those statements, there was nobody behind you laughing. They all had their heads buried. You did not have much support. There was no rah-rahing in support of Senator Brandis when he was making that statement. Senator Brandis, you are an absolute embarrassment to what is really a poor government. Because you are such an embarrassment, it really says a lot about where you are.

This is a poor government, a bad government, an incompetent government. Senator Brandis, I think you also fit every one of those adjectives. You are not in command of your portfolio. You have got an absolute hide to come here and try to do what you are doing tonight to take wages and conditions away from ordinary Australians.