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

Senator Abetz says 'A good man.' Senator Abetz, we know that he is your mate. We know what he is up to. We know that the ABCC is simply about taking money out of building workers around this country and taking away capacity for them to get decent wages and conditions. Some young workers will be threatened with pay cuts. Many young workers may not remember Work Choices, but I remember listening to the Work Choices debate in the Senate. Senator Abetz, when he was on the frontbench and had not been kicked off the frontbench, argued for Work Choices to cut workers' wages and conditions. He was the Work Choices warrior in the Senate. He stuck his hand up to cut the wages and conditions of ordinary workers to make sure that workers had no capacity to bargain effectively. That is the Work Choices warrior that Senator Abetz is.

What is really happening here is that, even though he is sitting on the backbench in exile, Senator Abetz is actually exercising a lot of power from exile. That is the reality. That power is making sure that the weakest Prime Minister ever in this country, Mr Malcolm Turnbull, supports these cuts to workers' wages, because it is the extremists in the right wing of the Liberal Party who are pushing these cuts through.