Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying, we continually see Senator Cash and her colleagues seize on facts and figures and then distort what they actually mean. The reality is that under the government's proposal most small businesses—and I know you're asking about medium-sized businesses—will have access to the cooperative workplaces stream. There are various other routes for medium-sized businesses to take advantage of that will not include the kinds of costs that the opposition is out there trying to scare people about. All through this debate we have seen scare campaign after scare campaign from the opposition. First of all, it was going to ruin the mining industry, and then everyone realised that it wasn't going to apply to most of the mining industry. Then it was going to promote strikes, when in actual fact there are restrictions on strikes. Everything we've heard from the coalition is a scare campaign and blatantly wrong.