Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

What have we got here? We have got a government that is clearly trying to hide a set of provisions contained in a bill by trying to cover them up. These are some of the most sensitive issues that could be delivered by Christmas to a whole heap of people in this country. Those people probably would be absolutely looking forward to receiving the kind of support that has been demonstrated by the huge bravery of the crossbench senators who sought to pull out these four components from the industrial relations bill that was put forward by this government.

I acknowledge both Senator Lambie and Senator Pocock and the fact they have seen the importance of these four particular components of the bill, which they thought were so important that they needed to be separated out so that they could be moved quickly and so that appropriate scrutiny could be shone over the rest of this bill. We know that the reminder of the industrial relations bill has some very significant components that would impact massively on the productivity of this nation, on the workers of this nation and on the business of this nation, and they deserve and require a much longer and harder level of scrutiny than we are seeing with the government trying to push this bill through this place. At the actions of the crossbench senators, we've seen four really important components extracted from the bill, about which there is absolutely no controversy whatsoever, and it is the will of this chamber for those four components to be passed immediately.

As Senator Roberts just pointed out, what we're seeing here today is the government, through the action of refusing to allow this to go forward to conference, actually saying that the will of this Senate is to be disregarded. I think that is probably the most important and the most unfortunate thing about this debate today. Senator Lambie and Senator Pocock and the crossbench, with the support of the coalition, want to test this for real. By having a conference of both the houses, the entire will of this parliament will be tested as to whether these four really important components of the industrial relations legislation should be allowed to progress without any further delay. That's all we're asking for this place to do. But for some reason the government do not want this to go ahead.

So the question has got to be: why are they doing this? Quite simply, the reason they're doing it is they are holding hostage these really important elements which would allow first responders to not have to go through a lengthy process in relation to proving PTSD, which would put a protection in place for people with asbestos, which would make sure that big businesses that become small businesses in terms of redundancies aren't able to hide behind a loophole and which would allow employees who are victims of domestic violence to not be discriminated against. How on earth can you stop these things going forward?

Stop holding these particular pieces of this legislation hostage to the dirty work that you want to do on behalf of your union mates. Allow the will of this parliament to be determined, and allow Senators Lambie and Pocock and the rest of the crossbench to at least test the will of this place, instead of holding pieces of this legislation to hostage because of your political desires.