Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will be taking up Senator Sheldon's invitation to put my cards on the table, and we will be putting our cards on the table. I will be doing exactly that.

The Australian Labor Party is Australia's oldest continuous political party, so you'd think that it would have got the hang of government by now—but no. This week has been a shocker. Perhaps 122 years is enough. It's time to find a nice twilight home, put your feet up and listen to Alan Jones, enjoy a juicy steak, read the Spectator and contemplate this government's many, many failures—so many failures that the Labor heartland are turning against Labor. The polls are an indictment of the performance of this one-term Labor government. Now the ALP thinks that doing dodgy deals to get parts of its signature industrial relations policy through will quieten the heartland—a heartland that can't pay their mortgage or rent, who can't buy groceries, whose kids are taught a hidden agenda at school and who will now be stalked at every turn, using Labor government sanctioned cameras. This bill doesn't fix those things. This bill doesn't fix those basics.

More importantly, from the perspective of the union bosses, this bill, the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill 2023, is about forcing people to join the union. That won't fix their declining support. The very thing that turns people off unionism these days—the thuggery and cronyism and backroom deals that only favour the union bosses—will enable more of it. We need more accountability, not less. Union bosses, and some large companies, have become accountable to no-one because they are arrogantly enshrined in a cosy monopoly of being the only union for their sector. Nothing here will claw back the reduction in real wages per capita that Australia's workers have suffered since Labor took over—a six per cent reduction in real wages in just 18 months, a reduction that just keeps getting worse with every new piece of economic data, as we saw again yesterday.

This bill will be full of unintended consequences, as any legislation that is written out of dodgy ideology always causes. Let me review the detail of this bill. There are four measures that the Senate has already passed. Easier access to PTSD support and compensation for first responders: we voted for that. Domestic violence protections: we voted for that. Asbestos and silica safety: we voted for that. Protecting redundancy entitlements: we voted for that. These four were passed by the Senate, with One Nation's support, and they've been sitting on the books down in the House of Representatives, left by the government to gather dust because it would be too embarrassing not to pass measures the Senate passed in defiance of the government. So much for workers—the government doesn't give a damn. Instead of looking out for workers, the government is more interested in looking good.