Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Hansard source

Of course women should be paid equally, and I don't think there are any Australians who would disagree. They should also be looked after equally. That's what should be happening in here, but not for the Greens. The Greens stand up for women only when it suits them. The Greens blocked the rights of women in the textile union to hold a secret ballot and are still blocking put an administrator in place to clean up the CFMEU. It's absolutely absurd. I have never seen anything like it. I would love to know why, but it will all come out in the end because the truth always comes out. Seriously, I just don't understand how you could possibly do that to those women. That you would still not give those women who feel that their lives are under threat an opportunity to have a secret ballot blows me away.

These are the Greens, who like nothing more than whipping up division on motions on the Hamas-Israel war but did not say a godamn word, not one word, about one million Afghan women pushed over the border into the arms of the Taliban. I have this to say to you: you seem to pick and choose how you want to help women when it suits you. But for those whose lives are under threat, you don't want a bar of it. You voted against it. You did not want to help those women in textiles. You did not want to move them away from the monsters of the leadership of the CFMEU and that just blows me away. So, to come in here, stand up, start running these motions, and have a standing affair on them is just absolute rubbish—fair dinkum. I just want people out there to know: you can't pick and choose; you're either for women or you are not. But you can't decide you're going to help these women and not these ones over here. You are either one in or all in. Other than that, you're just looking like a pack of hypocrites.