Mr STEPHEN SMITH (9:55 AM) —I move:

The House should adopt my amendment because the adoption of the amendment kills the bill. No tinkering amendments—even if there are 330 or 340 of them—by the government can rescue this bill. The Prime Minister said to his party room yesterday that the government had lost some bark so far as public opinion was concerned as a result of these measures. Well, you might think you are losing bark now, but we will take an axe to these proposals and we will take an axe to the Liberal Party. When we are elected to government we will kill this bill and replace it with a system that is underpinned by fairness, that treats people with civility and dignity and makes sure that there are sensible safety nets, minimum standards and a strong independent umpire. We will do things the Australian way, not the un-Australian way that the Prime Minister is proceeding with.

We heard nothing about these proposals in the run-up to the last election, but we will hear plenty about them in the run-up to the next. When did we start to hear about these proposals? We started to hear about these proposals when John Howard, the Prime Minister, realised that he had total control of the parliament—that he had all power under the sun. Where did he revert to when he discovered that? He reverted to the John Howard Jobsback October 1992 policy. That Jobsback policy, released in October 1992, was resoundingly rejected by the Australian public because it was a massive attack on living standards and a massive attack on the Australian way of life. That Jobsback policy became the briefing instructions for the 1,500 pages of legislation and associated material that we now find. You will find a lot in the 1,500 pages and the 534,000 words in this legislation and its associated materials, but there are two things you will not find: you will not find a guarantee that individual Australian employees will not be worse off and you will not find fairness. As a consequence of that, this is a massive attack on the living standards and conditions of Australian working families and a massive attack on the Australian way of life.

The 10 million Australian employees in the work force should do one thing today: they should write down very carefully the full extent of their conditions and entitlements in the workplace. They should make a checklist and come back in 2007 and see where they have ended up—see what has happened to their penalty rates, their overtime, their redundancy pay, their shift allowances, their leave loadings, roster times and holidays. They should see what has happened to their way of life—their capacity to spend and share time with their family and their capacity to balance work and family.

The Prime Minister and the minister often say, ‘In 1996’—when you had Peter Reith and alsatians and balaclavas—‘Labor said the same thing.’ There are a couple of qualitative differences. Firstly, in 1996 the Australian Senate and about 230 amendments stood between you and what you wanted to do. Now that you have total control of the parliament and total control of the Senate, you are doing it for yourself. We will hold you to account.

John Howard has said that as a result of the adoption of these measures unemployment will decrease, employment will increase, our productivity will improve and our international competitiveness will increase. We will hold John Howard and the Liberal Party to account on the promises and assertions they have made. These measures are a massive attack on the Australian way of life—on our values and virtues and character and on the Australian notion of a fair go. They are a massive attack on the living standards, the entitlements and the conditions of working Australian families. This House should do nothing except reject the bill resoundingly—and kill the bill.