Senator GEORGE CAMPBELL (3:31 PM) —If there is one thing that is clear from the contribution by Senator Mason it is that he knows absolutely nothing about industrial relations and industrial relations issues.

Senator Mason —I know about history, George.

Senator GEORGE CAMPBELL —We are not talking about history.

Senator Mason —Yes, we are.

Senator GEORGE CAMPBELL —We are talking about the current environment. We are talking about the future that you are trying to create, not the history that we have come from. That is what we are talking about. We are talking about a government that is hell-bent on using its powers to create a set of circumstances in this country where workers will be oppressed and suppressed and where the balance of power in the workplace will be shifted to employers.

You have only to look at what happened with the question asked by Senator Marshall of Senator Abetz—which Senator Abetz could not answer—about the application of the code of conduct in the building industry in Victoria. You introduced legislation in the building industry and made it retrospective so that unions and employers or companies in Victoria could not do certain things. They accepted that situation and sat down and negotiated amongst themselves arrangements for their industry into the future. What did you do as a government? You moved in in the middle of it, after they negotiated the agreements and registered the agreements legally, under the laws that stood at the time, and arbitrarily changed the regulations. You changed the rules. You shifted the goalposts. You changed the goalposts from AFL to Rugby League. You changed the nature of the game and penalised them as a result of it.

Is that what we can expect under the new laws that you are introducing if they do not get the outcomes that you expect to get and you do not get the cut in wages of workers that you expect to get? Will you keep shifting the goalposts on the AWAs? Will you keep shifting the goalposts on the powers you give to the Office of the Employment Advocate? Will you keep shifting the goalposts on the restrictions you put upon unions and their capacity to operate in the work force? If you have done this in respect of the building industry then we can expect you to do it in the rest of industry.

I found it interesting on opening the papers this morning to see, in every newspaper I opened, four pages of intense propaganda on behalf of the government, selling the government’s message about its industrial reform. It was not informing the Australian public about the IR changes. It was nothing more than propaganda. Again, it was full of this government’s Orwellian doublespeak—say one thing, mean another. Tell people you are good, but at the end the reality is that you are bad. It was full of it.

Senator Abetz was asked a question about the expenditure on this campaign. He said he did not know. He is the minister responsible for it. He is the minister who sits down and chairs the meetings with the cabinet, ministers or whomever his meetings are with. He determines the government’s spend on advertising, yet he has the cheek to come into this chamber and say that he does not know, not even within a ballpark figure, how much money they are spending on the advertising campaign. You would not have to be a genius to know that a very significant amount of Australia’s tax dollar is going into this campaign. It is money that could be going to creating jobs. It could be invested in training in skills, hospitals and a whole range of other services that the Australian community is crying out for.

This government has no difficulty finding money to promote its own ideological agendas when it suits it, but when it comes to finding money to deal with some of the social problems we have in this country, that is a totally different matter. You are sitting on a $13 billion surplus at the moment, yet you will do nothing about trying to remove the burden of increased petrol costs and charges on the businesses of this country. (Time expired)