Sunday, February 17, 2008

What about Work Choices, Laurie?



Laurie Oakes let us all down in his interview with Brendan Nelson on the Sunday program this morning. He gets points for grilling him about the sad "sorry" speech. But we had to endure a Dorothy Dixer about the email between Kevin Rudd and Brian Burke in 2005.

That might be today's story but not the other big one of the week that should have been aired but wasn't. That was the Coalition's complete disregard for the people's verdict on Work Choices by effectively blocking changes in the Senate until July at least. Their timely rediscovery of the Senate Committee system is disgraceful.

Not one question from Laurie about Work Choices. He had pointed out Nelson's back flip on the apology. Yet he failed to raise Nelson's complete reversal of the position he took after the election:

We have listened and we have learned, and one of the issues that was very important to the Australian people in changing the Government on November 24 was that of WorkChoices.

We've listened to the Australian people, we respect the decisions they have made, and WorkChoices is dead.
Nelson declares WorkChoices dead (ABC News 19 December 2007)
Instead we had a reprise of Nelson's famous "I've never voted Liberal in my life" speech in 1993.

Not good enough, Laurie! Reform of Work Choices was unquestionably the number one issue of the 2007 election.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you're spot on there Kevin. The progress of the anti-Workchoices legislation through parliament (or not) is bound to be one of the biggest political items of this year.

Anonymous said...

And now we learn that some of Howard's Cabinet ministers did not understand that WorkChoices could leave some workers worse off.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23231263-2,00.html

What a farce!

I wonder if some shadow ministers still don't completely understand WorkChoices?

Al

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