Thank you, Chair.
With great respect to the member opposite, it's impossible to get a big piece of legislation like this right. I know the government inside has been negotiating it for years and working with labour, but I was certainly getting calls all summer from labour partners and from members of the coalition asking what was happening, as they weren't hearing anything back and didn't know what was proposed. I had hoped that the reason this had been delayed three years was that inside work was happening. In fact, there was some confusion. Maybe it was not as close work with the people who have the expertise, the labour activists who have been doing this work all this time.
That aside, it's impossible to bring such a big and complicated piece of legislation forward—not least because it's buried within a 900-page bill—in a very short time and get it right. I know this from 12 years in local government. We count on the input of our constituents and our partners to steer us off the rocks and to give us another perspective. This government has made this commitment and has such a strong mandate to work in a different way—to work collaboratively—and so I promise you....
I'm honestly discouraged and surprised that the government members so far in this debate this morning haven't found a single piece of NGO or labour advice or amendments worthy of taking up.
I'm one member here. You have tremendous resources. You have a lot of good minds there. It isn't possible for you to have dug in and found some pieces that you wanted to move yourself, as members, let alone leaving it to me. I do say this in the spirit of wanting to get this right. You have great advice and you would not have had labour submissions with the detail that is here—hundreds of pages of testimony and evidence—if they didn't think it was worth trying to get these changes noted on the record.
I'll just leave it there. The advice stands. This is based on the work of the people who have been in the trenches. I am surprised and discouraged that none of the advice so far has been found worthy of being taken forward. It would have improved the act.