Industrial relations has become an unwelcome distraction again for Tony Abbott after his proposed spending cuts sparked suggestions he was breaking a pledge to leave workplace laws untouched.
Labor says the opposition leader's plan to save $25 million by cutting union ballot funding is a rewriting of the Fair Work Act.
But Mr Abbott has dismissed this suggestion, arguing his snips to the Australian Electoral Commission budget were effectively a change to the Electoral Act.
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"It's simply wrong," he told reporters as he campaigned in a marginal Brisbane seat.
"There will be no change to the Fair Work Act."
He had support from a University of New South Wales legal academic, Andrew Lynch, who said changes to the Electoral Act were not technically a change to the Fair Work Act.
"If there's two pieces of legislation which are inconsistent with each other, then the one which is more recent in time is the law," Dr Lynch, the director of the Gilbert and Tobin Centre of Public Law, told ABC Radio.
The government, however, said Mr Abbott's policy was in effect a change to the Fair Work Act, undermining his day one election campaign pledge to leave the laws alone.
Labor pointed to the Registered Organisations section of the 2009 laws, which said the Electoral Commission must conduct "all elections" for registered organisations, namely unions.
The Fair Work Act would have to be amended to remove the coalition provision, otherwise two acts of parliament would be in conflict, it argued.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard, a former industrial lawyer, used the controversy to portray Mr Abbott as a closet Work Choices supporter.
"What's happened in the last 24 hours is if you can't trust Mr Abbott to keep his promise to not change the Fair Work Act ... how can you trust him not to bring back the worst aspects of Work Choices," she told reporters while campaigning in western Sydney.
The $25 million in funding cuts for union and industrial ballots were part of the $1.2 billion worth of budget cuts to which the coalition committed itself on Tuesday.
