Page 1217 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 4 May 2022
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extremely well attended. Transport Canberra plans to do more of these come-and-try days as it becomes possible to run open public events again.
This is just one of a number of different promotional activities, with the others including a recent recruitment campaign targeted at women through channels like HerCanberra and LinkedIn. These social media campaigns have strongly featured women and promoted the benefits for women of working with Transport Canberra, helping to counter perceptions that driving a bus is only a job for blokes.
Additionally, we will continue to support the employment of people with families by including provision for special shift requests in the enterprise agreement. These arrangements support staff with specific family or other qualifying reasons to structure their work around these requirements.
We are also keen to see these arrangements retained in the next iteration of Transport Canberra’s enterprise agreement because they are an important way of ensuring that people who do shiftwork can still be mums, dads, soccer coaches, book club members or whatever else is important to them in their lives.
We agree with Ms Clay that there is more that we can do to grow the Transport Canberra workforce in an inclusive way to deliver better public transport for Canberrans, particularly on the weekends. We are committed to doing that work. It is currently underway. I will be happy to update the Assembly on our progress in the new year, or sooner, if we are able to reach some good conclusions in the EBA process before that time. But the outcomes of that process are not known at present, and the ability for us to deliver extra weekend services is, of course, contingent on that process and the other measures that I have outlined.
MR PARTON (Brindabella) (4.29): We will not be opposing or amending this motion, but I have to say that there are some aspects of it that I am not entirely comfortable with. I am much more comfortable with Ms Clay’s motion than I was with, say, Mr Braddock’s amendment to the last motion. In particular—and Mr Steel has made mention of it—I am not entirely comfortable with the concept of us as an Assembly holding some of the enterprise bargaining agreement negotiations here in this chamber, because I am just not sure that is how it works.
There are aspects of this motion—which, by the looks of it, we are going to pass—that pretty much present the government with a fixed position on some aspects of EBA negotiations. I think we all know that EBA negotiations are about compromise. I am just not sure that it is for this parliament to be setting a fixed position in a negotiation which has already commenced.
It must be said, Mr Assistant Speaker, that the current EBA is quite generous; it is one of the most generous in the country for bus drivers. I think Mr Pinkus and the TWU have done a fine job of looking after their members. That is what they are here for. I would argue that some of the battles that the union has won in this space over the years might have been to the detriment of the wider community. I know that there are those on the left side of politics who would agree with me, because they have agreed in the past. But we are where we are, and I think it is important that when these
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