Page 1435 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 26 September 1989
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party to this Plan. Union representatives should come from among the local OH&S Reps, but may include union officials.
3.2.6 Either management or unions may invite observers, without prior notification, who will participate at the discretion of the Committee.
Again, on page 11 it says:
3.3.3 Management representatives will include a senior executive. Union representation should be determined by the unions represented within the organisation. The Trades and Labour Council of the ACT may play a coordinating and participative role.
3.3.4 Management and union representatives may invite observers by prior notification.
Given the track record of some of the unions involved in the Canberra Hospital situation, as I said before, and given some of the problems indeed with management, I am not at all hopeful that that is going to work. Hopefully, there will be goodwill on both sides and it will work, but there are a number of problems there. The only people involved and able to participate as health and safety representatives have to be members of a union. I think it is very much arguable that that should not even apply in the hospital situation, but it is irrefutably arguable that it should not apply throughout the private sector in Canberra where there is a large number of people who are not members of unions and who do not want to become members of unions.
Obviously, if there are unions involved in occupational health and safety and in areas of the work force which are unionised and happy to be so, the unions will be involved in a very big way and, indeed, it will be union people who will be the representatives. In certain other enterprises there may well be other people who want to be representatives who are not members of unions, and they should have that right and that ability. That is something I think we must really look to ensuring when we come to debating and passing the occupational health and safety legislation.
MR HUMPHRIES (4.27): Mr Speaker, this accord between the ACT Community and Health Service, as it was then described - I think it is now the Department of Health or Community Services and Health - and the ACT Trades and Labour Council governs, as my friend Mr Stefaniak indicated, the workplace safety standards for a large number of workers in the health and welfare areas in the ACT. In fact, some 5,000 people are affected by this accord. It aims to reduce the cost of compensation claims to the community through better health and safety
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