Page 2243 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 31 October 1989
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Looking at this particular drafting of the new section 38A, I think there are a lot of problems with it. My party believes that this clause should be taken away; it should be rejected tonight and redrafted by the Minister's department to ensure that it does only cover those large sites where there are a large number of employers and their employees working, so that they form one large designated work group, because when one looks further into this there are some problems. For example, take the subsection 38A(1), which says:
In this section -
'building and construction work' has the same meaning as in the Long-Service Leave (Building and Construction Industry) Act 1981;
'construction site' means a workplace at which building and construction work is, or is to be, performed.
So what is a construction site? It is a workplace at which building and construction work is or is to be performed. Building and construction work is defined in the Long Service Leave Act 1981 as follows:
"building and construction work" means work performed in the Territory in the building and construction industry -
(a) of the kind usually performed by, or by an apprentice or assistant to, a carpenter, joiner, bricklayer, plasterer, slater, roof-tiler, tilelayer, painter, decorator, bridge and wharf carpenter, stonemason, plumber, gas fitter, asbestos cement fixer, drainer, signwriter, crane driver, electrician, plant operator or builders' labourer;
(b) of the kind usually performed by a construction labourer;
(c) under a contract of employment by a person acting as a foreman, sub-foreman or leading hand in the supervision of the performance of any work of the kind referred in paragraph (a) or (b) or as a clerk of works or construction supervisor; or
(d) of a prescribed kind;
One of the problems with this would be that you may well have a fairly small site, perhaps a couple of units being built, and it may have more than 20 people working on it at some stage. You might have the brickie, the builder with a couple of brickies and some brickie's labourers. There might be five or six of them. You might have on that site roof tilers, painters, plumbers, carpenters, plasterers, subcontractors, perhaps with one or two employees, and that would easily amount to more than 20. These people would not normally form a designated work group because usually
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