Page 5667 - Week 17 - Thursday, 5 December 1991
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The second issue is that, as Mr Berry correctly said earlier, the money has gone out of the ACT to the CERT in Sydney. Members will recall that in this house during question time recently there was mention of an issue arising before the royal commission into the New South Wales building industry about a gift of funds from CERT to the Federal Government made in alleged breach of the fund's own trust deed. The trust deed, of course, required distribution of funds from CERT, moneys taken from contractors in the ACT and nominally assigned to workers, to be distributed as follows: For administration costs, training schemes, health and safety facilities, and direct payments to workers.
So, there are two interrelated questions in this matter of public importance, Mr Speaker. First, why has the cost to the Government of a building project been inflated by the Government itself and, secondly, has all of this benefit flowed to the employees involved or has it gone through a revolving door by virtue of a three-year, half million dollar a year payment in breach of the trust deed? Mr Speaker, I do not intend to explore the latter issue before the matters are resolved at the New South Wales royal commission. However, the Government is not bound by sub judice rules in taking action it may wish to take to protect those funds. I will come back to that later.
Employees and employers alike should have an equal interest in this matter. Employers properly resent being pressured into above-award payments that are not set through the normal wage fixation principles and the national guidelines. Equally, employees are having their anticipated benefits siphoned off into a project to which the trust deed gives no cognisance. This is a very serious matter, Mr Speaker. Over and above this, you have the competing priorities of government. The Government decides to pay more for the building of the Gordon Primary School, when there are calls upon government funds for the home and community care program, for example. We need to assign government funds to capital works projects to assist in community services or to relieve government funds generally to support recurrent expenditure on such programs as we need for our rapidly ageing population.
So, the philosophical question here is: Why has this Labor Government decided to enrich one small sector by direct government persuasion by virtue of the schedule of industrial requirements to contracts when there are strong calls upon it elsewhere? The subject needs to be introduced by a historical overview. In 1988 the Industrial Relations Commission heard an application concurrently with the national inquiry into the building and construction industry and subsequently approved the introduction of termination, transfer and redundancy provisions in the Federal building and construction award.
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