Page 5813 - Week 18 - Tuesday, 10 December 1991
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recall, that TOCs should, within a short time of their establishment, set up and provide a statement of corporate intent. Statements of corporate intent for ACTEW, for instance, should provide for the pensioner and emergency rebates, EEO, and affirmative action issues, although that has been covered by statute in this Bill, et cetera.
The structural and accountability provisions are set out in the principal Act; but it is not clear to me what this Government has asked Totalcare Industries to do in dealing, for example, with a heavy linen service under the home and community care program. There is a heavy linen service in the home and community care program in the continency support area as well, and in palliative care, and so on. It is not clear whether we have what we intended as a government, ironically, and what I intended as a former Minister. From a statement of corporate intent we require specific, even statutory, protection in those areas. For example, with our ACTEW proposal, which this present Government should have, we proposed legislative mechanisms to protect rebates, pensioner issues and the like. We were going to do that within a mechanism that answered social justice imperatives.
I want to say, on the subject of social justice, that the union movement needs to understand that it cannot quarantine itself from change. The ACTEW moves could actually result in advancement for workers. Those of us who have been looking at the superannuation debate in this country in the last year know that some private corporate super schemes are more efficient, have a better return, and have some wiser investments than government super schemes. So, the old fear about going off the government payroll because your super might be at risk no longer applies. Mrs Grassby, I am sure, agrees that private superannuation schemes are often more innovative, have a better return, and are equally secure under the Commonwealth life insurance Act and so on.
The question is this: Is the message getting out to the workers that their protections can be equally provided and their benefits improved sometimes by corporatisation, as well, of their superannuation functions? In New Zealand charges went down following the corporatisation of their electricity services. The line that the unions are putting around some of these government statutory bodies, in social justice terms, means that the unions themselves need to be conscious of whether they are retarding the cost benefits to the community at large.
I heard Mr Moore talk about NIMBYs in another context earlier. There is a NIMBY element in, for example, the Australian Workers Union workers at the petroleum refineries in Geelong recently who got an effective 16 per cent rise. That, translated through, goes to our pumps, and has another effect in an industry.
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