Page 5829 - Week 18 - Tuesday, 10 December 1991
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or will contribute towards meeting those lump sum payments when the vast majority of the years of service to which they relate may well have been under the Commonwealth in service for the Commonwealth.
I am afraid that my papers have not yet been delivered to me in the chamber; but, to my recollection, they are the principal matters I wanted to raise. The Bill appears to reflect arrangements made previously for the civil aviation members. However, I believe that in making these arrangements we have to be very careful to determine whether there are any sleeping issues unresolved in our ongoing financial settlement with the Commonwealth. I will speak in the detail stage, subject to the responses we receive from the Government on those issues.
Members will recall that there has been a series of anomalies for the ACT in the self-government mode stemming from the fire brigade. They had for many years a most effective campaigner in their interests. Members will recall that there were long service leave problems relating to the service and questions about whether certain payments for long service leave were legal at the time.
Of course, in government in the middle of 1990 we found that the wages had not been adjusted since 1988. For that reason there was an amendment in relation to long service leave entitlements for the fire brigade to overcome anomalies between the award, the Act and a number of other issues. I introduce that issue not as a red herring but to suggest that we want to make sure that what we are doing is done properly and that the problem is not part of the general administrative mess that we inherited in relation to not only fire brigade employees' entitlements under their 1975 award and the later award but also what the Commonwealth paid us in the acts of financial settlement when we took over.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (8.55), in reply: This legislation is really the Labor Government honouring a commitment that was made by the Alliance Government. Mr Duby, as Minister for Urban Services, did discuss the issues with the firefighters through their union and gave a commitment that the Government would fix this problem. The incoming Labor Government looked at that agreement and that legislation, considered that it was a fair thing and so brought this legislation forward.
The essential problem here is that the firefighters, because of what has been seen historically as the nature of their employment, are required to retire earlier than other ACT Government employees. I think, perhaps in the long term, that we need to look at that issue of different ages of retirement, because it is, in a sense, age discrimination and perhaps is inappropriate, and we probably need to look at the issue of persons employed
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