Page 560 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 19 May 1992
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force must be valued so that our work force represents the diversity of the ACT community. Having a consistent approach to equal employment opportunity across the ACT Government Service, with the backing of appropriate legislation, is an important part of these necessary changes for the future. Madam Speaker, I commend the Bills to members, and I thank those who have already indicated their support.
MR HUMPHRIES (4.35): Madam Speaker, I can indicate, as Mr Kaine did, that the general intention of these Bills is supported; but there are some questions which cross my mind and which I think need to be resolved.
The Bills make a careful distinction between the size and the activity of enterprises of the ACT Government in the way in which principles apply to those organisations, and that is important and necessary. It begs the question of how, in those circumstances, one applies EEO principles to non-government organisations, the private sector. There have been strong suggestions - one could almost say strong threats - to the private sector that if they do not get their act together on the question of EEO and anti-discrimination legislation the Government might at some point have to think about bringing in provisions to make them go down that path.
The Government is only in part directly regulating what is happening in our ACT Government workplaces - that is, partly through legislation and partly through programs that are developed within those workplaces. The EEO programs that are worked out within those workplaces are a crucially important part of making this whole scheme work.
The question has to be asked: How would this work in the private sector if these principles were to be applied there? Who would develop the EEO programs in the private sector? Would the Government in some way have to approve those programs before they were to be acceptable, if one were to apply these principles there? It raises some rather thorny and, I have to say, alarming questions which have not really been resolved. But today we are not talking about the private sector, so I will brush over that point and move to another.
I have to emphasise again, Madam Speaker, as I have said on previous occasions in debates of this nature, that avoiding the artificiality of these schemes is crucially important. An element of flexibility is built into these words, which I think one can appreciate quite readily by reading them. But it is dangerous to incorporate too much rigidity, too much inflexibility, into the way in which these programs operate, because they would surely fail.
Speaking as one of, I think, the minority of people in this place who have worked in the ACT Government Service, before it was the ACT Government, needless to say, I can say that on occasions I encountered the application of EEO principles and, on occasions, those principles were rickety, to say the least, in their operation. One particular exercise in which I was involved necessitated the involvement of a woman because that was part of the requirements of the particular matter with which I was dealing. Frankly, it was difficult to find an appropriately qualified woman to take on that role. The person who was found, in due course, was frankly not really willing and not really interested, and, as a result, the process being engaged in was undermined. We need to be flexible enough to make these principles work where they can work and not impose them where they are not relevant or will not work. That is very important, Madam Speaker.
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