Page 2838 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 21 October 1992
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INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
Discussion of Matter of Public Importance
MADAM SPEAKER: I have received letters from Mrs Carnell, Mr Cornwell, Mr De Domenico, Mr Humphries, Mr Kaine and Mr Westende proposing that matters of public importance be submitted to the Assembly. In accordance with standing order 79, I have determined that the matter proposed by Mr Kaine be submitted to the Assembly, namely:
The Government's failure to adopt a realistic attitude to industrial relations in the ACT.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (3.13): Madam Speaker, I must say that I am delighted that my matter of public importance was selected from those submitted, under the rules devised by the Labor Party. I am delighted that it came out because I believe that industrial relations and labour market reform truly are matters of the greatest public importance today. Our industry in Australia is uncompetitive in world markets. Our investment in productive resources is lagging. We compare unfavourably with many other countries and regions in terms of productivity. We have the pure waste of one million people unemployed. Yet government has failed to provide leadership on this issue. It seems to be happy with the status quo established decades ago, dominated by the Commonwealth, with its awards based on obsolete national economic and business imperatives, and driven largely by the demands of the national trade unions.
At the end of the twentieth century we need a major shift in our attitude to industrial relations and workplace reforms. This is imperative at the national level and it applies also in the ACT. The labour-intensive days of the nineteenth century mines and factories, with thousands of workers who were poorly paid, poorly housed, in poor health, forced underground from the age of 10 and working out their lives in darkness, are long gone.
Mr Connolly: But they will come back if John Howard finds a way.
MR KAINE: We will come to that, Mr Connolly. The images of those dark, satanic mills, with their cauldrons illuminating cavernous factories, serviced by faceless, nameless masses drawn in from the bucolic rural life of their birth by economic necessity, and presided over by magnates luxuriating in the conspicuous wealth produced by the tragedy of exploitation, no longer applies.
Mr Berry: Who wrote that?
MR KAINE: Those, Mr Deputy Speaker, are words that these people over the road will use. Even Labor must accept that that is no longer true; that those days are long gone. Yet, Mr Deputy Speaker, the Keating and Follett governments pathetically appear to see no change. Labor ideology is tempered in those long-damped fires. Their limited vision is shackling the future of the workers that they purport to represent, and it is fettering the ability of our business to meet the complex and rapidly changing demands of this century, and the new demands for ever more rapid change in the next.
Mr Lamont: Could we get some piped music? Wuthering Heights would be appropriate.
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