Page 2841 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 21 October 1992
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Mr Deputy Speaker, these reforms will enshrine the socially just ideas of voluntary unionism, freedom of choice, equality between employee and employer, and the flexibility to meet the challenges facing individual firms. These reforms, put into practice in the ACT, will reduce business costs, increase productivity and competitiveness, and lead to higher employment. Mr Deputy Speaker, I commend them to the Government. This industrial relations reformation will support independence and self-reliance in the work force and encourage the participation of employees and employers in remaking the economy, and still with the protection of the industrial courts.
Mr Deputy Speaker, the Follett Labor Government has been content to sit idly by while the economy of the ACT stagnated, while unemployment has grown to crisis proportions and while business failures have reached historically high levels. They have done nothing to explore even the possibility of change in the industrial relations structure in the ACT. What we had yesterday and last decade and last century is good enough. They have been complacent within the Labor fold, dominated by the unions. They have abdicated from their responsibility to find a better, more effective and more productive framework for industrial development in the ACT. Yet again they have proved to be a status quo, no change government, with neither the will nor the desire to identify problems, to find new solutions relevant to our time and circumstance, and to implement them.
They have done nothing to deregulate business hours or even to match those of our smallest regional neighbours. They have done nothing to reduce regulations strangling business growth. Rather, they have increased government and union interference. They have done nothing to assist business to afford more employees. There is no minimum youth wage; there is only the environment corps and jobs for six months for a fortunate 40. They have acted to increase the spread of tax. Land tax on investment property is depressing investment growth and consequently the building industry. Industrial laws such as the Occupational Health and Safety Act and the Parental Leave Act impose costs and enshrine union interference in business activity.
Mr Lamont: Mr Howard wants them.
MR KAINE: Mr Lamont hates this. It is the new thinking. Open your mind, Mr Lamont.
Mr Lamont: Mr Howard told us yesterday that we were going to have them.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: If Mr Lamont continues to interject, he will not hear much more of it either.
MR KAINE: These new Acts, put into place by this Government, reflect the industrial relations reality of the 1950s and the factory, not the 1990s in the ACT with its service industry base. In short, the Government has elected to hold to the vision of the worker triumphant so expressive of the old Europe, and has failed to recognise, and has even rejected, the reality of the new industrial age where democratic values, people values, community values of justice, freedom, choice, independence and shared responsibility, are expressed in industrial democracy and participative management.
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