Page 2851 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 21 October 1992
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Mr Kaine: Laurie who?
MR CONNOLLY: Laurie Oakes. They are all wrong. Johnnie Howard and Dr Hewson are the only two that are right. Dr Hewson is right and 16 million Australians are wrong.
Mr De Domenico: And the Chamber of Commerce.
Mrs Carnell: And the Chamber of Manufactures.
MADAM SPEAKER: Order! Members of the Opposition will desist from interjecting.
MR CONNOLLY: Madam Speaker, I doubt whether the Australian community will fall for this nonsense, but time will show and this debate will continue. This attempt to ape the national industrial policy of the Federal Government needs no more attention from me; it was well demolished by Mr Berry.
Let us look at what we are doing within the ACT. What we are doing within the ACT, Madam Speaker, is utilising the Federal industrial relations system, utilising the mechanisms of the Industrial Relations Commission, to resolve industrial disputes as they occur. Our rate of industrial disputation, as Mr Berry indicated, is extraordinarily low, and falling. It is the envy of the rest of Australia. Mr De Domenico railed about a few instances of industrial dispute. We had the tip dispute where I certainly said that I thought that what they were on about was inappropriate. That matter lasted only a day or so. We had the Canberra Cranes dispute, where Mr De Domenico was jumping up and down saying, "The Government should have intervened; the Government should have intervened". Madam Speaker, that was a dispute between a private company and its employees. It was not a dispute involving government employees. We had no role in that.
Mr Kaine: Was the trade union involved?
MR CONNOLLY: The trade union movement was strongly involved. The trade union movement was involved in taking industrial action and in arguing the case before the commission, and the commission said that the trade union movement was right. The commission ordered that company to make the redundancy payments to the workers who had been sacked that the union movement had been urging. The union movement was found to be right by the independent umpire. The system, Madam Speaker, was shown to work. Mr De Domenico said that we should have intervened in that, somehow, and taken government action at some point. The system worked.
Within the bus industry, within ACTION, we have had a few days of industrial disputation this year because the Government has taken a decision to achieve certain savings in that industry. That was a collective government decision which this Government collectively stands by, and we will deliver on that. That is in marked contrast to the approach when Mr Kaine was in the chair as Chief Minister and Treasurer, when the ACTION deficit just kept going up.
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