Page 1096 - Week 04 - Thursday, 1 April 1993
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The failure of the Government to ratify the agreement that was arrived at in the way I have been speaking about signals a government way behind the times. It signals a government so steeped in the tradition of unionism that it cannot see beyond it, even when the unions have taken that step. Here we have a situation where the union involved - for Mr Berry's information, the correct title of the union involved in the ACTEW agreement is the Electrical, Electronic and Plumbing and Allied Workers Union, commonly known as the EPU - was very supportive of the agreement. It is now outraged.
It is interesting to note that, running up to the last election, the Labor Party's scaremongering machine had the audacity to tell the public that the Liberal Party's industrial relations policy would tear Australia apart. It could well be that the Labor Government's reluctance, particularly that of the ACT Labor Government, to ratify workplace agreements may cause the very thing they said the Liberals would do. The EPU, quite rightly, is furious about the action to overturn the decision made, also rightly, by Mr Connolly, and we expect that they will take action and that this will cost the ACT. It will also cost the ACT in lost opportunity for the productivity improvements so badly needed to bolster the Territory's finances.
None of this would have happened if the Government could simply be more adventurous and entrepreneurial. It has become dangerously interventionist and cripplingly conservative. Madam Speaker, this Government must get its act together and express to the community some vision and hope for this wonderful city before the opportunities pass us by.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (5.07): I have very little to add to the remarks Mr Berry made earlier in this debate. Listening to the Liberal Party, you get the impression that this is a situation that has reached total chaos point and that there has been an abandonment of productivity savings that were negotiated between ACTEW and the union. That is not the case at all. The situation is that the Government has made a decision that we need to have enterprise bargains in a framework that is consistent with a global approach but with the scope for individual variations at individual enterprises.
As Mr Berry has indicated, and as the Chief Minister indicated in her answer to a question today, we are continuing to negotiate with ACTEW and with the electrical and plumbing union with a view to hammering the basics of the productivity savings that were agreed upon into a format that is consistent with the overall ACT approach. That is capable of resolution. I am sure that it will be resolved. They were in the commission this afternoon; we have not yet got a report back from that.
I am confident that officials from the industrial relations area and ACTEW will sit down, hammer out the productivity savings that had been reached by the EPU and ACTEW some weeks ago, putting that in a manner consistent with the whole-of-government approach to enterprise bargaining, and thus delivering to the community the savings that had been negotiated upon and delivering to the workers appropriate advantages for themselves. We will achieve that, and I am sure that when this house next meets this issue, which was seen as the great controversy of the day, will have been settled and we will have, as Mr Westende indicated we should have, appropriate and sensible arrangements in place, and we will have achieved that within the framework of a whole-of-government approach.
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