Page 1325 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 12 May 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Lamont has demonstrated his ignorance. For the benefit of Mr Lamont, let me tell him that it is not compulsory to belong to the Australian Medical Association to be a doctor. It is not compulsory to belong to the Pharmacy Guild to be a pharmacist. There is one example Mr Lamont did not quote which would have had a bit more weight if he had said it, and that is the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, to which you have to belong in order to be a lawyer. That is another matter. If Mr Lamont chose to describe the Law Society as a union, I would not argue with him; but that is a debate for another day. I do believe, Madam Speaker, that the case has not been made convincingly by anybody opposite to preserve that kind of preference, to preserve the arrangement whereby people are forced to belong to a particular trade organisation before they can obtain employment or continue their employment. That is quite abhorrent.
Let me put something clearly on the record, in case those people opposite attempt to misrepresent the position. The Liberal Party of Australia, and in the ACT in particular, supports the existence and the right to operate of trade unions. They have been, and they are, important players in the industrial landscape. They have played an enormous role in the development of better working conditions, and better pay in particular, for Australian workers. Let that be clearly on the record. It is not enough to observe that trade unions over the last 100 years or so, particularly between about the middle of last century and the middle of this century, have been champions of those without power in conditions where exploitation was rife and easily exercised. Those observations are undoubtedly true, but they do not settle this debate today.
Mr Berry, in defending without qualification the practices of trade unions in this community, is living in the past. He is describing an historically romantic view of trade unions, which was certainly true 50 years ago, and even more true perhaps 100 years ago, but which today just does not accord with the reality of industrial life. What Mr Berry fails to acknowledge, what he completely refuses to accept, is that there are some unions in this environment today which are unreasonable, which operate on an undemocratic basis, which are out of touch with their membership, and which exercise power out of proportion to the support they enjoy from the workers in their industry.
This measure to make membership of unions non-compulsory deals with that problem by requiring unions to win support by winning the hearts and minds of the people operating in the industry. There is no longer any basis on which to say, "You must belong to this union because you are a member of this particular work force". From now on, with this legislation, unions will have to say, "We think you should belong to our union for these good reasons: We can achieve this for you, we can achieve that for you, we can win better pay, we can win better conditions". That is a good set of reasons for belonging to a trade union. That is the basis on which, henceforth, with the passage of this legislation, it will be necessary for unions to operate.
What does the Labor Party opposite have to fear about that? What is wrong with asking unions to persuade the workers in their industries to join that union? Are you afraid that unions cannot do that? Are you afraid that trade unions are such an unpopular concept in our community that people will not want to belong to them? Perhaps there is some good basis for saying that, because an
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .