Page 4058 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 24 November 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
the same way as a bank teller may settle a bank robbery when a gun is held at his head. He gave away the cash. What Mrs Carnell is urging now is that, again, we just give away the cash and pay the doctors what they want. This dispute carries with it a lot more than just the salaries the doctors are paid. Mrs Carnell says, when under pressure, "Yes, the doctors are paid too much and we have to bring them into line with the sorts of sacrifices the rest of the community has had to suffer". But, when pressed, she always sides with the doctors against the Government.
Since self-government, the process this administration has been grappling with has been a process of fairly and equitably reducing expenditure across a range of areas of ACT expenditure. We have had a number of industrial crises in that process, and I will talk about just a couple that I have personally been involved with. In the first budget that was brought down when I became a member of this Labor Government, we reduced expenditure on the Federal Police. It had never happened before, but we said that the police budget must be dealt with like any other budget. We achieved that. There was some industrial unrest. The AFP at one stage threatened some bans; but the AFP, when they were threatening bans, made it abundantly clear that those bans would never be applied in life-threatening situations. The Australian Federal Police Association consistently said that their bans would be applied to revenue but not to life-threatening situations. That is in marked distinction to what the doctors are doing.
That matter got resolved because the AFPA accepted that the police budget would be treated like any other budget and that cuts would be equitably spread across the board. The doctors want to be different. They are the only ones who will not accept a cut. You accuse Mr Berry of being gutless. If Mr Berry did what Mr Humphries did and signed the piece of paper and gave in, the police union could legitimately say, "Why should we cooperate with the Government? Why do we not place a ban on going out to assaults? If we do that, the Government will cave in to us like they caved in to the doctors".
That is why this issue is so important. If Mr Berry gives the doctors what they want, the whole house of cards in industrial relations and achieving savings targets collapses. Every union that has at the end of the day cooperated, has gone to arbitration, has accepted change, will say, "Why should we go down that process of cooperation? Why should we go down that process of accepting that everybody has to make cuts and savings? We should just hold out, take the most painful weapon available in our industrial armoury, hold it at the head of a government, and a government will then collapse". This Government will not collapse. Mr De Domenico's absurd charge of gutlessness in this dispute could not be further from the truth.
We have to maintain the position that the doctors have to accept that they are like any other workers. In their view, they are different from the ACTION workers. They are different from the bus drivers, who Mr De Domenico is quick to say should have their overtime slashed, should have their allowances slashed, should have their general wages slashed. That is fine. There is one set of rules that applies to the old bus driver eating his pie at the lunch kiosk and a different set of rules that applies to these specialists who have lunch at the Commonwealth Club with their Liberal Party mates. They are to be treated differently from the bus driver.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .