Page 4059 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 24 November 1993
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Mr De Domenico: When have I said that? Tell us the truth now.
MR CONNOLLY: When have you said that? You have said in the Estimates Committee report and you said yesterday that we need to take urgent action to slash overtime payments in the ACTION bus system. Whom does that affect? I will tell you whom that affects. It affects bus drivers and mechanics, and we have reduced overtime in both of those areas. We had a three-day strike in 1991-92 over a new bus rostering arrangement that this Government forced through and that had a significant impact on overtime take-home payments that bus drivers enjoyed. They were unhappy about it and they went on strike for three days over that issue. At the end of the day, they accepted a reduction in their take-home pay on the basis that everybody else was having to accept changes.
When rostering changes were made in the police force, again through 1992, those rostering changes did affect the take-home pay that some police enjoyed. It did affect them; there is no question about that. But the Police Association accepted it. Everyone has to accept some savings, everyone is going through difficult times, and they copped that. But not the doctors. Overtime for workers is one thing, but on-call allowances for professionals is another.
Mr De Domenico: How many have done it for nothing over the years?
MR CONNOLLY: You rant and you rave, Mr De Domenico, about allowance rorts - one of your favourite phrases - but the doctors are different. This Government does not see that there is a difference industrially between the bus worker having his pie and the professional doctor having lunch with his Liberal mates in the Commonwealth Club.
This Government says that they all have to accept that we live in times of constraint. They must accept that they cannot continue with the extraordinary rates of pay they achieved some years ago by holding a gun at the head of the then Federal Government and had re-endorsed in 1990, it would appear, by holding a gun at the head of the Alliance Government. These doctors should do what every other industrial group that has been in dispute with this Government has done and go to arbitration. We cop arbitration. Mr Berry said that we will cop the arbitration outcome.
Mr De Domenico: But they do not trust you.
MR CONNOLLY: It is not trusting Mr Berry; it is trusting the Industrial Relations Commission. It is trusting an arbitrator. Your absurd "We want an independent arbitrator and we will offer Mrs Carnell as an independent arbitrator" was a cheap political stunt, and was seen as such by both sides. We are saying that the doctors, like everybody else, should accept arbitration. That is what the Industrial Relations Commission is there for. That is where everybody else ends up. That is where the police dispute ended up, that is where the transport workers dispute ended up, that is where the metal workers dispute over cutting back overtime - the same basic premise as what is going on with the doctors - ended up. That is where the issue of redundancies ended up, and you people crow constantly because there was a decision adverse to the Government which the Government copped.
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