Page 4060 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 24 November 1993
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This Government wants to resolve industrial disputes through arbitration and will always cop the outcome. The doctors think they are different. The doctors think that because they are professionals different rules apply. The doctors think that by holding a gun at the head of the Canberra community, with one of the most powerful weapons that any industrial group has ever used - the weapon of life and death - they will get this Government to collapse and surrender. If the Government did that, it would deserve the unending condemnation of the Canberra community and it would deserve to be called a traitor to every other group of workers who have gone through a process of workplace change and workplace reform - the process on which you, Mr De Domenico, are constantly urging us to go faster and farther. Every other group of workers in this community has accepted change that in some cases has meant a reduction in salary rates.
Mr De Domenico: When was the last time you called a bus driver a parasite?
MR CONNOLLY: I have referred to one dispute as the world's most absurd industrial dispute. There has been some fairly tough rhetoric between a few prominent trade union leaders and me over the past couple of years; but at the end of the day we always accept arbitration, and the doctors should do the same. Every member of this Assembly should join in this motion to urge the doctors to accept arbitration. We will cop the decision of the independent umpire. Will the AMA?
MR HUMPHRIES (11.42): Madam Speaker, Mr Lamont made reference to our discussions last night about these motions, and I also want to put something on the record about last night's discussions. Mr Lamont said that in moving this motion today he hoped to be able to engender a bipartisan approach which would, by unanimous vote on the Assembly floor, bring this dispute to a swift end. If Mr Lamont really intended to build bipartisan support for this motion, the language he used in his remarks and the language used by his colleagues in this debate has done absolutely nothing to achieve that end; nor, of course, was it calculated to achieve that end. This motion has nothing whatever to do with settling the doctors dispute. It has to do entirely with shoring up the position of Mr Berry, the Government's hardline standard bearer in this matter, and making cheap points against the Liberal Opposition in this place. It has nothing, apart from that, to do with settling the doctors dispute.
Let me put very clearly on the record the answer to a question by Mr Connolly. The Liberal Party in this place fully endorses the position that says that the VMOs must accept pay and conditions which are inferior to those that applied before the end of their contracts at midnight last Saturday. The Liberal Party does not pretend for one instant that that level of pay and conditions could be or should be sustained. The world has changed since those contracts were drawn up. The situation of their brethren in New South Wales is different. The situation, arguably, of hardship applying to a post in the ACT no longer applies.
For every one of those reasons, it is appropriate for the doctors to accept fully that their position must decline relative to what they enjoyed before. The point is that they have accepted that fact. They have made it clear that they are going to have to accept that. The position they came to the Government with, when they managed to get to speak to anybody in the Government about this subject some
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