Page 485 - Week 02 - Thursday, 3 March 1994
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MADAM SPEAKER: Minister, you may proceed.
MR WOOD: Thank you. There is a deal of lobbying going on in this instance, hence the questions from my colleagues across the way and hence some of the meetings I have had in my office, so I am reasonably well briefed about this matter. I can inform Ms Szuty that in principle the department has accepted those statements that she read out. I think there are something like 33 different strategies flowing from those. Last year and this year we have been working on a good number of those, and some more will be undertaken next year. At least five of those strategies are fine, but they have quite significant resource implications - something I am not quite sure Ms Szuty understands. We may think they are good ideas; but, since it means, for example, four physical education resource teachers around Canberra and a deal to do about physical structures, obviously we have to find money to implement those. We have had long discussions about this in this Assembly. The simple answer to your question is yes, in principle, and we are working through them all within the resource limits imposed upon us.
ACTION Industrial Dispute
MS ELLIS: Madam Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister for Urban Services. Can the Minister advise the Assembly of the outcome of the ACTION bus dispute?
MR CONNOLLY: I am delighted to advise Ms Ellis of this. The members opposite no doubt will be very unhappy because it is yet another example of this Government getting on with the job and delivering savings and efficiencies to the people of Canberra. Madam Speaker, the resolution of the bus mechanics dispute, which we settled last evening and which the members accepted this morning, means that in two weeks we have effected substantial change on the two key areas of ACTION, that is the drivers side and the mechanics side. The drivers side was settled some weeks ago with a net saving to ACT taxpayers of some $6.5m.
The resolution of the mechanics dispute allows us to proceed with the closure of the Kingston depot. It allows us to redeploy the existing workers from the Kingston depot, putting them on a shift system which does reinstate to many of the workers overtime that they had been earning up until November when we suspended overtime, so the workers individually are better off. ACTION is better off because we have fewer workshops open before the morning peak and also after the evening peak, so we can turn the buses around much more rapidly. We have an agreement in the 12-month period to reduce the number of workshop workers by at least 20, and possibly more. It means, Madam Speaker, that ACTION is now going to achieve Australian standard levels of efficiency in the next financial year.
When you lot ran this Territory, and I use "ran" loosely, the Grants Commission finding showed that ACTION was operating at an above average level of subsidy of well over 20 per cent. In the last financial year, according to the Grants Commission report tabled yesterday, we got that down to about 3 per cent. As we proceed with these two major changes we will achieve Australian standard levels of efficiency. In dollar terms, we have brought it
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