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Mr Speaker, I am also happy to announce the establishment today of a Task Force on Red Tape and Excessive Regulation, to be headed by Ms Elizabeth Whitelaw. Ms Whitelaw is the partner in charge of the commercial and property division of the law firm Sly and Weigall. She will bring to the task force considerable experience, gained not only from her legal practice but also from her participation in Canberra's professional business and government advisory bodies. I have asked the task force to make recommendations to the Government on the areas requiring review which appear to impose significant unnecessary burdens, cost or disadvantage to business. The task force will be asked to report by October this year so that it can provide advice on the priority areas that will need to be examined by agencies as part of their systematic reviews. There will, of course, be an obligation on the business community to present a solid case and demonstrate how and why they are being unnecessarily restricted by government processes and excessive regulations. In return, government agencies will be obliged to review and streamline their procedures.

Mr Speaker, we will also be examining, in conjunction with a review of the business licence information system, BLIS, the feasibility of introducing a master licence for particular businesses and industry groups. We are also moving to make the burden of changes less onerous on industry. For some time now the Construction Industry Long Service Leave Board has been running a considerable surplus accumulated from the long service leave levy that employers pay. I have instructed that the levy be reduced from 1.5 per cent to one per cent as from 1 July this year. This will be of considerable benefit to the building and construction industry and is a tangible example of the positive steps that we are going to be making to reduce unnecessary burdens on industry.

Turning to industrial relations, you are aware that recent changes to the Commonwealth industrial relations law have created a system of enterprise bargaining. The intent is to enable individual enterprises to come to agreements which reflect their own local circumstances. The present arrangements are certainly not user friendly and bargains struck have generally been add-ons to awards instead of creative new approaches to work arrangements. While these are Federal laws that the ACT Government does not control, I can nevertheless assure you that I will take every opportunity to raise these issues with my Federal counterpart, the Hon. Laurie Brereton. I will impress upon him the need for more reforms of the Commonwealth's legal framework, including the removal of union monopoly rights to be bargaining agents for workers. Employers and their workers must be given the opportunity to come to mutually acceptable workplace arrangements. Mr Speaker, the Liberal Government believes that a facilitative industrial environment is integral to business growth, and we will pursue such an environment vigorously. I will be using the Instant Office Furniture success story as an example for other businesses in the Canberra region who wish to move down the enterprise bargaining track.

Mr Speaker, the Government is committed to bringing workers compensation arrangements into line with those in New South Wales because we believe that ACT businesses should not be competitively disadvantaged in comparison to those operating across the border. Officers of the Business, Employment and Tourism Bureau have begun preliminary discussions with officers of New South Wales Workcover to explore the possibilities of harmonising workers compensation arrangements between the

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