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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 8 Hansard (26 October) . . Page.. 2142 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

workers in the workplace, and so on. What it is on about is the enterprise approach to trade unions, the smallest enterprise possible, even down to the Jeff Kennett approach of individual contracts. This is now showing up in the Government's approach to the Senior Executive Service. This is an ideological battle as well. The unions have become familiar with the all-of-government enterprise.

Debate interrupted.

MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Wood): Order! It being 5.00 pm, I propose the question:

That the Assembly do now adjourn.

Mr Humphries: As much as I regret it, I require the question to be put forthwith without debate.

Question resolved in the negative.

Debate resumed.

MR BERRY: Those enterprises in the Commonwealth sector go to some of the large Commonwealth departments which, in turn, are larger than the entire ACT government sector. It is wrong for Mr De Domenico to say that everybody is doing it differently from that which is proposed. This is about taking an all-of-government centralised bargaining system and telling the ACT government sector that it is the enterprise with which the unions wish to negotiate.

The Government, as I said earlier, has taken the ideological approach and has tried to break it down into as small a unit as possible, and that weakens the ability of workers to best represent themselves through their unions. There is no doubt about that. When Labor was in office we guaranteed that on transfer to the ACT Government Service there would be no reduction in the benefits which flowed to the members of the service. That was before the last election. Of course, this Government clearly has a different approach. Mrs Carnell said in an interjection earlier that this will affect their bottom line. That is not the way to start out on enterprise bargaining; to start off with the bottom line and then go to the trade union movement, try to break it down into as small a unit as possible and negotiate your bottom line. There has to be a cooperative and consultative approach to arriving at an agreement which is established from the contemplative stage.

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