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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 1 Hansard (20 February) . . Page.. 12 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

What those opposite want us to do is cave in to an unrealistic wage demand, one that is not in line with what Mr Beazley or Mr Willis is saying should happen nationally. That $27m would mean an extra payment of $225 for every household in this city. The reality is that we are simply not willing to do that to the community. What we are willing to do, though, is come up with a decent enterprise bargain on an agency specific basis, based upon our initial whole-of-government offer. We are more than willing to talk to the teachers, the nurses, the CPSU and whoever wants to talk to us on an agency specific basis above the 4.3 per cent. It will be going down to 4.1 per cent now, as the cost of this dispute continues to escalate. That is in line with industrial relations in this country. The people who are out of step are those opposite, who did not require productivity trade-offs in their enterprise bargains or did not require any of those sorts of things that are basic to industrial relations in this country. Because they did not, we have ended up with a record deficit this year. We have ended up with problems in our education budget and problems in our health budget. That is what we are dealing with.

It is interesting to note that for the first EBA, between December 1992 and June 1994, an 18-month period, the offer was 4.9 per cent. For the second EBA, between July 1994 and now, an 18-month period, it was 4.5 per cent. So you can see that the offer that is on the table now, with capacity for improvements over the top of that on an agency specific basis, is very much within the ballpark of previous EBAs. We believe that our position is totally sustainable. I would be extremely disappointed if this Assembly believed otherwise. I will be very interested to see what the vote is today. What we are voting on today is whether we believe that there should be budget-funded wage increases above the 1.3 per cent that is the safety net. If we do that, this Assembly will be responsible for tax increases in this city.

MR BERRY (11.19): Once again Mrs Carnell attempts to mislead. We are not voting for a budget-funded pay rise; we are voting to censure the Chief Minister and the Minister for Industrial Relations for their failure to negotiate in good faith in an attempt to come to a settlement of this dispute. The problem with Mrs Carnell is that she has treated these industrial relations negotiations as a public relations exercise. She has treated them like an election campaign, rather than an industrial relations negotiation. She has demonstrated her total incompetence on the issue, and she deserves to be censured.

The Liberals opposite regard industrial relations as a class struggle; they think it is a contest between themselves and the unions. This is one of the great social issues which the Liberals have never been able to accommodate within their ideology. Negotiating with groups within the community, including unions, is the path to social justice. Of course, that is something that escapes the Liberals' notice as well. That is why they have failed to come to grips with this industrial relations problem. Mrs Carnell is unable to come to grips with it because it is not something that her brain can cope with.

I think it has been made clear that there is a need for reason. I will go through the chronology of events in a little while. They are quite interesting, in the context of what Mrs Carnell has been saying. There are responsibilities of employers to their employees and a need for reason. Mrs Carnell's approach has been in contrast with Labor's approach

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