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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 1 Hansard (21 February) . . Page.. 142 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

discount some kind of negotiation and take money away from your wages". The whole atmosphere, I must say, is not conciliatory or to do with good management. I am very concerned about what has happened as well. I support members who have voiced other concerns that I will not repeat. I hope that we do not see this kind of approach anymore.

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister) (4.28): I was very interested to hear the comments made. I will state again that there was no effort by this Government, or no inclination for this Government, to ban payroll deductions by union members. What we are in the business of is giving choice. But we are also in the business of consultation. On that basis we were more than willing, as an act of good faith, to withdraw this approach this morning.

I am interested in the comments that Ms Tucker, Mr Berry and Ms Follett made about confrontation, good management style and all of those sorts of things. It would be useful to tell this Assembly about an incident that happened this morning. This is where you see true confrontation happening in this whole industrial dispute. This morning, as we would be aware, there was a rally outside. Various members of the HSUA who are on ward services - wardsmen, in other words - attended that meeting this morning. It was interesting to note that the hospital obviously did provide skeleton staff to cover while the HSUA - - -

Mr Berry: Relevance.

MR SPEAKER: It is a terrible choice of words, Chief Minister.

MRS CARNELL: They were alive. It is all right; they were not skeletons.

Mr Berry: Relevance.

MRS CARNELL: You were talking about confrontation. This is a very important issue. The hospital provided staff to get by while the HSUA members were at the stopwork meeting. Fine; but guess what happened. At 12 o'clock several of the staff did not report back to work. Several others who did put in place rolling bans immediately. Just to make sure that the confrontation was absolutely complete, when management relocated a wardsperson from one area to another to cover an area of the hospital that had no coverage at all and therefore had no capacity to cover the essential services that were needed to be covered, guess what happened. The union banned the relocation. They were quite happy to leave an area totally uncovered.

I am told now that the HSUA secretary has returned all the radio pagers to the director's office. For those that are the uninitiated here, wardsmen cannot work without radio pagers because that is how they are told where to go. We were told that they are on strike until 11 pm today. There was no information; no ideas; no warning; no capacity for management to actually put in place things that would protect patients - none of that. If we are talking about confrontation here, that is confrontation. If we are talking about bad management, that is bad management. If we cannot have decent, sensible negotiations when these sorts of things are in place, how can you possibly sit down and have sensible negotiations with a union that is allowing, right now, a whole ward of the hospital to go without staff?

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