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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 1 Hansard (20 February) . . Page.. 9 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

What happened on 24 November? On 24 November the unions notified commencement of a bargaining period and filed a notification under section 170 of the Industrial Relations Act. What does that mean? These negotiations were in good faith. At this stage, after a number of meetings and a number of offers, what did the unions do? They filed a notification under section 170 of the Industrial Relations Act. For those that still do not know what that means, it takes the umpire out of the equation. It is an amazing part of the Federal Industrial Relations Act which allows a situation where we, as the Government, cannot take the unions to the Industrial Relations Commission if the action is protected.

Most unions at that stage, or very shortly after that, filed for the prerequisite 72 hours' notice period, which meant that virtually all action from that moment on was protected and the Government had no capacity at all to go back to the Industrial Relations Commission. That really indicates that the union movement was very interested in coming up with a solution at that stage! We were not daunted by that approach; we continued to have discussions with the unions. In fact, on 7 December there was a meeting with the unions to clarify the agenda. There was a mass union meeting on 8 December. I think there was a meeting between the TLC and me on 12 December - and so the list goes on. In fact, there were meetings during January. There was a meeting between me and the TLC on 30 January - and so the situation goes on.

What we have said the whole way through this negotiating period is that we as a government have a budget in place; that it was passed by this Assembly; and that is in line with the Federal Labor Party's approach to industrial relations. That means that there is 1.3 per cent factored into our budget over the next three years. On top of that, we are more than willing to enter into enterprise-based agreements. Our initial position was that those negotiations should be agency specific. The reason that they should be agency specific, from our perspective, was that the sorts of things that we can do to improve the productivity in, say, areas such as teaching are totally different from the sorts of things that can be achieved in areas such as grass mowing, general clerical areas or whatever. Therefore, our capacity to offer real productivity pay increases to teachers, people in the clerical areas and nurses really relates to agency specific issues.

Because we care, because we were extraordinarily interested in coming to some sort of an agreement, we gave quite substantially and agreed with the unions that we would go to a basic whole-of-government offer - something that was totally at odds with our policy in the area and our stated position. Because we wanted an agreement, we moved to a situation where we sat down with the unions and determined productivity matters that could be given right across the ACT Government Service. As a result of that, an offer of 4.3 per cent right across the ACT Government Service was put on the table. It was a substantial increase on our initial offer - based upon productivity, of course, but right across the Government Service. We then said, "We are willing to negotiate on an agency-by-agency basis for increases above 4.3 per cent". Remember that the Treasury advice at this stage was that the rise in the CPI for the next 18 months, the 18 months of this particular agreement, would be 4.1 per cent. That was based upon a quarterly CPI increase of something like 0.5 per cent, with a downturn in the CPI in June-July this year. That was Treasury advice, not my advice.

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