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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 3 Hansard (26 March) . . Page.. 644 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

It is important to realise, Mr Speaker, that it is not only the 20,000 and more employees of the ACT Government and their families who are affected by Mrs Carnell's approach and who have very real reason to be concerned about their futures. There is also the effect on the community at large of Mrs Carnell's philosophies and her self-indulgent and irrationalist approach to this matter. Her approach strikes at the very core of everything that is important to our lives as a community. Her approach has created concern about the futures of people in this city - about their jobs, about their families, about their children, about the provision of health care, and about the final consequences to this community of a government motivated by the bottom line. These are not imaginary fears, Mr Speaker. These are daily realities for a lot of people.

The industrial relations dispute that we have just been through is a dispute which, by Mrs Carnell's last count, has cost this community over $5m. It has left people unable to get to work. Facilities in this community have been degraded, with grass being uncut, teachers not engaging in out of hours activities, threats occurring to the delivery of health services, fees not being collected and bus fares not being collected. It is a serious record of distress and disheartenment for this community. The community has suffered greatly from this and will continue to pay for the costs of Mrs Carnell's dispute.

Mr Speaker, while the community has a right to be angry about the costs that we have incurred, the lost revenue and the inconvenience, it is also entitled to ask why this is happening. The answer lies in the character of Mrs Carnell, in the way that she goes about her business as a Minister and as Chief Minister. It is affecting the way government is being carried out in the ACT. Mrs Carnell's approach to this dispute has been characterised by ignorance of the basic tenets of the industrial relations environment that we are working in. It has been characterised by a complete lack of understanding of what enterprise bargaining is about and of how pay increases are negotiated in the current industrial relations environment. The fact is, Mr Speaker, that enterprise bargaining is about sharing the responsibility for changing organisations, and sharing the benefits of change - something that Mrs Carnell does not understand. Mrs Carnell wants to load onto her work force the responsibility of change, and to load onto them the displacement of jobs as a result of change, to load onto them the changes in work practices; but she does not want to share the benefits. She does not want to share the savings of those changes through higher pay. She fundamentally does not understand the cooperative nature of the employer-employee relationship. Mr Speaker, Mrs Carnell has portrayed in this dispute her stubbornness, her inability to compromise. She has a win-at-all-costs mentality. Mrs Carnell wants agency bargaining. She approached in August with a view that she wanted agency bargaining. The unions, for their part, identified a range of areas where there were opportunities for across-the-board efficiencies.

Mrs Carnell: That is not agency.

MR WHITECROSS: No, it is not agency, and this is my point, Mrs Carnell. You would not listen. You would not budge. You would not talk about the issues that they raised, because it was not your way of doing it. You had to do it your way. You had to do it your way even though there were cross-agency issues which the Government needed to address - issues like workers compensation, information technology and accommodation which go across agencies. Mrs Carnell would not talk about them in a cross-agency way. She insisted that she had to have it her way.

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