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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 5 Hansard (15 May) . . Page.. 1309 ..

MR HUMPHRIES: Of course, the Keating Government never had a majority in the Senate and therefore presumably, on Ms McRae's test, never had the right to implement any of its mandate. That is a rather difficult proposition to accept. Mr Speaker, I know, and everybody else in Australia - even the New South Wales Labor Government, which supported the package that was taken to that conference the other day - knows that we have to move with the times. Australia's industrial relations laws, particularly the unfair dismissal laws, do not serve this nation well.

We can hear all the rhetoric you like from people who believe that Fidel Castro is pretty cool and that industrial relations are pretty strong when you have a militant industrial organisation smashing through doorways and creating chaos. That is a pretty good idea of industrial relations! We can all think that that is very nice, but it is not the real world. It is not what Australians today expect in an industrial system. They expect flexibility. They expect that, if a person wants to negotiate with their boss to make a better deal for their living conditions, they should be able to do so, and they should not have to use a union in the process of doing that if they do not wish to.

Mr Speaker, the most resounding evidence of the failure of the point of view Mr Berry has put in this place is the fact that, for the last 10 years at least, union membership in this country has been declining steadily and markedly. It is about half of what it was 15 years ago. That, Mr Speaker, is a powerful indictment of the philosophy that is still Mr Berry's creed but that was rejected, among others, by the Australian people on 2 March this year.

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister) (4.22): Mr Speaker, I would like to add very briefly to what Mr Humphries has said. I think that the issue of industrial relations laws is very important to this country. These laws can be very negative if they are implemented the wrong way.

Ms McRae: We have noticed.

MRS CARNELL: That is exactly the point I was going to make. If there is anything which shows that industrial laws need to be changed, it is such things as the section 170s that exist under our current industrial legislation. Section 170 was first explained to me last year after a couple of unions decided to file under section 170, which basically meant that the Government could no longer take those unions to the industrial relations tribunal, to the umpire, which I thought was the whole basis of the system. We actually have legislation that gives unions the capacity to say, "No, we do not want to have an umpire any longer". As it was explained to me, under the Act both the employer and the employee have to go out the back and thrash it out until there is only one left standing. That is an extremely unusual piece of legislation, to say the least.

An employer can be placed in a position where the only course that they have open to them is to lock out their employees. They cannot take them to arbitration. There is very little they can do, except lock them out. What great legislation and what horribly unfair legislation, both from the employees' perspective and from the employers' perspective!

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