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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 5 Hansard (15 May) . . Page.. 1312 ..

MR WHITECROSS: That is not a point of order, Mr Speaker. Mrs Carnell is just debating the matter.

MR SPEAKER: The point of order is about where you obtained the information.

MR WHITECROSS: That is not a point of order. That is just contributing to the debate. She has already had a turn.

Mrs Carnell: I am suggesting very definitely that you should make it clear where you get information that you are willing to speak about.

MR WHITECROSS: Mr Speaker, I know that you are scared of her, but she is just debating the matter. She is not actually making a point of order.

MR SPEAKER: Go on. Continue, with care.

MR WHITECROSS: Mr Speaker, the reality of the matter is that it is the Liberals who are the ideologues in this matter. They are absolutely ideologically driven by an agenda of forcing down labour costs. Mr Speaker, absolutely bizarre economics underpin this. Of course, when you drive down the wages of people, they have less money to spend, and we all know that the end result of that is a smaller economy, not a bigger economy. That is their agenda. It is an ideological agenda. They do not understand the practical realities of industrial relations, which are that there are people who need to protect their interests, who have limited economic power, who depend on their wages for income, who defend their position by collectively bargaining, by joining together into unions.

It has never been the position that it should be compulsory to join a union. It is not compulsory to join a union, but the benefits to workers of joining unions and operating collectively are clear. It is the Liberals who want everybody lining up individually before their bosses and saying, "I earn $20,000 a year and you are a big multinational. Can I have a pay rise?". That is the Liberals' agenda. That is not our agenda. It is the Liberals who want to do that sort of thing. It is the Liberals who in their own industrial relations negotiations insisted that if their workers wanted a pay rise bigger than l.3 per cent they had to trade off their conditions. That has been Mrs Carnell's position.

Mr Speaker, the reality of the industrial dispute we have just had, which is a classic example of how the Liberals go about the business of industrial relations, is that Mrs Carnell was able to protract the dispute with no compunction because, unlike normal businesses that have to worry about the bottom line, Mrs Carnell was happy to run up a tab against the taxpayers' expense account. It is the taxpayers who are going to have to pay for Mrs Carnell's mismanagement of industrial relations in this Territory. Mrs Carnell is determined to keep managing it that way in the course of pursuing her industrial relations agenda. She does not understand the notion of working cooperatively with a work force.

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