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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 7 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 1923 ..

Mrs Carnell: New South Wales Labor are making the same mistakes, are they?

MR BERRY: This is not New South Wales; this is the ACT.

Mrs Carnell: It is the same problem.

MR BERRY: Stop that nonsense. You cannot argue an industrial dispute like that. There you go again. If you go out in the community and through the media start using examples in New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland and all that sort of rubbish and nonsense, all you do is aggravate the situation. Industrial arrangements have their origins in the historic region. ACT industrial history has been developed that way. That is the sort of stuff you do not do. You have to create a situation which has as an aim a settlement, not a victory. The trouble with you lot is that you look through the old eyes of CRA. You have to crunch them all the time. You have to win. You announce your position and go out and flog people round the head. It has not worked for you. You have tried it once. Give up.

Mrs Carnell: Fourteen out of 15 unions is not bad.

MR BERRY: Give up. It has been a dreadful loss to the Territory. Services were affected. The relationship between the Government and its employees has been irreparably damaged. That will not be repaired until Labor returns to office. Of course, there is $5m out of the ACT's purse, which joins the other dollar casualties that Mrs Carnell has imposed on us.

Mr Speaker, we have in Mr Stefaniak's handling of this dispute a demonstrated inability to deal with the issue. I will say in his defence that Mrs Carnell created a terrible industrial scene for him to operate in. I say no more about that, except that that is a problem he had to deal with and it would be a pretty difficult one to fix, but his own activities in relation to the matter have not helped either. I sense that he has used many of the same sorts of tactics in the media, though not as much as Mrs Carnell is prone to do. His approach through the media has been confrontationalist and obviously aimed to aggravate rather than to settle. I plead with the Assembly to support this motion to send a strong message to Mr Stefaniak and to the Government that the Assembly is upset about the way this matter is going, and I plead with you, Mr Stefaniak, to come to your senses in relation to the issue and try to find a reasonable solution and settle this dispute, which is damaging to the future of our young people.

MR STEFANIAK (Minister for Education and Training) (3.53): Mr Berry talked about flogging people around the head. I found that amazing and hardly conducive to creating an atmosphere for congenial discussions on industrial relations. Wayne, I seem to recall that you did not adopt that tactic with the Fire Brigade or indeed in quite a lot of industrial matters you were associated with.

Mr Berry also had a shot at Mr Humphries and me. I remind him of a number of things which this Government has done and I as Minister have done but which unfortunately are largely on hold as a result of bans. First and foremost, given that there was a sports component in this motion, I mention the Government's policy in relation to physical

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