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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 7 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 1946 ..

Mr Moore: It is the Minister trying to get scab labour going. It is not them volunteering. He is motivating it. That is where the problem is.

MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Moore, you have already spoken.

MRS CARNELL: If Mr Stefaniak was directing people to take students away on trips, if Mr Stefaniak was saying to the sporting community, "You get in and take those kids away", I would support the motion, because that would be inappropriate. The fact is that that is not what Mr Stefaniak has done at all. He has not directed anybody to get in and take school students away. What he has not done is stop people who have wanted to do it.

I, like many others here, have been to events around Canberra over the last few months where there have been school choirs and other people performing, with teachers there. Obviously, these people are nasty strikebreakers and certainly should not be doing what they are doing. But why should we stop them if that is what they want to do? Why should we, as an Assembly, get in the way of what volunteers or, for that matter, teachers want to do in after-hours and out-of-hours school activities? Personally, I do not think that is appropriate for this Assembly. Mr Stefaniak made it very clear that he was not ordering or directing them; all he was doing was not stopping them if that is what they wanted to do. I think that is a very appropriate approach. I am interested that this Assembly seems to believe that, when a group of volunteers want to take a group of schoolchildren away, Mr Stefaniak should be saying to them, "You cannot, because it is not acceptable for you to do the right thing by those students. So just get back in your box, you nasty group of volunteers or sports officials or, for that matter, teachers". I will tell you what - this side of the house will not be doing that.

MR BERRY (5.16): Mr Speaker, there are plenty of pickings around the place here. I think the biggest problem with this whole industrial dispute is the way it developed in the first place. I am pleased that Mrs Carnell spoke on the issue, because she became involved in the management of the industrial dispute early in the piece. I know that I mentioned this earlier to some degree. A posse of cowboys came into town. We had Mr Houlihan and all the CRA baggage. All of a sudden, we had memos being sent to all public sector staff, warning them that they would be locked out if they got involved in industrial action. It was just full-on confrontation, threatening on the radio and on television, and Mrs Carnell going for them. This is the whole sequence of events which occurred in relation to the industrial dispute.

Certainly, Mr Houlihan was engaged to give them advice. Trade union leaders are no fools. They have seen the sort of advice that Mr Houlihan has given in the past and the sorts of industrial relations disasters that it has led to. They know that Mr Houlihan is a founding member of the right-wing H.R. Nicholls Society. It was a deliberate act of provocation just to employ him. So, Mr Speaker, if you start off on that sort of footing, you are in trouble from the beginning. It is no wonder that the unions then, being confronted with a government that was pretty interested in industrial confrontation, went off and lodged section 170 material. They knew that they were in for it,

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