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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (25 June) . . Page.. 2101 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

Mr Berry talked about union relationships with this Assembly. Unions have no relationships with this Assembly, Mr Speaker. Unions have relationships with the Government, which is the employer. This Assembly is not a party to any negotiations that go on between the Government and the trade unions. If it attempted to do so, it would more often than not confuse the issue, muddy it, and make the situation more difficult - exacerbate the situation - than if it kept out of it. There is no place for this Assembly in negotiations between a trade union and the Government as the employer. So, I do not quite know what Mr Berry meant when he spoke about union relationships with this Assembly. There are none. The Assembly has no place, and no role to play, in these negotiations.

I think Mr Berry really gave himself away when he made some reference to the ideological war with the working-class people. Mr Speaker, it has been said by a person probably closer to the situation and more knowledgeable of it than I that this Labor Party is the only Marxist-Leninist socialist party remaining in the world, other than in Cuba. When Mr Berry uses that sort of terminology, you have to say that whoever said that was dead right. He is still thinking in the terms of the 1950s. All I can suggest to Mr Berry and to the Labor Party, if it subscribes to Mr Berry's view, is: "Come into the twenty-first century with the rest of us. Get out of the nineteenth century and get into the twenty-first century. If you do not, you are going to be left behind. I suspect that you already are. It may say something about your own relationships with your own trade unions, that you claim support you, if that is the attitude you take, because the trade unions do not take that view any longer". They are at least a little more enlightened than Mr Berry, I suspect.

In connection with the Acton Peninsula situation, Mr Berry seemed to imply that somehow the Government was a party to the relationship between the contractor and his subcontractors. He said that somehow the Government was responsible for leaving ACT truck drivers and contractors out of the contract. The ACT Government was not party to that contract, Mr Speaker. I would not pretend to tell a government contractor whom it should and should not hire. I find it objectionable, in a sense, that ACT facilities and resources were not used; but we were not party to the contract. Does Mr Berry suggest that the Government should interpose itself into all of the contractual arrangements that all its contractors make, to see what arrangements they enter into with their subcontractors? What a nonsense! You would not get far. The first time somebody went into court, you would be the meat in the sandwich. The fact is that, when the unions took exception to the situation, the situation was resolved by negotiation between the parties. That did not involve the Government, and nor should it have done. We keep coming back to this strange notion that Mr Berry has that this is a socialist country and that the Government is involved in everything. It is not, and it will not be.

Mr Speaker, I do not know what either of those subjects had to do with the budget. They had nothing to do with it. He made some reference to tobacco consumption. I submit that the Government has done a great deal to address the question of tobacco consumption. It has not done it easily, either. If Mr Berry suggests that the Government has done nothing, either he does not know or he does not want to know what the Government has done. In any case, in my view, it again is not a matter that affects the budget.

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