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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 4 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 842 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

employment agencies. This is where our young unemployed and the thousands of former ACT and Federal public servants go to seek a new career. The system was described by Howard's ultra-dry Employment Minister as a "radical experiment". Here they are, experimenting on the workers of Australia and the ACT.

By 2 May the Canberra Times was able to inform us that there were about 310 firms around the country - and there are a dozen in the ACT - which will be providing these services. The Canberra Times also reminded us of Khadar Roude. Who will forget this part of the radical experiment? He had no office, no staff, but a million dollar contract from the Howard Government. Kemp himself told us that Roude was not alone: About 30 of the private agencies had, by 2 May, subcontracted all or part of their work. So, here we had a situation where obviously the contracts were available to people and, in fact, it was ripe for the growth of shysters in the employment agency market. To quote the Canberra Times:

Is this a joke? The process is fundamentally flawed if 10 per cent of the successful bidders can just flip the work to subcontractors and make money for doing practically nothing.

Another issue is that there is no regulation in place in the ACT to ensure that the unemployed are not exploited. This is an area ripe for exploitation. It is an area where people at their weakest point can be exploited by unscrupulous operators. That is not to say that that brand should be applied to all employment agents. Employment agents, on the whole, will be good operators who care about their clients - both newer employees and businesses who seek to employ the unemployed. But, if this area is not regulated, there will be an opportunity for exploitation of the unemployed.

Let us take the thousands of people in the ACT whose unemployment has been created by the Carnell and Howard governments and let us see the rather weak position they are in in relation to jobs. Of course, if they were pressed, they would pay for a job. What we have to do is ensure that that case cannot apply here in the ACT. We have to prohibit it. And that is what my legislation sets out to do. On May Day this year, I announced that I would move to introduce legislation to regulate employment agents and that, in particular, I would move to make it illegal for an employment agent to charge an unemployed person to find them a job. What I set out to do there was to rule out the possibility of exploitation of the unemployed. New South Wales already has such legislation in place, as do Queensland and Western Australia. So, it is not necessarily new; but governments have not been focused on these issues, because they have always been able to rely on the quality service that was provided in the past by the Commonwealth Employment Service.

It is not surprising that the Carnell Government did not even notice the gap in the legislation in the ACT, because of their so-called commitment to the marketplace. The dry economics exhibited by the Chief Minister very clearly focuses on the marketplace. Ordinary people, in particular, and unemployed people have no particular place in the philosophy of the Liberal members opposite. In fact, what has happened

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