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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 12 Hansard (24 November) . . Page.. 3651 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

Mr Bracks will not gazette a public holiday either. In Victoria the Government is making individual departments and agencies respond in an individual manner to the unions' demands for activity on the New Year's Eve weekend. There is no central direction. There is no order from above. It is: "We are not going to gazette a public holiday". It seems these nasty conservative union-bashing governments are popping up all over the country.

There are more critical issues to this. The critical issue is that the Full Bench of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission has indicated that Australians should be entitled to a minimum safety net of 10 public holidays per year, plus one additional holiday in each State or Territory for employees covered by federal awards. The commission draws the distinction between public holidays and holidays, but for the purpose of this debate, the total is 10 plus one. The commission recognises New Year's Day, Australia Day, Good Friday, Easter Saturday, the Monday after Good Friday, Anzac Day, the Queen's Birthday, Labour Day, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. In addition, federal award employees in the ACT have these 10 public holidays and they get two territory holidays, Canberra Day and the union picnic day. That is one more than New South Wales in any normal year. This would be an extra half day on top of that.

What is this going to do? It will hurt local businesses, because local businesses will have to pay for this. It is local businesses that employ Canberrans. The fact that we are debating this Bill at the end of November does not help either. For a long time Mr Berry has known this has been coming. Businesses have been preparing for the holiday weekend for a very long time and have made certain assumptions on what their costs will be. Based on that, they will have made offers or priced their services for that night at an according rate.

Maybe Mr Berry is not aware that they will have already made these plans. People have been booking these events for years; certainly for more than half of this year. They have built their cost structures on the standard rate of pay that they would expect for these events, not for what Mr Berry is proposing to put to them. So it is too late for these businesses to go back to their customers and say, "Well, look, the Assembly has bunged this extra public holiday on; the Labor Party has bunged this extra holiday and I'm not going to wear the cost. We'll include it in what you're doing". It is often impossible to go back. They would have made arrangements with their customers to simply say, "Here is the cost". It is impossible for many of these people to go back and say, "Look, we have incurred an extra cost because of what the Labor Party has done in the Assembly".

Perhaps Labor just expects them to carry this cost. It is another burden. It is just taken out of the boss's pocket. It is a classic case of Labor's lack of business acumen. It clearly shows Mr Berry's lack of understanding of what it is to run a small business. It clearly shows their classic disregard for the private sector in the ACT. What you may get, of course, is a reduced level of services as businesses find it cheaper not to pay somebody to be there.

Because of the actions of the Labor Party enforcing this extra half-day holiday upon us at such a late point in time, workers themselves may suffer. Mr Berry does not seem concerned. He has put forward this proposal that these people should have a half-day

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