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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 2 Hansard (1 March) . . Page.. 403 ..
MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):
Of great concern is that, as the industry association, we have not been included in the information dissemination, discussion or reviews pertaining to this Bill. This is particularly disappointing when it must be noted that a like review is being undertaken by the Department of Fair Trading in New South Wales and the RCSA is a central player in the process.
The RCSA is a body which purports to represent at least a number of employment agents in the ACT. I wonder whether Mr Berry consulted this organisation before or even after he introduced his Bill. I assume by his silence that he did not consult it.
I want to put a question to the crossbenchers in this place - particularly Ms Tucker, who has been very concerned in this place about consultation - about whether they think that this sort of introduction and passing of legislation without consultation with the people affected is really fair. Do they think that it is fair to have this level of imposition on the people of the ACT who are affected by these kinds of changes?
Mr Speaker, a number of other agents have expressed the view that they do not believe that there is any basis for the legislation. They do not charge fees for genuinely unemployed people; therefore, they cannot understand why legislation should be introduced to be able to effect this change. There are, of course, cases where people wish to obtain the services of employment agents for the purpose of upgrading or improving the position that they currently hold. If a person rocks in to the office of an employment agent and says that he is a chef but wants to become a public servant and would like some help on developing a resume or would like to be able to get some skills by consulting an employment agent, the employment agent obviously would have to turn that person away because the employment agent cannot charge that person for that kind of service.
Mr Berry: They cannot do it in New South Wales, either.
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, I do not believe that the case has been made out for us to adopt the expensive regime used in New South Wales when most of the smaller jurisdictions in Australia do not have such a scheme of registration. The difference between the ACT and New South Wales in this matter is that there are over 2,200 employment agents in New South Wales and they can levy $100 a year on employment agents and still achieve a pool of about $400,000 a year with which to regulate this industry. In the ACT, we cannot possibly generate anything like that amount of money but, because of the lack of economies of scale, our costs are quite high. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot liken us to New South Wales and then seek reasons why we should be different from New South Wales in terms of the amounts that we charge.
Mr Speaker, I table the correspondence I have received on these matters from a large number of ACT employment agents. We wrote to people twice in the last 18 months - shortly after Mr Berry's Bill was introduced in, I think, July 1998 and in October of last year when the issue was before the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety. I do not know how many replies there are in these documents, but I table the replies, for the interest of members.
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