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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 5 Hansard (11 May) . . Page.. 1502 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

Mr Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Advisory Committee for their work on this project, and in implementing the will of the Assembly in this matter.

Debate (on motion by Mr Berry ) adjourned.

Debate resumed.

MS TUCKER (4.16): We will be supporting Mr Berry's disallowance motion. We have given serious consideration to this issue. We did actually respond to the request for comments that Mrs Carnell made. She commented that a letter had been sent out. That may well have been the case, but also we were contacted by telephone and we did give our views. So we did appreciate the opportunity of making comment and did so.

Basically, we have some pretty key concerns about this particular initiative. While I understand the argument put by government is about flexibility, there are a lot more issues related to this so-called provision of flexibility that need to be given careful consideration. I am concerned. I agree with Mr Berry and others who have expressed these concerns that the Assembly needs to take a leadership role in how we deal with these issues of employment of people. I think it is very important that we do always consider conditions under which we employ people and the implications of removing any of those conditions.

The question of leave goes to the heart of the discussion that we are having in Australia and in developed countries at the moment about the problem of overemployment and underemployment: that is, that we have people who are employed in our community who are incredibly overworked; that there is a culture that develops within workplaces that, if in fact you do not overwork, you are not a good worker. And that is actually quite destructive, obviously not in terms of general employment issues, because the more people who are employed and work longer and longer hours the fewer opportunities there will be for other people to get jobs. There are also examples and research which support the contention that in fact productivity will not necessarily benefit from actually doing this; that it can cause considerable ill health in employees.

There are also some really interesting discriminatory aspects to what these sorts of initiatives actually produce-the results that these sorts of initiatives produce. I know, in discussions around conditions and workplace arrangements, women's groups have often expressed concern about this tendency towards the subtle pressure to keep working late and the person whose lights are on the longest is the person who will probably get the promotion. The contrary position there, of course, is that the person who actually wants part-time work will certainly suffer. That is the other end of the spectrum.

There are, of course, strong arguments in the community that we want to see more shared work because, clearly with the advance of technology there are issues around loss of employment that we are not going to be able to avoid, no matter how great we are at

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