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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 3 Hansard (7 March) . . Page.. 733 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

He said, "We said that and these workers are always at risk, so it does not matter." It is not said there that jobs may go as a result. Nothing was ever said about the job prospects of these workers. These workers have been treated dishonestly from the word go. I am not surprised to hear that some of them want to get out of it because they have had enough of the mismanagement.

The government, in its announcement of these redundancies, went to great lengths to try to blame governments of yesteryear. It might even have blamed Bob Menzies' government. Yes, we all know that there is a long lead time when it comes to planting trees and harvesting them. We all know that and we all know that mistakes are made. But we all know that there are enough professionals out there to identify any mistakes made and take action to lessen the impact on the workers and on the territory. It seems that this government, after five or six years in office, is in the indefensible position of not having done much at all except ignore reviews and come up with others, one after the other. In the end, lowly paid blue-collar workers are going to pay the price.

In effect, these fire fighters, who have a warehouse of personal knowledge about their job, particularly local knowledge of the topography, of the forests and of the risks that certain locations in the forest present to them as fire fighters and to other fire fighters, form the backbone of the fire fighting service in the forest. What is the government going to do about that? Each year, it is going to call in some volunteers to help out. Some of them will come from university as prospective forestry workers, which is a good thing, but they do that anyway.

Mr Speaker, if you take away the backbone of forestry fire fighting-that is, the experienced workers out there-you take a serious risk with any new fire fighters that you introduce on a part-time basis. How are you going to compensate for the loss of corporate knowledge about their job out in the forest? It is beyond me to contemplate such a thing being done in such a harsh and unconscionable way. I just cannot believe that you would-

Mr Humphries: Of course you can, Wayne.

MR BERRY: I am sorry, I withdraw that. I do believe that the government would do it because I have the experience in front of me-Forests, Totalcare and so on, your own workers. I must say that the dogma has leached into the language that all of you use. Mr Moore sprouts it as if he was born to it. I heard him saying the other day of 100 workers that it was not about 100 jobs. First of all, there were no jobs involved and then there were 30 jobs; anyway, there were going to be jobs in Canberra. He does not seem to appreciate that it is important to somebody who has worked in a job for 30 years not to lose it. To him, the jobs will stay in Canberra and it does not matter whether a dozen, 20,30 or 50 people lose their jobs with Totalcare as other people will get them. That is just incomprehensible.

Mr Speaker, my motion goes to the issue of voluntary redundancies. The government will climb to its feet in a moment and say that it is negotiating with the unions and will probably use the triple R award, which deals with voluntary redundancies, with nobody being forced to go. But what the government does-I have had calls about it to my office-is it makes them an offer of voluntary redundancy, saying that they should bear in mind that if they do not take a voluntary redundancy there are not going to be any job

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