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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 2110 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

made it his business to discover what position the leader of the nurses union took. Instead, he just criticised her and had to apologise later on.

I later heard the minister accusing nurses of being undemocratic-it was quite crafty media management but phoney-because they would not have a ballot. He was being completely disingenuous, because the nurses were bound by the enterprise bargaining arrangements they had reached agreement on with the government as provided for under the Workplace Relations Act. The minister knew that. The only way the minister could get the nurses union to agree to a change was to get the union itself, within its own democratic processes, to agree to a change. But the nurses would not have a bar of it.

Then the old ploy came out. We have seen it all happen before. The minister tried to engage a few nurses who were unhappy about the industrial situation and tried to create a split within the organisation. It was the old Houlihan try-on of the H R Nicholls Society. In an industrial dispute you try to drive a wedge into the work force and pick them off.

This comes from an Independent member of this Assembly. He has picked up the worst habits of the Right, of the conservatives, on industrial relations. It came so easy to him. It sounded as if he was born to the philosophical positions of the extreme Right. It is the sort of stuff we have heard from the H R Nicholls Society from time to time. The minister was not satisfied with the tough industrial relations act that workers in the ACT hospital system have to work under. He wanted to make it even tougher for them.

We passed a motion in this place requiring the minister to enter into negotiations with the union on an even footing. But he did not want to do that, because the union would then have been able to pursue its claim within the meaning of the act, the most repressive act since federation. That was too much for the minister to contemplate.

He could not contemplate a set of in-good-faith bargaining arrangements with the nurses union. That was not something he could get his ideological head around, because that meant the nurses would have been able to contest the minister's ideas, with the assistance of an independent conciliator, the Industrial Relations Commission, and with extreme provocation they would have been able to take industrial action.

On the other hand, the government could have taken industrial action against the nurses in a protracted industrial action situation. The minister did not want to enter into that situation, so he started to howl protest, claiming that we only wanted to pass that motion so the nurses could go on strike. That would have been a first. It was an extraordinary turn of events. The end result is that patients get less than the best hospital care because of the impact on morale in the hospital system. That has been seen to be the case. Nurses have missed out on a pay rise. We do not have enough nurses, because they do not get paid enough. But there are ways and means to secure a pay increase. That does not mean that you demand it without any flexibility.

MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member's time has expired. Do you care to take your second 10 minutes, Mr Berry?

MR BERRY: Do I have to use all of it?

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