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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (20 June) . . Page.. 2266 ..

MR BERRY: All right. Leave it as an amendment.

MR SPEAKER: Leave it as a foreshadowed amendment, Mr Berry?

MR BERRY: Yes. That is fine. Mr Humphries spoke at length about intervening in industrial disputes. It was not we who set the standard for ACT Forests workers; it was the ACT government. It was outside the enterprise bargaining agreement, from my memory of it. It was offered as a major attraction to win the hearts and minds of Canberra people about the righteousness of the redundancy of those 20 workers. It did not win many, but that is what it was about. It was about putting some sugar coating on redundancies, which is very difficult to do.

Mr Humphries said that forestry workers were less likely to get work than are the Totalcare workers. How does he know? If the government accepts the call of this Assembly that none of these workers are to be made redundant against their will, how would you know?

Was Mr Humphries suggesting that the conditions he referred to applied to Totalcare workers?

Mr Humphries: Which conditions?

MR BERRY: The enhanced packages that you were talking about. Were you referring to the forestry workers?

Mr Humphries: No, I was talking about the Totalcare workers.

MR BERRY: My advice is that that is inaccurate. My advice is that the enhanced packages that were provided to forestry workers were better.

Mr Humphries: Yes, that is true. That is the point I made.

MR BERRY: You say that we should not intervene on the industrial front. There are redundancy provisions in relevant awards and in relevant enterprise bargaining arrangements. There is no doubt about that. But the government was the one that enhanced the packages for the forestry workers and set the new pattern without getting it endorsed all over the place. It left a whole heap of workers out of the picture. We think it is fair for this to apply to all redundancies.

I do not mind entering the industrial fray when it means getting workers a fair go when they are not getting a fair go. If it means setting a new standard and setting the slippery slope you have described, I am not going to run away from that if it means that some workers will get done over as a result.

The importance of this motion is to make sure that there is fair play and that one group of ACT workers employed by the government gets the same sort of treatment as another group. There is nothing wrong with that. Mr Humphries drew attention to the position that we adopted in relation to the nurses. There was an entirely different set of circumstances there. It was disingenuous of the minister to try to draw comparisons.

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