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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 10 Hansard (30 August) . . Page.. 3865 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

I know that the government has been critical of Labor in that they say they had to fix up the legislation. But I recall that although the bill was before the house for something like 18 months, no amendments came forward from the government during the time. The members of the board, who are practised in dealing with these sorts of funds and who have to manage this scheme, were able to come up with a range of amendments, which Labor will be supporting. In addition, Mr Speaker, I will be moving an amendment, which has been circulated, for the inclusion of new section 3BA.

Mr Speaker, the amendment which I will be moving seeks to apply to this legislation what has been described as the 80 per cent rule. This rule is designed to head off, if you like, attempts by employers to escape their obligations to their employees.

Let me go back to the beginning. One of the reasons for supporting this central fund was to ensure that, at least so far as long service leave was concerned, employers would not be able to trade on conditions to adjust their quotation rates for jobs around the town. In other words, they would not be able to manipulate their employment practices to avoid paying long service leave and get an advantage over other employers. That was a fundamental point raised in the discussions which I had with employers.

I think it is important to maintain the faith with employers about that level playing field. It is important that we do not end up with a Dutch auction of workers' conditions by employers trying to find a lower price for contracts for jobs around this city. The end result, of course, is that the ones who lose out badly will be the employees. It is well known that cleaners are lowly paid, hard-working employees who work the worst hours. When we go home from here tonight or possibly early in the morning thinking that we have worked hard, we should realise that this is the time when many cleaners start work. They perform hard work which most people would find unbearable.

The 80 per cent rule is similar to the rule set out by the Parliamentary Counsel's Office in the debate we had yesterday or the day before-time travels so fast that these things blur a little-on workers compensation. I will be moving an amendment at the committee stage. This provision has been remodelled and we propose to amend the legislation by inserting a new section.

This evening I heard about a disturbing report on WIN television-I did not see it myself-involving a cleaning company that does work for the ACT government and which was the subject of an answer to a question given by Mr Moore. The report, as I understand it, went to the cleaning company putting workers on individual contracts, thereby avoiding their obligation to pay workers compensation, the long service leave levy, sick leave, holidays and superannuation.

An employer can come out and say, "Well, I pay over the award in terms of the rate of pay." But employers do not want to pay employees more; they want their employees to cost them less. They can then get involved in the bazaar, if you like, or the auction for jobs in the territory at lower prices because they have squeezed workers' wages and conditions. The 80 per cent rule should stop that as it would relate to any employee, so defined, who acts as a so-called contractor. New section 3BA states:

(1) This section applies to the engagement of an individual to carry out cleaning work by a person (the employer) if-

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