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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 10 Hansard (30 August) . . Page.. 3867 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

Mr Deputy Speaker, this bill fixes the Long Service Leave (Cleaning, Building and Property Services) Act 1999 so that it can actually work. In December 1999 the Assembly passed a private members bill which sought to establish a portable long service leave scheme for employees in the contract cleaning industry. The government has always maintained its support for the intent of the legislation. No worker should be denied an entitlement they are eligible for. Furthermore, if employers are not meeting their obligations, we want to know about it so that remedies available in the current legislation can be enforced.

During the debate on the original legislation the government voiced concerns about the appropriateness of the bill to actually do what was intended. In August 2000, this concern was reiterated by Mr Robert Yeomans, the chairperson of the board established under the act. Mr Yeomans wrote and advised me that in the board's opinion the act needed substantial changes to enable it to work as intended. It has been nigh impossible for the board to fulfil its legal obligations as determined under the current act. I would like to impress upon members that these amendments do not change the intention of the act, which was not in dispute at the time of the debate. They are necessary to make it work.

It is important for members to note that the Long Service Leave (Building and Construction Industry) Act was used as the basis for the drafting of the original act. Unfortunately, this cut and paste exercise, this hasty approach, failed to take account of differences between the cleaning industry and the construction industry, and this has been the cause of most of the problems that these amendments are designed to fix. The bill aligns the operations of the scheme with the nature and circumstances of the contract cleaning industry.

Mr Deputy Speaker, my amendments to the bill address the following main problems: how the coverage of the act is defined; the method used to measure service in the contract cleaning industry; and the method used to measure rates of pay and calculate employees' long service leave pay. Coverage under the act is currently determined by the definition found in the Cleaning (Building and Property Services) ACT Award 1998, which is a federal award. This leaves the ACT government in a difficult position if the federal award is changed.

The act also unintentionally covers a plethora of industries as a result of using the federal award as a means of defining the acts coverage. The amendments solve this problem by replacing the direct link to the award with a stand-alone definition. The definition will mirror the award definition of "cleaning work" but will specifically focus upon the contract cleaning industry.

Mr Deputy Speaker, the current methods used by the act to measure rates of pay and calculate long service leave have been copied from the construction industry. They are modelled on the construction industry's week/day work in daylight hours and do not recognise the variety of employment circumstances in the cleaning industry. This disadvantages those people who are meant to be helped by the act.

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