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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4226 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

issue. Different benefits applied in each scheme. The one in New South Wales was slightly more generous, and there was an argument about portability. The award for firefighters attempted to address the issue but was on shaky legal ground, and ultimately laws had to be passed in the territory to guarantee the portability of benefits of firefighters who came from New South Wales.

That was not the end of my interest in long service leave schemes. Later, as was mentioned in earlier discussion, the federal government provided a scheme for construction workers in the ACT, and the portability argument was left unresolved until 1984, when there was a massive dispute to gain portability with New South Wales and the rest of the states. That was during the construction phase of the new Parliament House.

These things do not come easy for workers. In the construction industry, because of subcontracting and workers moving from one employer to another, declining access to long service leave was an issue that had to be dealt with. Eventually, the portability issue was resolved, and there is a portable scheme for construction workers throughout Australia, save for the Northern Territory.

This is the scheme upon which the cleaning industry long service leave scheme adopted by the last Assembly was modelled. Mr Pratt, on behalf of the Liberal opposition, supports that scheme. I wish I had had that level of support when I put the legislation forward during the last Assembly, because it would have been a much easier job to pass it through the Assembly.

It is interesting to hear complaints that this is going to be a tax on business and will be a disaster. It reminds me of headlines in one of the Melbourne papers in the 1860s about the eight hour day, which said, "We'll all be rooned. The world will not be the same tomorrow if we have an eight-hour day."That cry has continued ever since. We all know that a worker's benefit is a cost on business. There is nothing new in that.

To use a phrase which is used often, we live in a society, not so much an economy, and we have to provide a fairer and fairer society as we try to provide incremental improvements to the people who live in it. That is what we are here for. Workers are no different. They are not ghosts in the community. They are the people we represent. We are responsible for providing better benefits to them.

A universal scheme would provide access and portability for all workers throughout the ACT. That is the fairest approach, because it accommodates the changes that have occurred in the workplace over recent years. There is far more casualisation and part-time work and people shifting from job to job. Under the present arrangements hundreds of thousands of employees will never have access to long service leave. This is the issue we faced in dealing with the cleaning industry scheme during the last Assembly.

Employees represented by the LHMU, which lobbied this place, had worked in only the one industry. In fact, one worker had worked as a cleaner in the one building for 25 years and had never got access to long service leave because her employers had changed so often. We fixed that. But that is no different from the experience of an overwhelming number of workers in industry. In the ACT, the public sector aside, 8,000 or 9,000 workers are covered by portability schemes-namely, the construction industry

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