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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 4284 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

One of the features of the new Australian work environment is its transitory nature. It is not just casual employees who can expect to move employment with some frequency. Young people entering the work force can now expect to change career, not just employment, five or six times. And so the issue of training and career development is becoming more important in every employment situation.

There are real issues with the increased casualisation of the workplace. Working conditions are in general poorer, long service leave and holiday leave tends to be paid in allowances, if at all, and casual employees are rarely secure enough in their employment to take much time off in lieu of a paid holiday in any event. Paid annual leave and long service leave serve a really important function in keeping the balance between work and life. While a casual employment contract can suit some professionals with highly marketable skills, and others such as some tertiary students who are specifically looking for short-term employment, it is a disadvantage for most of us. It is in the more casualised sectors of employment that people are trapped in working poverty. Security of employment ranks up there near to safe and secure housing as a key factor in ensuring people can escape from the traps of poverty and social exclusion.

Sidney Myer once said that the real purpose of business is to create employment. In addition to creating thousands of jobs in retail back before the war, he also provided his employees with health care and with holidays in the country or at the coast. We have come a very long way from such a socially responsible view of business and employment to a focus on competition with other business and cutting costs and employee entitlements.

Consequently, award and agreement entitlements are particularly important to casual employees, and so it makes sense to put some effort into ensuring employers and employees are aware of them. Unfortunately, in most cases your conditions are only as good as the award or the agreement has delivered; those industries that have a high degree of casualisation also tend to have a lower level of union membership; and those industries and workplaces that have a lower level of union membership end up with worse conditions. So, while it does indeed make sense for the government to better inform people of their entitlements, it would also make sense as much as possible to ensure that those entitlements themselves are satisfactory.

While the ACT government has limited influence in these areas, those programs that it directly funds need to be funded at a level that the employees, whether casual or not, do have access to training, to long service leave, to parental leave and so on.

The ACT government can actually show leadership across Australia if they do this and accept-and, through practice, show that they accept-that the balance between work and life is very critical in our society. The emphasis has been for too long on the economic bottom line. The social consequences of that are very evident-and people in the community know that. It is not something that is not recognised, but still governments are not responding to that understanding and to arguably increasing costs to the public purse that result from not acknowledging the reality of the human experience of the people in the community. It is that human experience which is what we are elected to take notice of. And, unfortunately, we are not seeing governments do that. I commend the motion.

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