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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 4292 ..

MS MacDONALD (continuing):

The final thing that I want to talk about relates to another issue that I dealt with: the collapse of Ansett. I have spoken in this place before about Ansett. I knew a lot of the people in this town who were personally affected by the collapse of Ansett, because I had been the union organiser for five years in this town and the union covered the majority of the check-in staff at the airport.

A number of those people have been re-employed in the airline industry. However, they have been re-employed on a casual basis. Those airline workers worked hard-there are no two ways about that-but they were compensated for the efforts that they put in. I would say that these days that does not necessarily apply any more for those people who have been re-employed in the airline industry, because they have been re-employed as casuals. They have a lack of certainty as to what happens with their future.

I commend the motion that Mr Hargreaves has brought forward. I thank him for bringing it to the attention of the Assembly and I urge the Assembly to support the motion.

MS GALLAGHER (Minister for Education, Youth and Family Services, Minister for Women and Minister for Industrial Relations) (11.17): Casualisation of the work force over the past two decades has significantly changed the traditional pattern of employment for an increasing number of workers in our community. Casual employment in Australia has increased from 16 per cent in 1984 to 27 per cent in 2002 and research indicates that, on current trends, by 2010 at least one in three Australians will be employed on a casual basis. In the ACT, as in the rest of Australia, higher proportions of casual employment exist in the private sector than in the public sector.

In a survey conducted by the ABS in 2001, over 50 per cent of ACT private sector employees identified as casuals, while just over 10 per cent of pubic sector employees identified as casual. A large number of these workers are women, many with the primary caring responsibilities in the family. But casual employment for men is also rapidly expanding, more than doubling as a proportion from 12 per cent in 1988 to 28 per cent in 2001. In fact, the new term "permanent casual"is now used to describe the way many workers are engaged. A 1995 survey found that the average tenure of a casual worker was three years.

The ABS 2001 statistics suggested that over 50 per cent of casuals in the ACT are employed for more than a year. Many people in the community are concerned about where some of the trends in the contemporary workplace might be taking us. The most important issues for workers-and this is no surprise to anyone who has been following workplace or work force issues in recent times-are: (1) job security; (2) how to balance work and family; (3) work intensity, including the pressures of balancing more than one job; and (4) low pay and limited employee entitlements. These are all issues that disproportionately affect casual workers over more permanent types of employment.

Casuals are not just young people in the services sector. They are 25 to 45-year-olds in the prime of their working life, increasingly in core sectors of the economy. Many casuals have been casual for a number of years-not the traditional, informal, irregular casual employment of the past.

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