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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 438 ..

All of these sorts of things are not good for Canberra, they are not good for employment and ultimately they are not good for the very people that Mr Berry, for all the right honourable reasons I am sure, is seeking to assist with his bill. At the end of the day it causes far more problems than it possibly solves. It is an impost on business and it does, in my view, go fundamentally against the principle of what long service leave was introduced for—a principle that has applied for decades.

So, Mr Deputy Speaker, I have issued a dissenting report to this report of the Standing Committee on Legal Affairs. I thank our secretary for her hard work in producing this report. I also thank my two fellow committee members, Deputy Chair John Hargreaves and Kerrie Tucker.

MS TUCKER (10.43): Obviously, this was not a unanimous report. I took the position with Mr Hargreaves that indeed this bill should be supported in principle because it acknowledges the fact that the world of work has changed significantly and that many workers are seriously disadvantaged in terms of their capacity to have a break after they have been working for 10 years or some such long period.

I know that a philosophical difference was put to the committee by some people that in fact long service leave is not about OH&S issues and having a break after a long period of work but about loyalty to the employer. In many ways, that is an anachronism when you look at the work situation for a lot of people in our community.

The argument was also put that people who choose to be on contracts—for example, people working in the IT industry—are doing very well thank you very much and are quite capable of managing their own time, working when they need to and taking breaks when they need to. While I accept that that is true for some people working in that industry, we also know that many women are in the situation where they have part-time or casual work. People who are already disadvantaged socially and economically in our society are often the ones who are put in the situation where they do not have a permanent employer and they work across industries. It is a social justice issue to ensure that they are not disadvantaged in the way that they are now. Obviously, a parallel can be drawn with a person working in the public sector, who would not be experiencing that disadvantage and would have the ability to access long service leave.

The committee was asked to look at a really good proposal. Of course, such schemes have existed for some time in the construction industry and the cleaning industry, with the levy actually going down as funds accumulated.

I think the argument about costs to employers that came from some submitters was not supported. There was certainly a survey about what people thought would happen, but when you look at what has happened with the other two funds, costs do not look as though they will be a problem.

If employers are not prepared to acknowledge that they have any responsibilities in this area, then I guess we will just have to disagree with them. If employers are prepared to take responsibility and they have the same experience as the construction industry and the cleaning industry—I cannot see any reason why it would not be so—the costs will be

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