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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Tuesday, 22 June 2004) . . Page.. 2408 ..

(2) The chief executive may publish the following information in relation to the conviction or finding of guilt in a way that the chief executive considers appropriate:

(a) particulars that allow the public to identify the person;

(b) details of the offence;

(c) the decision of the court and the penalty imposed on the person or a representative of the person;

(d) any other information in relation to the offence and the safety of the workplace (if any) where the offence happened that the chief executive considers appropriate to be published.

It does not talk about underage people here, so I am a little bit concerned about anybody running a lemonade stall who may transgress.

Minister, you are quite prepared to bring this name and shame idea into this piece of legislation. My question is: would you do the same with mandatory reporting, or factors of the Vardon report? It appears to me that you are being extremely selective in the legislation in which you choose to impose this draconian information. That is my question. I look forward to your attempting to answer it.

MRS DUNNE (11.18): Like my colleagues, I rise to oppose this pointless piece of legislation. That is not because, as my leader has said, the Liberal opposition is opposed to the notion of cooperative occupational health and safety. Occupational health and safety is in many ways the lifeblood of how we do business, provide employment and undertake our work in this territory and elsewhere.

We all know that occupational health and safety has changed the environment in which we work and that much good work has been done in improving workers’ conditions. But we find in this piece of legislation a reflection of an outmoded, 19th century, unions-versus-bosses approach. We are not in the 19th century; we are not in barely industrialised England; we are in Canberra in the 21st century. We are in what we would hope is a creative and clever city where we work cooperatively together and where we find commonality between the aims and objectives of the person who provides the employment and the aims and objectives of the person who does the work, so that we work together for the joint prosperity of the employer and the employee.

Everything involved in this legislation goes against those principles. There is no sense of cooperation or of finding common ground or of working towards this. I would like to reflect upon the impact this legislation would have on the people with whom I deal most in my job as shadow minister for planning: those in the building and development industry.

The building and development industry is in many ways the lifeblood of this community. It contributes billions of dollars every year to the economy of this territory. It gets squeezed every which way through intolerable planning impositions and a whole range of measures designed to extract money from them. After all: “They are just builders and developers and they are rich; we are the Labor party, so we can take money from them.”

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