Page 3968 - Week 12 - Thursday, 20 October 2005
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proposed workplace changes are union heavies who will see their power and influence diminished.
But not all will be in that category. Union and employee representatives who provide an effective service to their members and other groups of workers will have lots of opportunities. There will always be employees who will want advice on options available to them and who will want a person with expertise and experience to negotiate on their behalf. The same applies to employer organisations. There are employer organisations that have gone out of business because they lost touch with their constituency and failed to provide services to their members. Unions that cannot keep up with the modern demands of the workplace, the changes in our society, and the needs of, particularly, young people are going to find they are very quickly becoming irrelevant. The days of the old time union heavy living off the sweat of working people are coming to an end.
The problem my colleagues opposite have with me is, of course, that I know how it works: I have been there; I have seen the way they operate; and I have seen these union officials who have lived off the fat of the land year in, year out, and have bullied their way around the work force. We hear all this talk about protecting young people. They bullied every young person into joining unions in days gone by when they were able to do that. You walked into the factory; it was: “Sonny boy, you sign here on the dotted line. This is a closed shop, and woe betide anybody who dares to question that sort of approach.” Thanks to the freedom of association provisions and thanks to some of the United Nations initiatives that have been quoted so often by my colleagues opposite in other debates, they cannot do that any more; they cannot intimidate people into joining the unions.
Mrs Burke: That is right.
MR MULCAHY: Mrs Burke has seen this from where she grew up, where this all has its origins of closed shops and standover tactics by union officials demanding people pay up their money to keep the union officials going in the style to which they have grown accustomed.
We have a new era; there is a new way of doing business and it is going to sort out those who are genuinely trying to help the people they represent, whether they are employers, small business or whatever, or whether they are employees. There will be opportunity under this new industrial regime for them to have an important and ongoing role.
I would say to Ms Porter and to her colleagues, “You do not have to be so protective of the union bosses; they really can look after themselves. They have had a good run.” I would love to hear you highlight the opportunities that exist for the people of the ACT which will flow from the federal government’s workplace reforms.
I am sure that you must be having doubts because you ran all of this before and you know how terribly wrong you were. I would be a tad embarrassed because I would be saying to myself, “If we stick our necks out here, in 12 months from now we are going to be hearing in the Assembly all of our gloom and doom talk and we will probably see the ACT economy strengthened further.” They will not see children put back into the coalmines, as they would almost have us believe. They will in fact see an improved industrial environment. But no, there is absolute, blind resistance in this last heartland,
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