Page 2532 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 23 August 2006
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Firming up job security, as opposed to removing it, will assist workers to achieve and deliver on their best potential. Removing these fundamental protections further weakens the ability of workers to adequately bargain their wages and conditions. The effect on workers is profound. As is demonstrated through the research, a lack of job security leads to financial insecurity, stress and health issues. This has the potential to lead to tension within the family unit. The health impact cannot be overstated.
The maintenance of a safe working environment is the joint responsibility of employees, employers and the governments that regulate that environment. Unfortunately, the federal government rejects this responsibility. The ACT’s Occupational Health and Safety Act includes right of entry provisions that allow authorised representatives to enter a workplace to investigate suspected contraventions of the act. Before introducing the WorkChoices legislation, federal minister Kevin Andrews stated that the federal government did not intend to override OH&S right of entry laws in the states and territories. While WorkChoices maintains state and territory jurisdiction over OH&S right of entry provisions, they are now subject to additional conditions under part 15 of the Workplace Relations Act 1996. These additional conditions seek, in the most part, to limit the safety oversight role that has been filled by the union movement.
The ACT government was not consulted about this matter before the regulations were made. The Howard government clearly views the workplace as an environment where employees must leave their desire for health and safety at the door. The ACT government rejects this proposition and will continue to do all it can to address the devastating effects of these draconian changes.
In the time remaining to me, I thought I might touch on a couple of the issues that were raised by previous speakers, particularly in relation to the evidence that was presented by Tourism Australia to the tourism ministerial council in Adelaide last Friday in relation to the 70 million days of unused recreation leave that had been accrued by workers and the evidence that one in three workers take no annual leave. When they dug a little bit deeper into why this was so, the issue of job insecurity came up as a considerable issue.
The ministers had an interesting debate on this issue and the commonwealth response, through Tourism Australia, is to start a campaign. I am pretty sure, 99 per cent sure, that they are calling it “No leave, no life”. There are about 300,000 workers in their trial group that they are seeking to encourage to take more leave. The question that was put to the federal minister in this forum was: how does this campaign balance with the WorkChoices legislation where workers are being encouraged to cash in two weeks of their leave?
With these two clearly contradictory pieces of federal government policy, how can Tourism Australia do the job it needs to do to promote domestic and international tourism? On the domestic tourism side, which is 75 per cent of the market here in Australia, how can we encourage domestic tourism when industrial relation laws and the processes that the federal government has put in place are working directly against it? The federal government is seeking to have workers cash in their annual leave for more money, in some instances forcing some workers to do that in order to ensure that they can meet their daily bills, their weekly bills. This is a clear contradiction in policy.
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