Page 2235 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 August 2007
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It is not merely that the High Court upheld the validity of the WorkChoices legislation or that this legislation has been a great boon to the Australian economy and to those employers and employees that are now able to negotiate more freely. Even in my limited time in this place, I remember Mr Gentleman telling us about the end of the barbecue, that the world was going to come to an end and that there would be heightened unemployment and shocking economic chaos. We are still having barbecues at my place, and so are most of the people I know. There are more people employed now than we have ever had in history. We cannot even remember when unemployment got to such low levels. The nation is booming. Home ownership is strong. People are well off. All of these things have flowed forth since the introduction of the legislation that we were told would be the end of the world as we knew it.
What takes this High Court challenge beyond being a case of mere waste is the fact that, even if the Labor state governments had succeeded in their challenge to the validity of the legislation, it would not have had any effect on the ACT as a commonwealth territory. Basically this was all for the benefit of Labor camaraderie—helping people in other states, even if you thought there was merit in their case, but unable to deliver an outcome in the ACT, where our constitutional role, in terms of legislating for industrial relations and wage fixing arrangements, is constrained under the self-government act. I seriously question how that financial outlay could ever be justified.
There was no real legal motivation for this. That brings to mind the question of what was the real motivation of the government in joining this action. I think this is pretty clear. Their motivation was not merely about winning a legal case but was also to run a political campaign in the High Court masquerading as a legal challenge—a very expensive political campaign. We can guess who paid for this political campaign. Was it the Labor Party? Was it the unions? No. It was the ACT taxpayer who once again footed the bill. It is not cheap to conduct a High Court challenge: the costs for lawyers and other expenses are substantial, as came to light in answer to questions in estimates committee hearings of 2 July, when the Minister for Industrial Relations put the cost of this litigation at $89,000. That is another $89,000 of pure waste paid for by ACT taxpayers to support a political cause—and that is all it amounted to.
The bottom line is that this was a case of playing the Labor game, hoping there might have been an opportunity. Even if there had been a win, it would not have been of any material benefit to the people of the ACT, despite their funds being used to pay for a wasteful trip to the High Court for no reason other than political advocacy. In light of this action by the territory government, I welcome the recommendation in the dissenting report of the estimates committee that the government refrain from taking legal action for political purposes. It is disappointing that the main report of the committee did not consider this issue to be worthy of such a recommendation.
I want to speak on one other area: the ACT Long Service Leave Authority. There are ongoing problems with the ACT Long Service Leave Authority. In estimates committee hearings, questions were raised about the use of confidential information by board members of the authority. This has been an area of some concern. It is not
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