Page 2918 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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the Fairness Test did not apply to 5408 agreements—either because protected award conditions did not change or because the employee earned more than $75,000 per annum
1070 agreements were assessed as requiring changes within 14 days to meet the Fairness Test
29 agreements met the Fairness Test following the changes—in most of these cases the employers agreed to pay a higher hourly rate of pay
five agreements ceased to operate because the changes needed to pass the Fairness Test were not made so the employees go back to the entitlements they would have received, as if the agreement had never been made.
The Workplace Authority is already doing this work and of course if we have a Labor government after the election AWAs will be phased out—and just think of the nightmare that is going to create. Either way, this recommendation has been overtaken by events.
The committee recommended that the ACT government request that the commonwealth government ensure that comprehensive data covering the details of AWAs that do not meet the safety net requirements are publicly disclosed by the Workplace Authority—and so they should be. The Workplace Authority is already disclosing information about AWAs that do not meet the fairness test, as I already noted. Mr Barr would look silly if he wrote to the commonwealth minister for workplace relations asking him to ensure that the Workplace Authority release data when—guess what—they are already doing it. That is another recommendation that has been overtaken by events.
The committee recommended that the ACT government review the ACT Discrimination Act 1999 and the ACT Human Rights Act 2004 with a view to strengthening the objectives to include family responsibilities and economic, cultural and social rights. Regarding the first part of the recommendation Mr Earle of the Human Rights Commission advised the committee:
We think there is scope for beefing up the effectiveness of the Discrimination Act, and the Human Rights and Discrimination Commissioner has proposed a review of the Act, to which the Attorney-General has agreed … One of the proposals that we flagged is the possibility of creating a statutory duty to promote equality and an obligation, for example, on employers to accommodate particular needs; for example, in relation to parenting or caring or disability.
As I said, there has been a kind of implicit right developing in the antidiscrimination sphere around the right to request flexible working, but I think it would be to everyone’s benefit if it were made more explicit, rather than something that people have to discover by accident. In other words, the committee has recommended something that is already happening regarding the Discrimination Act. If you look at the recommendation on the Human Rights Act the government declined to include economic, cultural and social rights. The government looked at this a few years ago and rightly rejected it. Mr Stanhope advised the Assembly in October 2003:
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