Page 2983 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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Where, anywhere in this, are Mr and Mrs Waramanga and their kids being represented? Mr Gentleman could not bring to this inquiry one working family—one representative of a working family—to point out that they were affected one way or the other by this, either adversely or positively. There is not one second of evidence taken from a working man or woman in this territory.
Mr Speaker, this member has been on the gravy train for two years and some months, taking a stipend as a chairman of a committee inquiring into the impacts of industrial relations legislation on working families. The really interesting thing is that this was all spurred on by the prospect of the introduction of WorkChoices. For most of the time that this committee was meeting, what was the status of WorkChoices? It did not exist as law. This was an inquiry into something that for most of the time that this committee was inquiring did not exist as law in this country. Then, after it came into law, we had a few months of getting on with it and we have come up with some recommendations.
As Mr Smyth said, we have got recommendations to continue to monitor things, to get the commonwealth to provide information to review legislation within the ACT. Recommendation 4 is asking the commonwealth to get comprehensive data. I do not know what the difference between the comprehensive data in recommendation 2 and recommendation 4 is.
I have to pay tribute, however, to the writers of the report. It is only a slim report; it is only 70 pages. I left my glasses upstairs, but it is big print so you can read it even without any glasses—unlike Mrs Burke’s comments, which are a bit hard to read without your glasses because there is more substance to them.
Recommendation 5: reviewing current initiatives targeting youth unemployment. Not a bad thing. But is this the forum for such a recommendation? Recommendation No 6: develop resources, information, et cetera. That is okay as far as it goes.
Recommendation No 7 is an absolutely laudable recommendation—that the ACT government should be doing more to employ and retain people with disabilities. However, I question why it comes up in here. Perhaps it was the only forum for this recommendation to come forward in, but I suspect that it does not comply with the terms of reference. When I have been a chairman of a committee, there have been cases where someone says “I would like to come and talk to you” about something that seems to relate to the terms of reference. What a good chairman does is say, “Thank you very much; we will note it, but it does not actually comply with the terms of reference.” It is a laudable recommendation—probably the best recommendation here. It is a shame that it probably does not comply with the terms of reference.
And then we have the comrades’ jobs. We have the independent workplace advocate. The reasons why we should not have that have already been addressed by Mr Mulcahy. And then there are the comradess’s jobs—a full-time women’s employment lawyer to work for the women’s legal service. That is a very, very specialist qualification.
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