Page 3541 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 25 August 2009
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The new governing structure will provide the best balance of equity to their membership, and this will ensure that there exists an appropriate mix of skills and experience within the governance of the authority. Currently both long service leave authorities are required to maintain separate operations for the purpose of the board’s secretariats, financial and annual reporting and fund investment. However, once again, these requirements are met by the same administrative unit. As such, the bill seeks to amalgamate existing structures to achieve greater efficiencies in the financial and reporting functions of the schemes, including the management and investment of the separate industry funds.
Whilst it is roundly agreed as desirable to amalgamate the roles and functions of the operations of long service leave authorities, the bill does, in fact, quarantine the assets of each industry’s long service leave fund. A consequence of this quarantining will see all covered industry schemes maintaining the requirement to produce separate financial statements and reporting requirements. The quarantining of each scheme’s assets recognises the historical accumulation of the assets of existing funds. In turn, this will enable each scheme to set its own long service leave levy relative to the fund’s size and performance.
For the information of members, at present the construction industry scheme maintains an estimated $59 million in assets and a membership of 7,500, whilst the assets of the cleaning industry scheme are estimated at $4.3 million with a membership of 4,500.
This new scheme does not rest on its laurels and simply exist for the administration of the long service leave funds of the construction industry and cleaning industry. That is not the case at all. The beauty of this bill is that it can be extended to allow for future separate long service schemes to also be incorporated under the provisions of the bill. It has already been flagged with the Assembly that the legislation will be presented to provide for a portable long service leave scheme for the community and childcare sectors. These are sectors that I believe will benefit greatly from being included under the auspices of this portable long service scheme, as many employees within these sectors may be working for more than one employer. It is also often the case that people working within these sectors work for a shorter period than the 10 years that we were mentioning before. This bill provides fairness and equity in administering the construction industry and cleaning industry long service leave provisions. This will greatly benefit the employees of these industries as benefiting all future schemes that may join at a later stage.
I would like to reflect before I close on what I was saying at the beginning of my speech. I do not think members opposite actually were paying attention. I thought the history of how long service leave came about was particularly interesting—that is, through the 19th century introduction—
Mrs Dunne: Mary, I promise I’ll read it in Hansard.
MS PORTER: I doubt very much whether Hansard could even hear what I was saying, given that there was so much noise in the chamber at the time. I will just
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