Page 4950 - Week 13 - Thursday, 12 November 2009
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The Greens are pleased to see that the federal workplace relations minister, Julia Gillard, has backed a case mounted by the Australian Services Union for an order lifting wages in the sector—so taking up a case with the new commission at the federal level to look at community sector wages.
The Greens have always supported increased entitlements for employees, and long service leave is a basic provision that all employees must be assured of. The Greens will continue to support reforms in the area of portable long service leave management and administration in the ACT, especially in areas such as the community sector that provide essential services to the community and areas that have often fallen behind in entitlement reform.
We have to understand that when we are looking at the community sector workforce we do need to be looking at those wages and conditions. Long service leave is only one factor. During my years working in the community sector, being part of a peak organisation and having regular meetings with other peak organisations, we identified, a number of years ago, that the discussion around the community sector was not about sustainability but about viability, and that we needed to get to the concerns around viability before we even started looking at sustainability. That was to do with buildings, equipment, wages and conditions, access to IT and a whole range of matters. Some of those things have been picked up. I do not think that they have been picked up as comprehensively as they need to be, but there has been some movement.
We then went on to have the community sector task force set up to look into a range of industrial matters. One of their recommendations was around a portable long service leave scheme, and that is what we are seeing here today as the result of work over a number of years looking at one matter around the importance of the community sector being able to recruit and retain staff within that sector.
For far too long we have seen people who have been working for community organisations who then—I do not, in any way, blame them—apply for a job in the ACT public service or the federal public service. When you are paid $15,000 to $20,000 a year more for doing the same job, of course you would be very tempted to take up that offer. We still have quite a way to go in valuing our community sector workforce in monetary terms. They provide an incredible range of services; they provide essential services. As we can see, over some years, particularly now with the global financial crisis, there has been increasing demand on those services. Quite frankly, at the moment, that demand is not being met, so we need to be looking at how we can ensure that the people of the ACT who need those support services and that assistance are not falling through the cracks—that we really are a territory, a place, that cares for all its people, including its most disadvantaged and its most vulnerable.
So there are ongoing issues. This is a longer term battle, in a way, that needs to continue, to ensure that we really do address all the issues within the community sector—as I said, ranging from industrial matters around wages, conditions and so forth right through to buildings, other sorts of equipment, IT assistance and so forth that they need in order to be able to run those services and provide quality services.
Today the Greens are supporting the legislation put forward. We see this as a step in the right direction—to acknowledge that the community sector workforce deserves
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