Page 5709 - Week 15 - Thursday, 10 December 2009
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safety responsibilities and for those who fail to uphold these responsibilities to be held directly to account, be it the employer, employee, WorkCover or the minister responsible.
The ACT needs a watchdog that checks dangerous workplaces more than once every five years, as has happened with the adult industry. We need a government that investigates and enforces standards in government work sites rather than sitting and hoping that contractors will adhere to standards, as has happened at government waste management facilities. The best OHS policies are meaningless without the government performing its role as independent investigator. Without a credible threat of auditing, the small number of companies who put their workers at risk may go undiscovered.
I mentioned earlier in this speech the role that employees and their union representatives play in making sure people are safe at work. I have mentioned previously when speaking in this place the Australian Building and Construction Commission, also known as the ABCC, and the discrimination it has continued against workers in the building and construction industry.
Violence of any sort used as an industrial weapon by either employers or unions should rightly be condemned and prosecuted. Yet those who would abuse their powers, be they employers or unions, are often minorities in the industry. Outside the extremely small minorities that seek to abuse their role as an organiser, shop steward or delegate, unions, particularly construction unions, seek to keep their members alive at work. For those that forget or wish to ignore the fact, people all across the country die in construction and related industries on an all too frequent basis. Yet we see the discriminatory practices of the ABCC continue to remain a part of the federal Labor platform within the Fair Work Act.
Many hardworking, committed individuals can be dragged through a process that denies them basic standards of jurisprudence, attacks their integrity and denies them dignity within our judicial system. And this can be done simply on the basis that they wish to refuse work they deem to be dangerous.
I am sure members of ACT Labor as individuals, and most of their membership, wish to see discrimination abandoned within the industrial relations system, yet the federal Labor Party choose to take the course of least resistance. We are concerned that on this point such decisions are made without reference to the Labor Party membership or the general will of the electorate. The manner in which the federal leadership of the Labor Party overrides the will of the membership and the general electorate represents a move away from the principles and the grassroots of the party.
Without wanting to spend too much time on it, I do feel compelled to discuss the reintroduction of individual contracts as a policy of the federal Labor Party and the effects that the application of such a policy would have upon the ability of workers to protect their right to a safe workplace in conjunction with unions.
I note that this week’s federal Leader of the Opposition—and I have to say “this week’s”, as we know the status of the frontbench is fairly fluid these days—has claimed again, and I paraphrase, that individual contracts allow employees and bosses
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