Page 2726 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 28 June 2011
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as my motion requested, as I know this is something groups involved with women with disabilities are keen to see.
The new strategy also says that the government still needs to undertake further research into episodic disability, such as chronic illness and mental illness, to assist the government in developing improved employment practices for people suffering such conditions. Practices that assist people with chronic illness are actually practices that should be incorporated into all workplaces as a matter of course as they benefit all people in the workplace. This includes improved flexibility in employment practices, allowing people to attend appointments, and access to sick rooms. These are all practices which can help keep people with chronic illness in the workplace on a long-term basis.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (8.31): I will resist the temptation of some of the members of this place and will not talk about arts now, although I am keen to—I will leave it till the Community Services Directorate, which is now where it lives, or when this amendment passes it will be where it lives. I will make my comments really in relation to industrial relations matters.
There are real problems for the people of the ACT in the administration of industrial relations, mainly because, as is usually the case when dealing with a Labor government, their wastefulness and flawed policies have a huge impact on the people of the ACT and they do not care at all about the implications of their decisions on costs of living and on people who are already struggling with the rising costs of water and electricity, increasing taxes through rates and other charges, and reduced housing affordability.
This is particularly the case where you have people in small business who are trying to keep their employees on the books while being confronted with a system of industrial relations of the sort that we have in the ACT where workers compensation, which is the principal issue for those of us in the ACT, is still a problematic issue, although there have been some improvements. I note that there are still other so-called improvements in the pipeline but they have not seen the light of day, although they were promised at the end of last year or early this year.
The estimates committee report noted that the ACT Public Service Workers Compensation and Work Safety Improvement Plan will centralise the management and reporting of injuries sustained by ACT government employees and of strategies to strengthen return to work practices. This is a positive step because for too long now the government has not really known very much about the management of its workers compensation scheme, and this of course is a problem because you do not have an overall picture of how the workers compensation scheme works.
It is working on a day-to-day basis; it is hard to identify problems and fix them up. I am pleased that the government has agreed to the committee’s recommendation that progress reports be given to the Assembly in relation to the implementation of the ACT Public Service Workers Compensation and Work Safety Improvement Plan. But I wonder why the estimates committee had to come up with this reporting framework; surely it should be something that the government of its own initiative would understand would profit the Assembly, government employees and the
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