Page 4038 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 20 September 2011
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inspectors and the regulator have. They are much more stringent than the powers we give to police, and I think these should be matters of some concern to members of this place.
But, in addition, what we have in part 7 is another set of powers—a set of lesser powers—which generally reflect the powers of the inspectors. We do not see any reason for this duplication of powers. If we succeed in deleting this, we will immediately delete 15 pages of legislation, which has to be a good thing if nothing else. By doing this, we will actually cut down and simplify this piece of legislation.
This is not to say that we think people should have open slather on work sites or in workplaces to act in an unsafe way. That is not the case. We believe there should be appropriate safety measures, and we believe those appropriate safety measures are ensured by the actions of the regulator and his inspectors and that the powers which are given to unions in this case are unnecessary and duplicatory but at the same time are lesser powers than those provided to inspectors.
There are some considerable concerns with this, and I have put forward this scenario to the officials. There are powers in this part that allow union officials who have a right of entry to compel people on the site to give them assistance. There is a risk that people who are not absolutely full bottle on the legislation will get themselves into trouble.
I create the scenario of a building site where there are a whole lot of people working—technical workers, manual workers, labourers and the like—and someone who has power under part 7 comes on site and says to somebody walking by, “Here, give me a hand to do this.” He is doing another job, and in the way that people do on building sites, probably with colourful language, he tells him that he is not going to help him do that because he is busy doing something else.
That would be a very tricky act that has penalties attached to it, because the people on the site may not actually recognise that this person is a person who is exercising his powers under part 7 of the act. However, if a workplace inspector, an official, came on site it would be much more obvious that that was what he was doing. It is interesting that those powers do not always translate into the workplace inspectors area.
For a variety of reasons the Canberra Liberals will be opposing this part. We believe that in some cases it creates an extra layer of bureaucracy in this already complex piece of legislation and creates a set of powers which are unnecessary and duplicatory. It is not actually about whether the unions exercise these powers; it is that having a third party exercise these powers—whether it be a union group or an employer group or any other interest group—is unnecessarily duplicatory in this already complex piece of legislation.
MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Chief Minister, Minister for Health and Minister for Industrial Relations) (12.16): I understand that Mrs Dunne is opposing the current clauses. The government will not support Mrs Dunne’s position on this, which would in effect remove the whole of part 7 of the bill.
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