Page 1399 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 3 May 2016
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There are far more women working in this sector than men. It is well known that women are more likely than men throughout their lifetimes to take a break from employment in their industry. Women on average are paid less, have less super, and are likely to change employer after breaks from employment. As I noted in my presentation speech, women are far more likely to lose their long service leave entitlements than men. Providing portable long service leave to an industry which has a higher proportion of its workforce made up of women reduces the number of women forced to forgo their long service leave entitlements.
The federal Senate inquiry into the aged-care sector workforce has recently concluded. The three recommendations are essentially that states, territories and the commonwealth should work together to consider developing a national portable long service leave scheme; the Australian Bureau of Statistics should consider developing an insecure work indicator; and the federal government should do detailed modelling on the possibility of a national portable long service leave scheme.
Several industry groups have tried to use this report and its recommendations to claim that the ACT should not proceed with these reforms. But nothing in these recommendations precludes the ACT government from extending existing schemes to targeted sections of the workforce with high transience and churn.
Mr Smyth stated in his speech in April:
… there was a Senate inquiry that said a whole lot more work needs to be done on the portability of long service leave.
The statement should have been that the Senate inquiry said a whole lot of work needs to be done on the portability of long service leave on a national cross-industry and all-encompassing scale. The idea of creating a national portable long service leave scheme which captures every worker from every industry in every state and territory and which puts the levies into the same fund and allows for the same amount of leave to be accrued and claimed for every industry is very different to a targeted scheme aimed at insecure workers. Nothing in those recommendations impacts on the feasibility of the reform we are discussing today.
I will go to a couple of comments raised in debate in regard to waste workers and small businesses. Under this legislation I am advised it will only be those who are under contracts with the territory that will be covered, so it should not affect small businesses. On the transience of the ACT workforce, we know that one of the largest suppliers of aged care in the territory has its own statistics on long service leave that already points to them only paying half of those entitlements. What is more, the industry in its submission to the Senate inquiry put forward its own details and evidence that 25 per cent is the rate of transience. If you were to look at that over a four-year period, you would see that all those employees may well change in that four-year period. I also understand that no new software will need to be purchased. (Time expired.)
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