Page 1750 - Week 06 - Thursday, 30 July 2020
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Hairdressing is a tough and competitive industry, with high overheads often experienced by businesses, and very slim margins. Now is utterly the worst possible time to be adding additional costs and barriers to the employment of Canberrans. Calls for an increase in employment costs will make existing margins—if there are any—slimmer, and for some it will be the difference between staying in business and not. It will be the difference between operating in the ACT or having to look for some respite elsewhere—over the border—from the high costs of operating in the ACT. It will be the difference between putting that extra employee on or having to let an employee go.
I have spoken to many in the industry about this, in particular an industry representative who has done many years as a hairdresser—as an employee and, for many years, as an operator of a number of hairdressing salons. She tells me that any move to introduce the portable long service leave scheme to the hairdressing and beauty industry would add another layer of compliance for small businesses, which already do not have the time or resources to manage the requirements they have to meet. Further, she reiterates the potential of having a situation where an additional, say, two per cent impost on top of their payroll would make the decision to employ more staff difficult. Again, in the current economic circumstances this seems to be naively short sighted. This purports to be a move to support the worker, but it fails to acknowledge the potential risk to the worker’s job.
Another huge concern I have with Ms Cody’s motion is this government’s long and chequered history of mismanagement and maladministration of the scheme, and its inability to interpret the legislation. We need only look at the recent debacle and the subsequent legal stoush around the eligibility and/or requirement of a peak body in the community services sector to contribute to the scheme, and the scheme’s reluctance to repay a substantial overpayment once the courts ruled, following a substantial legal battle, the funds that had been contributed to the long service leave fund. We also only need to look at the private aged-care providers in this town, who are struggling in a government-regulated market to meet the costs of doing business when competing with not-for-profits paying significantly lower taxes and no payroll tax.
The opposition does not support Ms Cody’s motion today, and I strongly oppose any further action on the matter. I reiterate my concerns that the extension of eligibility of the scheme will make it harder for employers to provide jobs and will add to the financial burden already present for business owners, who are doing everything that they can to keep their staff employed at this time. Whilst we are in the depths of a battle against a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and a national economic crisis, I will go so far as to say that this is one of the most ill thought out and ill-considered motions that Ms Cody has brought to this place. It is about time that she ventured outside her union bubble and realised that thousands of businesses across the ACT are currently on life support, and that without those businesses there will be no jobs.
MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong) (2.51): The Greens are pleased to see a continued commitment to long service leave for ACT employees and to have an opportunity to discuss that here in the Assembly today. Ms Cody’s motion calls on the ACT
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