Page 3981 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 1 December 2021
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widespread, while Victorian Minister for Industrial Relations, Tim Pallas, has said ‘wage theft is an insidious crime’;
(c) many cases have been brought to courts, tribunals and the Fair Work Ombudsman relating to wage theft and underpayment via individual or class actions or through self-reporting;
(d) that the ACT Government is doing the work to improve the lives of workers in Canberra through its Secure Local Jobs Code, anti-privatisation program, and union encouragement policy;
(e) that the extraordinary efforts of teachers during the ongoing global pandemic have been vital to our community; and
(f) that the national teacher shortage demonstrates the need to better recognise the value of the teaching profession; and
(3) calls on the ACT Government to:
(a) bargain in good faith when the teaching enterprise agreement expires to find enduring improvements to teacher workloads;
(b) continue to work closely with the AEU through the joint teacher shortage taskforce, focussing on recruitment, retention, and workload issues; and
(c) commit to working with public school teachers and their union to ensure that the ACT is the best place in the nation to be employed as a teacher.”.
Of course, we know that teachers work hard because they love what they do, and they care about their students. Teachers always go above and beyond for their students. Even when teachers were in quarantine, their families were in quarantine and they needed to switch to remote learning, they were still prioritising the learning of their students. That is why it is so important that we listen to them and that we keep their workload sustainable.
The ACT government has partnered with the AEU in a joint teacher shortage task force to tackle recruitment, retention and workload issues. The current teaching enterprise agreement made ACT public school teachers the highest paid in the country. That is because the ACT government genuinely values the teaching profession in our public schools in the ACT.
It is really important to state, and let us be clear: there is no systemic underpayment issue in public schools. Mr Hanson is simply clutching at straws here. He is completely misrepresenting the union survey. Teachers are telling us, through their union, that their workloads are unsustainable, and they want to see change in their workplaces. This is a serious issue, and that is why I am taking it seriously. That is why the ACT government is working in partnership with the union to make tangible changes to improve the working lives of teachers and to ensure that our public education system can continue to provide world-class education for Canberra families.
Mr Hanson is not interested in real solutions; let us be clear about that. The government has already been working with the AEU for months to improve the workload for teachers, based on what we heard in the survey. Public school teachers deserve their voices to be listened to genuinely and to be seriously taken account of, and that is what the ACT government is doing.
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