Page 2226 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 31 October 1989
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includes part-time employees - not full-time people alone. "Employee" means a "natural person who is employed under a contract of service". Although "contract of service" is not defined within the legislation, it obviously means an agreement and includes part-time people. So apart from the fact that you may not find even 10 people on a construction site, as Mr Duby mentions, particularly after knock-off time, the truth of the matter is you could indeed find 10 people on a somewhat smaller building site, say, a house. I have been involved in that area and I would not think that is necessarily uncommon at all. They may not be there all at the one time, but as part-time employees they could certainly be there.
It has also been said that the 10 employees was a compromise. Well, that is not quite the truth of the matter. The 20 was the compromise. Mr Kleinig of CARD said that he believes it should be 30, but as a compromise we would accept 20.
A figure of 20 is what the business community appears to be prepared to accept as a compromise. Indeed, it was prepared to accept the entire report as a compromise. But once the committee's judgment was not accepted, then we entered into other areas, which is fair enough.
The organisations have been most prepared to compromise. There are a number of things within the report of the select committee which they were not particularly in agreement with, but they were prepared to make that compromise. But the matter of involved unions, which was not a recommendation of the committee for change, throws the area open to new understandings. So I recommend that the figure should be 20.
MR COLLAERY (4.44): The Rally supports the motion and believes that the group should be 20. The Rally supports that, not because we disagree with what Mr Duby, Mr Moore or Mr Wood said, but because we believe, in relation to Mr Duby's comments, that the duty of care applies regardless of the size of the group.
We take the view that what we are really talking about - the unstated fact in a lot of this debate - is union activity in the building sector. That union activity has at times been unacceptable to any reasonable person in this town, and the Rally serves notice on the BWIU that this legislation can pass with 20 at this stage.
In due course the Rally will support an amendment to come back down to another size, but at this stage we believe this new legislation in the ACT should be phased in, in industrial harmony, against a background of impending further developments in the city. It should not be used to create any industrial disruption for purposes affecting those one or two union groups that are prominent in union disturbances in this town and who bring discredit on the vast majority of the union movement in the city.
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