Page 4097 - Week 13 - Thursday, 10 November 1994
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Mr Lamont: You want to abolish them altogether.
MR DE DOMENICO: I can get on to that in a minute, Minister. I am glad that you interjected. He said that there was unanimity in the Labour Ministers Council that highly centralised wage fixing is no longer appropriate. Once again I find very little to disagree with. I believe very strongly that highly centralised wage fixing is no longer appropriate either. One wonders whether the ACT Government is practising what it is preaching. I am sure that people will recall that during the first round of estimates the Government was saying how wonderful the centralised wage fixing process was - or the centralised coordinating group, I think it was called. So, once again, I am saying, "Yes, Minister, I agree". Highly centralised wage fixing is no longer appropriate and I am glad to see that there was unanimous agreement to that.
I am pleased to say that most of the Ministers that I spoke to also agreed that wage increases had to be linked to improvements in productivity and efficiency. We heard yesterday that the Minister has signed three agreements, I think, with the majority of public sector employees here in the ACT, which he says are based on productivity and efficiency. I would be very interested today to have a look at those three agreements, as I am sure would other members of the Assembly. I hope that the Minister is right when he says that they are based on improvements in productivity and efficiency as well.
One thing that came out loud and clear at the conference that the Minister went to - it was reiterated at the conference I went to - was that it is not true that governments of non-Labor persuasion are aiming at removing from workers award safety nets and the protection of trade unions. At the conference I went to the words that came out loud and clear were "flexibility and choice". By that I mean that there was a strong - - -
Mr Berry: Flexibility and choice?
MR DE DOMENICO: Mr Berry might laugh. You would not know anything about flexibility and choice, Mr Berry. That means, for example, that if individual employment contracts were what workers individually wanted, and if they wanted to be protected by a safety net and that safety net was to be the minimum award, it is the worker's individual choice to be able to go along and obtain such an individual employment contract with his employer. If the workers wanted to group together and form their own little group, with or without union involvement, and then negotiate individual employment contracts, that was also something that was happening very successfully in all States - including Queensland, I must say. That is what flexibility and choice means.
Mr Berry, there is a classic example of what flexibility and choice means at IOF. The IOF experience here in the ACT was, I think, the first of its kind registered in Australia. It was highly praised all over the place. That is what we mean by flexibility and choice. I am delighted with this sort of statement. There was flexibility and choice and unanimity on removing the right to join or not to join a trade union, which, I think, is a very basic right of all Australians. So, as I said, once again, it is very difficult to disagree with some of the statements made by the Ministers, Mr Lamont included.
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