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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 8 Hansard (25 October) . . Page.. 2047 ..

MR CONNOLLY (continuing):

groups in, particularly, the blue-collar workplace who otherwise miss out on health promotion messages. A factor that the current board of the Health Promotion Fund, the advisory body, started to work on some years ago was the realisation that there has been an awful lot of attention on middle-class, white-collar anti-smoking messages. There would not be a public service office in Canberra or a professional office in Canberra that has not been bombarded with those messages, but it is much harder in a blue-collar workplace. Some of the programs that the ACT has developed through the existing Health Promotion Fund have won acclaim around Australia, and have been regarded, in some cases, as the first of their type and in many cases the best of their type.

It has been put to me that one of the reasons why they have been so successful has been that the person on the Health Promotion Advisory Board has been from the TLC. The TLC has thus got right behind the process. The authority for TLC affiliates under the Industrial Relations Act, the ability to access workplaces, the ability to get into workplaces, is a very important asset in promoting that campaign. It would be most unfortunate if the requirement that we have a person with expertise in employee relations or occupational health and safety did not mean a person active and practising in the Canberra trade union community. The best way to ensure that we are getting a person who actually is out there in the workplace community, as a union official or rep or nominee, is to prescribe that they be a nominee of the Trades and Labour Council.

Again I accept an argument in principle that we should be cautious about these advisory boards being seen as nominees of particular community interests, but there are good reasons why that should be so in this case. If the Government is not minded to support this amendment, which I suspect they will not be, it would be encouraging at least to hear that it is the Government's intention to look for somebody who is out there practising as a trade unionist, as a trade union official. I would be most concerned, and I think many in this community would be most concerned, if the person appointed was somebody who is an academic with expertise in employee relations or somebody working for a consultancy in occupational health and safety.

One of the reasons why the current Health Promotion Fund has been able to do some very innovative work is that we have had a person from the TLC on that board. They have captured the energy and imagination of the broader union movement. It has been quite an achievement to get the Trades and Labour Council and the broader union movement to focus on anti-smoking campaigns and on alcohol and drugs at work campaigns, just to name two.

I am sure that Mrs Carnell would be aware of the at work smoking campaign, and I am sure that she would share my enthusiasm for how successful that has been. The alcohol and drugs at work campaign was pushed very strongly by the Health Promotion Fund. Some of the major building unions got up and got running some very innovative programs. They worked because they captured the imagination of the trade union leadership and, through the trade union leadership being enthused, the rank and file members of the trade unions were getting messages that they should think seriously about alcohol and drug use. It was not some sort of wussy bunch of do-gooders telling them that they need to be careful about drugs and alcohol at work; it was their workmates, their union officials, their union reps. It was a very positive message.

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