Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 1 Hansard (20 February) . . Page.. 8 ..

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister) (11.01): Mr Speaker, it is very hard to decide where to start on this absolutely ridiculous behaviour by Rosemary Follett. Maybe I will start on Labor's public administration policy from 12 February last year. Rosemary Follett suggested on the second page of the document outlining Labor's record that one of their real achievements was introducing enterprise bargaining, with two agreements settled and with industrial relations in the ACT public sector firmly based on productivity improvements. None of that was delivered. It is interesting that Ms Follett said that over the next three years Labor would maximise the benefits of enterprise bargaining through further productivity improvements and efficiencies across the ACT Government Service. What that basically means is exactly what we are doing here.

The budget that was passed in this Assembly had in it exactly what the Federal Labor Party's policy is on industrial relations; that is, we had a 1.3 per cent budget funded safety net in the budget over the next three years. Increases above that are supposed to be productivity based. They are not my words. I will quote now from a comment made by, I think, Mr Beazley - not normally a renowned Liberal. On 10 May 1995 Mr Beazley, talking about the Federal Government, said that that Government had decided to replace price indexation for government programs with large wage costs, arguing that enterprise bargaining had rendered the present method unsuitable as a basis for budgeting. Mr Beazley said that the new arrangements would ensure that the budget did not fund pay rises which were meant to be offset by productivity growth. That is exactly what we are doing here; we are requiring that increases above the 1.3 per cent which is in the budget be productivity based.

Ms Follett seems to believe that we should have used the Consolidated Fund surplus which is, at least in my understanding, supposed to be used for building schools and all of those sorts of things. One of the things that Ms Follett might have forgotten was that the balance in the ACT Consolidated Fund when we took government was zero. For the interest of members of the Assembly, I table a graph of the Consolidated Fund costs when we took government. Zero is what we had to deal with.

Ms Follett: How come your budget paper says that there was a $43m surplus?

MRS CARNELL: When we took over the budget, the balance of the Consolidated Fund was absolutely zero. If Ms Follett and those opposite think that we have not negotiated, I will just run through a chronology of events that go on forever. I will just go through some of the issues. On 3 July last the offer to begin discussions came. Where from? The Government. The first offer from the Government was put on the table on 22 August last year. On 29 August there was an agreement to a paid meeting of delegates on the proposal of 22 August. It was not until 15 September that there was an initial meeting with unions, simply because the unions were not available until then. Then, on 13 October there was the second meeting, after, by the way, the unions had rejected the Government's offer of 22 August. On 11 October there was the TLC's counterproposal. We met two days later. There was then another meeting, a third meeting, with the unions, on 27 October. There was a written outline of the Government's proposal, as requested by the unions, on 13 November. All of these meetings went on. There was another meeting on 17 November.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .