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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 5 Hansard (7 May) . . Page.. 1605 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

received it straightaway; of the Ansett workers, where the failure of that airline had led to the disappearance of their entitlements; and of national textile workers.

Those are the headline issues that we hear about. It was only the organisational strength of those workers and their unions that led to them receiving anything at all. But in the end the liability for these high-profile collapses was left with the taxpayers and the travelling public, because there was inadequate protection for the employees' entitlements within the corporate framework.

These are the high-profile collapses. We do not hear much about smaller enterprises which collapse and leave workers and their families without their hard-earned entitlements. One example of this was highlighted in the ACT when the Florey Medical Centre went into receivership some years ago. Once again, workers' entitlements evaporated. I shared the dismay, the frustration and the sense of injustice suffered by one of the workers from the Florey Medical Centre and I promised that I would continue to work to protect workers' entitlements.

Also affected are the workers employed on contracts. They can be casual workers in part-time jobs while they study, they can be the increasing number of people on short-term contracts, or they can be in an industry where three to five-year contracts are the norm. These workers do not get access to long service leave.

That is a particular problem in industries where people perform the same job year in, year out, but where there are routine contract changes. For these workers, the situation is that they can do the same job, often in exactly the same workplace, but never accrue long service leave. We had examples of that when we met workers in this situation when we were debating the Long Service Leave (Contract Cleaning Industry) Act in 1999. One of these workers, as I recall, had been doing the same job for 25 years without a long service leave entitlement.

This story repeats itself among transport workers, retail workers and clerical workers. Governments add to the problem in the private sector when they contract out government work and entitlements formally in place for workers are lost when they move to the private sector. This Assembly has a proud history over a number of years of securing, improving and guaranteeing long service leave in the private sector. As our private sector grows, we need to continue that work.

Our Assembly work on long service leave began when we increased benefits for workers under the building and construction industry scheme in 1996. Following that we passed the Long Service Leave (Contract Cleaning Industry) Act 1999, which set up a scheme for the cleaning industry in the ACT. That Act was modelled on the scheme in place in the ACT building and construction industry since 1981. The building and construction industry long service leave scheme went on to become a national scheme whereby building workers can earn long service leave credits in any state or territory except the Northern Territory.

As an aside, I recall a dispute in the ACT in the early 1980s during the construction of the new Parliament House when workers argued strongly for portability and the government of the day had not delivered that portability to the territory. Indeed, there was a lengthy stoppage on the Parliament House site. It was, I think, around the

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