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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 8 Hansard (19 August) . . Page.. 2847 ..

MS GALLAGHER: On average, they are 3.3 per cent behind New South Wales. There is an offer on the table that meets parity-in fact, it exceeds parity for every point of the classification scale, except the teacher level 1. Don't scoff; it's true. You haven't read it, have you? You haven't got the New South Wales classification structure and the ACT classification structure and matched them up with the offer- have you?-because if you had you'd realise that parity is probably a little more than wages anyway. But there we go.

Mr Pratt: What's happening with New South Wales negotiations now?

MS GALLAGHER: Let's just look at it; let's just look at it on the basic facts; let's just look at it on the classification scale. You would see that, at every point other than the teacher level 1.9, this offer addresses parity.

We've also created an extra classification, an extra increment point, so that teachers aren't constrained at the 1.9 level and could move to the 1.10-a new class, a new increment point so that teachers could be rewarded for their length of service. Again, that is something that you and your party, with all its tremendous knowledge about fair industrial relations practices and wage outcomes for people, weren't able to deliver.

This party is about supporting workers, and we do this through various mechanisms. We have legislation, and we negotiate appropriate wage outcomes through agreements. And as part of determining what are appropriate wage outcomes, we have to consider it in conjunction with other wage priorities, and we have to consider it in terms of recurrent expenditure.

Steve said, "Oh, tremendous, you've got all this money coming in this year."Every 1 per cent for teachers is $2 million, and it's recurrent expenditure. So we have to have the capacity; we have to be responsible; we have to have the capacity to pay the offer that's on the table now and anything that comes in the next three years of the agreement, which we can't even get to because of Mrs Carnell's stupid clause in that agreement, which she agreed to without advice. She agreed to it because she wanted to get out of the situation where she was suppressing wages to the point that people were getting half of the CPI.

Mr Stefaniak: They've actually got some good, sensible people in that union, Katy; they're not too bad.

MS GALLAGHER: They are good people in the union. I have no doubt about it. And they are laughing all over their faces about that clause being agreed to, because they've never seen it agreed to in any other agreement either. They couldn't believe that she said, "Yes, I'll agree to that. That'd be great. Let's tie the next negotiations up at the first instance, at the first five seconds of negotiations, and enter into a dispute."We can't even get to discuss 90 per cent of the log of claims, because we can't get over this clause. And we are negotiating. We are negotiating in good faith.

Mr Stefaniak: When did it come in?

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