Page 2917 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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The impact of these changes on current or potential ACT legislation and any other related matter.
The report states:
With respect to industrial relations, the Workplace Relations Act 1996 places restrictions on the ability of the ACT to make industrial relations laws because the application provisions in the Act [see sections 5, 6, and 7] indicate that federal industrial relations legislation applies to the ACT in its entirety to the exclusion of any Territory laws that may cover the same subject matter.
However, matters central to the working of the industrial relations system such as wages and conditions, unfair dismissal and agreement-making are reserved exclusively for Commonwealth legislation in respect of these issues would be invalid.
In other words, this committee has taken over two years to look at issues that the ACT has absolutely no powers to deal with. Talk about an exercise in futility! I have recommended that the Assembly and the government disregard the report and I also said, “Hold this committee till a later time.” I did not ever say, “Never have a committee.” And if you had done what I suggested, most of your speech, Mr Gentleman, would have been appropriate. Otherwise, it was not relevant to what we as a committee did and the people we saw.
Mr Gentleman: I think twice you voted against it.
MRS BURKE: I have done so. I have asked the Assembly to disregard the report because large parts of it are outside the terms of reference, parts of it are based on out-of-date information or not soundly based and parts of it have obviously been overtaken by events. It has all been a waste of time and resources.
I will go through the recommendations in turn. The first recommendation is that the ACT government “develop strategies, in partnership with community groups, to continue to monitor the impact of the WorkChoices legislation on the ACT community”. The report notes that the ACT government is already monitoring WorkChoices just as it would also monitor any other industrial relations system. Other groups such as unions and business organisations, similarly, are already monitoring WorkChoices. This recommendation is for the government to continue doing what it is doing.
The second recommendation is that the ACT government “lobby the commonwealth government to ensure that comprehensive data on Australian Workplace Agreements is gathered by the Workplace Authority and made available”. Recently the Australian Workplace Authority released assessments of AWAs lodged since May this year as at the end of August. It found that, of the finalised assessments:
6237 agreements passed the Fairness Test—these agreements commonly provided a higher rate of pay in exchange for changes to protected award conditions
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