Page 2975 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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document, it does not appear. It is there in the headers; it is there in the title; it is there in the footers, but it does not appear in the report. Mr Gentleman, in his search to protect working families in the ACT, has not found one “working family” to come forward and tell him that they feel threatened by this legislation. That is the debacle that this report is. If you go to the introduction, the words “working families” appears once, and it is in a quote from the previous document. If you go to the conclusion, it appears in the second last line.
Apart from that, there is no analysis of how many working families there are in the ACT; there is no analysis of what the impact of this legislation is; there is no analysis of how many working families are impacted and to what degree. In fact, there is no analysis at all. This is a he-said-she-said report, where Mr Gentleman has got his list of union colleagues to turn up to give their view of the world in the 14 hours and 21 minutes of public hearings over two years, for which Mr Gentleman received an allowance of $20,000—$10,000 a year. That works out at about $1,700 an hour. It is actually $28 a second per public hearing. There were 14 hours and 21 minutes of hearings in two years to deliver up 12 recommendations.
If members of the Assembly go to the recommendations, they will see that they do not mention working families either. The term “working family” does not appear in a recommendation; there are no recommendations that look at the effect of what this legislation has done for them. So, from that, you can only conclude that after two years of exhaustive activity from Mr Gentleman—or perhaps exhausting activity for Mr Gentleman—he cannot prove that WorkChoices has hurt working families. Therefore, you have to conclude that the changes that the federal government has put in place have actually benefited the working families of the ACT, because Mr Gentleman could not find one—not one—working family to appear before his committee to tell them of the negative impacts on them of the WorkChoices legislation. It is a terrible indictment of Mr Gentleman that he has allowed this to go on for so long.
You have to remember, Mr Speaker, that the committee had a false start. Yes, that is right; he got to the barrier, but he hesitated. The original terms of reference for the select committee—they are on page III—were: to examine the effect on working families in relation to health costs, the effect of industrial legislation changes, adjustments by the Commonwealth Grants Commission, and the allocation of funds by the commonwealth. None of those get mentioned in the report either. So, we started in May 2005. We had to change it in June 2006, because we could not find any evidence on the first terms of reference.
If you put the word “health” into the word search and look for something about the impact on the health of the people of the ACT of WorkChoices, the only time the word “health” appears is when the Occupational Health and Safety Act is cited. Obviously, there are no negative health impacts from the federal government’s changes; therefore, one can only conclude that is a positive for the working families of the ACT. We also looked for adjustments from the Commonwealth Grants Commission. It does not appear either. So, perhaps Mr Gentleman should get up and tell the Assembly and the taxpayers of the ACT what he discovered between 5 May 2005 and 8 June 2007, because it is not written up in his report.
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