Page 3539 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 25 August 2009
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Mr Hargreaves: You’re too nice a guy. You’re not a nice guy?
MR SPEAKER: Mr Hargreaves, you are interrupting Ms Porter’s speech.
Mr Hargreaves: I apologise, Ms Porter, and to you, Mr Speaker.
MS PORTER: Thank you. In the 19th century, furlough was a privilege granted by legislation to colonial and Indian services due to the duration of travel by ship—six-month trips were not uncommon—to and from England. Furlough would provide an immigrant civil service staff member with a single opportunity to revisit friends and family left behind in England with the security of held positions in Australia. In fact, this concept of furlough was adopted by some organisations with staff in remote areas within Australia to allow families to return south for extended periods of time. I and my family benefited from this policy when working for so long in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. The concept spread beyond the public service over the period 1950 to 1975, mainly as a result of pressure from employees seeking comparability with the public service.
In most industries, long service leave is provided either directly by the commonwealth, state or territory legislation or through federal and state awards. In normal circumstances, entitlements to the full benefit fall due after a minimum continuous period of employment generally of 10 years, and pro rata provisions are available under certain circumstances. In the organisations I previously worked with in the not-for-profit sector, it was more common to award pro rata provisions.
Long service leave is typically awarded to employees after completing a considerable tenure with a single company. However, within a limited number of industries, such as the construction industry and the cleaning industry in the ACT or, indeed, within the public service, it is possible to transfer long service entitlements from one employer to another. This is mostly done through specific legislation schemes which employees in those industries pay into and which administer the funds to employees. The itinerant project-based nature of these industries means that workers have to move from employer to employer which, without the portability schemes introduced, would prevent workers from accruing sufficient continuous work with one employer to become eligible under normal long service leave provisions, as the Chief Minister previously said.
All of that is by way of background to the debate before the Assembly today. I would like to remind members that both the ACT Construction Industry Long Service Leave Authority and the ACT Cleaning Industry Long Service Leave Authority agree that the most appropriate way to progress an industry-specific portable long service leave scheme is to establish a single, integrated ACT portable long service leave authority. Like Ms Burch, I have experienced the building industry through my family members, currently through my stepson, who is a project manager for commercial building projects.
To facilitate the establishment of a single, integrated ACT portable long service leave authority, extensive stakeholder consultation was undertaken prior to the development
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