Page 4101 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 20 September 2011

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Question put:

That Mrs Dunne’s amendment No 5 be agreed to.

The Assembly voted—

Ayes 5		Noes 10
Mr Coe	Mr Smyth	Mr Barr	Ms Gallagher
Mrs Dunne		Dr Bourke	Mr Hargreaves
Mr Hanson		Ms Bresnan	Ms Hunter
Mr Seselja		Ms Burch	Ms Le Couteur
		Mr Corbell	Mr Rattenbury

Question so resolved in the negative.

Amendment negatived.

Clause 34 agreed to.

Clauses 35 to 70, by leave, taken together and agreed to.

Clause 71 agreed to.

Clauses 72 to 103, by leave, taken together and agreed to.

Clause 104.

MS BRESNAN (Brindabella) (5.09): I move amendment No 1 circulated in my name [see schedule 2 at page 4125]. At this point I will speak to amendments 1 to 4. Similarly to Mrs Dunne, these all relate to the same issue. It would have been preferable to move these amendments together, but the particular procedure for this bill makes that difficult, but I will talk to them together.

Amendments 1 to 4 will remove the substantial dominant reason test from the discrimination provisions in part 6 of the bill. These provisions are included in the bill to prevent various types of discriminatory conduct against people in workplaces—for example, preventing someone discriminating against a health and safety representative by dismissing them or treating them less favourably because they are doing their health and safety duties—but the bill places a limitation on this.

Currently, to access the discrimination provision in this bill, the prohibited reason needs to be the dominant or substantial reason for the discrimination. To give a practical example, if a health and safety representative is dismissed, the fact that they were a health and safety representative would need to be the dominant or substantial reason for the dismissal to be considered discrimination under this bill. If the fact that they were a health and safety representative was one of the reasons but not the dominant reason or a substantial reason, then that conduct would not be discriminatory.

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