Howard must take responsibility

Date: 03 August 2001

The current car industry dispute is clearly the result of the Howard Government's unwillingness to guarantee 100 per cent of employee's entitlements, Shadow Minister for Industrial Relations, Arch Bevis, said today.

"Since the Oakdale mine dispute in 1999, Labor has had private members legislation in the Parliament to fix the issue of loss of accrued entitlements in cases of company insolvency. Two years ago I offered to sit down with Peter Reith to come up with a bipartisan scheme that would guarantee 100 per cent of employee entitlements. Peter Reith wouldn't take up the offer but even worse the government have used its numbers to prevent the Parliament from even debating Labor's plan.
"If the Government had adopted Labor's scheme or allowed the parliament to debate the issue we would not be in this position today.
"Although the timing of the dispute is unfortunate John Howard has only himself to blame.
"The action by John Howard and his Government to put in place a clearly inadequate scheme following the failure of National Textiles has resulted in a great deal of frustration from workers in all industries, right across Australia. We cannot ignore the high profile cases of company insolvency. Just this year we have seen companies the size of One.Tel go under, not to mention other numerous smaller companies, all resulting in loss of jobs and uncertainty as to whether entitlements will ever be paid.
"The dispute at Tristar, which has affected the whole car industry, is in direct response to the failure of John Howard to put in place a scheme that would guarantee 100 per cent of the entitlements for Australian workers. The workers at Tristar are not asking for anything more than a guarantee that the money they are legally entitled to will be there if the company fails - this is exactly what the workers at Stan Howard's company, National Textiles, eventually got.
"The Labor Party supports a scheme where all employees are covered for unpaid wages, accrued annual leave, long service leave, termination and redundancy arrangements and superannuation payments.
"Labor's plan is based on a small contribution of 0.1% of payroll to fund the scheme. Small employers would not even pay that - their employees would be covered directly by the Government. That's a small price to pay to promote security for all Australian workers and their families," said Mr Bevis.

For further information

Contact:	David Tansey
Union:	ALP Federal
Phone:	(02) 6277 4518
Contact Mobile:	0416 136 164
Fax:	(02) 6277 8534
Email:	david.tansey@aph.gov.au
WWW:	http://www.alp.org.au

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