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Anderson Hypocritical Over Ansett
Date: 14 September 2001
Shadow Minister for Industrial Relations Arch Bevis called on the Howard Government to stop playing politics with employee entitlements and to support Labor's package of reforms aimed at addressing this ever-increasing problem.
"It has become increasingly apparent in the last week that Ansett workers are going to join the long queue of workers who have lost their legally accrued entitlements through no fault of their own.
"Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson has said this morning that the government will encourage the administrators to go after Air New Zealand for employees' entitlements. This indicates that Mr Anderson believes that Air New Zealand may have undertaken an asset strip of Ansett. Yesterday's announcement by Air New Zealand that Ansett has a nominal value of $1 means that approximately $1.1 billion has effectively disappeared.
"At the moment Ansett employees are facing an enormous loss of their entitlements with the Australian taxpayer set to pick up part of the bill through the government's inadequate employee entitlements support scheme.
"John Anderson has now claimed that the government will seek to secure these lost assets from Air New Zealand, the Deputy Prime Minister's comments reek of hypocrisy. Mr Anderson, like every coalition member, voted to defeat amendment to the Corporations Laws that Labor with Democrat support had passed in the Senate. These amendments would allow the courts to do what Mr Anderson claims needs to be done in the Ansett case.
"Mr Anderson's comments are even more hypocritical as Labor has had a workers' entitlements Private Members Bill in the House of Representatives for over three years that the Government has refused to even debate
"When parliament resumes next week Labor will again move to debate the Employment Security Bill, hopefully this time the Government will allow a constructive and meaningful debate on this bill.
"While Labor's bill will help recovery of stripped assets, this is only one part of the bigger problem of loss of employee entitlements. Just a couple of months ago we saw the uncertainty that the One.Tel employees faced. This is a national problem and so far only Labor has sought to provide a comprehensive national solution to this problem.
"For far too long John Howard and his Minister have wanted to play politics with people's life savings, Labor's package of reforms will see entitlements guaranteed and enable recovery in cases of asset stripping," said Mr Bevis.
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