LOCAL VOLUNTEER GROUPS TO BE HIT BY HARSH NEW GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS

Volunteers in local communities will be at risk of large personal fines and possible jail terms, under a Gillard Government plan to make volunteers subject to the same OH&S obligations as paid workers, says Senator Gary Humphries, Liberal Senator for the ACT.

Under the Gillard Government’s new national OH&S regime, volunteers will be considered in the same way as workers when it comes to OH&S matters and will be personally liable for fines of up to $300,000 and prison sentences of up to five years if they don’t comply with Labor’s new laws.

“Labor’s national OH&S regime will badly damage the voluntary sector”, said Senator Humphries.

“Local sports clubs, scout groups and other community organisations will now be tied up with strict regulations and threatened with harsh punishments for non-compliance.

“This new law will demand exactly the same standards from the organisers and cooks of local sausage sizzles and church lamington stalls as it will from nationwide restaurant chains.

“I don’t want to see a ‘meals on wheels’ volunteer or a local cricket coach cop a $300,000 fine, or a prison term, for not complying with Labor’s new regulations.

“Volunteer groups (like soccer clubs, meals on wheels, the scouts and guides) and the events they run (like fetes, gala days and community events) are the glue that binds together communities – and Julia Gillard wants to make them subject to officious inspectors.

“Governments should be making volunteering easier not harder.

Senator Humphries said the ‘mud-army’ of Queensland was the most inspiring act of 2011 and we should not be discouraging volunteers for lending a hand to make our communities better.

“Given our concerns of the possible impacts on community groups and volunteers, the Coalition is calling on the Federal Government to delay its implementation of this new regime for 12 months so that the true impacts on voluntary organisations can be assessed.

“The Coalition, through its Red Tape Reduction Taskforce, will also examine the new laws and identify ways that we can lessen the regulatory burden that will exist on community groups and volunteers, and let them get back to doing what they do so well”, Senator Humphries concluded.

31 January 2012

HOUSING SLUMP SHOWS SHINE COMING OFF CANBERRA

The ACT has recorded its lowest building approval level in three years, confirming that Canberra is becoming less and less liveable.

The figures recently published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that Canberra has gone against the national trend with building approvals reduced by almost half from October to November 2011.

“This really does confirm that Canberra is a less attractive place to live than once it was, as the nation’s capital subsists in a Federal Labor blind spot”, Senator Gary Humphries said today.

“Petrol and food costs are amongst the highest in Australia, hospital waiting lists are the longest in the country – yet the Federal Government cuts spending on Canberra-based national institutions and allows the city to become tatty and run-down.

“Consumer confidence is down and uncertainty in the Public Service due to the Federal Labor’s efficiency dividend zigzags looms like a dark cloud over the city’s future.

“The ACT and Federal Labor Governments are doing their best to ensure fewer people see Canberra as the place to call home – the cost of living keeps rising, and spending on services and maintenance keeps sliding.

“There was a time not so long ago that people wanted to live and work in Canberra and would come from across the nation, but the shine continues to wear off Canberra as a destination.

“The picture can’t be painted more clearly, yet the government stands back and scratches its head as though it’s looking at a Picasso.

“I call on the Federal Government to stop taking Canberra and our national institutions for granted, pillaging them each time they want a little extra spending money”, Senator Humphries concluded.

11 January 2012

NO HAPPY NEW YEAR FOR THE NCA

In an unhappy start to 2012 for Canberra, Labor has ignored the plight of the National Capital Authority, confirming that maintenance of the city’s fabric will suffer through the increased efficiency dividend.

Since 2007, the NCA has lost nearly 40% of its funding. The recently announced cuts which exempted some small agencies will apply with full force to the NCA, reducing its already inadequate budget further.

“The NCA is supposed to be able to maintain our national capital, but this Government seems determined to ensure its unable to do that,” Senator Gary Humphries said today.

“Again and again, the NCA has been crippled by the Rudd-Gillard governments and this latest cut, which goes totally against the Hawke review’s call for more funding, will see Canberra continue to suffer while Canberra’s Labor members sit back and watch.

“We have a Chief Minister begging the Prime Minister not to cut funding but it seems her pleas for relief have been flatly ignored.

“Kate Lundy, Andrew Leigh and Gai Brodtmann have remained eerily quiet since the announcement and you really have to wonder just what deal has been done for them to back flip on their commitment to Canberrans at the 2010 election”, Senator Humphries concluded.

3 January 2012

CANBERRA MUST HOST G20 IN 2014

The ACT’s Liberal senator has called on the Gillard Government to ensure Canberra is the host city of the G20 summit in 2014.

Months after the announcement that Australia would host the summit of world leaders, plans for Australia’s hosting are proceeding with no explicit role for the national capital coming into consideration from the Labor Government.

Canberra looks to again miss out on an opportunity to prove its title as Australia’s capital city.

“This is an opportunity that this city deserves, and I’m confident that Canberra is the best placed Australian city to host the summit,” Senator Humphries said today.

“It wasn’t so long ago that the then Labor Opposition condemned the Howard Government as ‘not having done enough to ensure Canberra would host CHOGM’, but now the chance has arisen for a Labor Government to put its money where its mouth is, and showcase Canberra for the G20.

“If Canberra was capable of hosting a meeting of 50-odd heads of government in 2000, it should certainly be able to host a meeting of 20 leaders in 2014.

With the global economy having gone through such dramatic changes recently, the world’s eyes will be on future G20 summits.

“This is Canberra’s chance to shine.

“I call on the ACT Labor members to join my call for the national capital to be given this chance,” Senator Humphries concluded.

29 December 2011

CPSU CRIES CROCODILE TEARS OVER PUBLIC SERVICE JOBS

The week after Labor announced its broken promise to protect the public service the CPSU has fallen dreadfully silent on the issue.

“Where are the CPSU bosses now?” Senator Humphries asked today.

“Have they already forgotten that Labor intends to slash public service jobs next year?

“Where is their campaign to protect public service jobs from Labor’s efficiency dividend broken promise?

“It’s clear that the CPSU bosses care more about being tapped on the shoulder by the factional bosses for a seat in Parliament than their members’ jobs.

“I remember the CPSU running the mother of all fear campaigns against the Coalition’s public service policy last year.

“This is disgraceful hypocrisy from the union which purports to protect the jobs of Canberra’s public servants,” Senator Humphries concluded.

5 December 2011

HUMPHRIES RUNS FOR CHARITY

Liberal Senator for the ACT Gary Humphries has joined a charity run to help raise funds for children in need.

Senator Humphries was participating in the 15^th annual Phil Botha Memorial Charity Run, held at parliament house by Parliamentary Security Services (PSS).

“It’s great to be part of such a great event,” Senator Humphries said.

“All funds raised assist children with life threatening illnesses through the Make-A-Wish Foundation. 

“Last year, more than $11,000 was raised and donated to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, Santa Clara Dili Orphanage in East Timor and the Prostate Cancer Support group in the ACT.

“Phil Botha was a Parliamentary Security Services member who died of cancer shortly after participating in the first Charity Run in 1997.

“The event was renamed in his honour soon after and has since raised more than $100,000 for charity,” Senator Humphries said. 

The event goes for 12 hours from 5:00am until 5:00pm today with security officers running in shifts throughout and others participating throughout the day.

Wednesday 5 October, 2011

CANBERRA CHEMICAL FIRE: EMERGENCY WARNING SYSTEM A SHAMBLES

The Canberra Times has revealed today that in the recent Canberra chemical fire, 80% of warning calls failed to reach residents in the target warning area threatened by the potentially toxic plume because the system is too slow.

It shows that the Federal Government’s Emergency Alert telephone emergency warning system is a shambles, Opposition emergency services spokesperson Senator Gary Humphries said today.

ACT Emergency Services Minister Simon Corbell told ABC Canberra this morning that he was told by the national operators of Emergency Alert after the emergency that it would have taken 6-7 hours to reach the target area during the potentially toxic fire.

“It’s just not good enough,” Senator Humphries said today.

“If the fire had indeed been toxic, this failure could have resulted in illness or death on a large scale.

“A national emergency warning system cannot be based on trial and error.  This system deals with matters of life and death.

“It’s simply unbelievable that the ACT Emergency Services Minister was told after the emergency that the system would have taken up to 7 hours to contact everyone affected.  I’m incredulous that this limitation of the system has never been raised with state and territory emergency agencies.

“The Federal Government has spent $26 million developing what we now know to be a system with severe limitations.

“Only a month ago the Attorney-General Robert McClelland issued a media release saying ‘Australia’s emergency alert system working well’.

“I urge the Attorney-General to explain why the system failed so catastrophically when called upon in an emergency,” Senator Humphries concluded.

30 September 2011

SPEECH IN THE SENATE: COMPULSORY STUDENT UNIONISM

Senator HUMPHRIES (Australian Capital Territory) (12:37): I rise to speak on the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (Student Services and Amenities) Bill 2010. Let us be clear that this is the imposition of a new tax. Australians are now very used to the Gillard Labor government imposing new tax burdens on them and this is another new burden, this time on students. It is a particularly ironic tax in that it is imposed on a group in the community that, throughout its years in opposition, the Labor Party constantly advocated for on the basis of having too many expenses associated with their education. Time and again we were lectured about how the cost of HECS, the cost of university fees and the cost of other impositions on students were excessive and that the Howard government needed to do something about the cost on students. Today, in government, the Gillard Labor government is adding its own costs—the cost of a student services fee—which until now students have had the choice to meet as they see fit. No-one denies that people on campus as students should not have the right to contribute to organisations where they feel they will obtain some benefit, where they feel that there is some advantage in belonging and that they can get some value for money from their investment. We all make decisions of that kind. We all decide at various stages of our life to join the local tennis club, the golf club, the RSL or to belong to the P&C at the local school. We make educated decisions about what is in our interests and about what benefits we get from membership, and organisations tailor their benefits of membership to the amount they charge to the people who come forward to join them. They need to demonstrate that there are benefits in order to have people make the decision to pay the membership fees and join those organisations. It is a freedom we all enjoy, all except, effectively, students at Australian universities, who will be told that they will have an obligation to pay a fee of $263 a year. The fee will not be voluntary; it will be levied regardless of the ability of the students to pay the fee, regardless of the extent to which students are actually on campus using the benefits of the fee. For example, there are around 130,000 Australian students at the moment who are studying externally. These students, of course, do not very often come to the campus; they cannot access the services which their $263 fee will provide, and yet they are compelled to pay it. Students will be required to pay the fee to fund services that they may not approve of. Senator Macdonald and other senators in this debate have pointed out that there are many things which those student organisations fund which, in the eyes of many Australians, would be regarded as quite reprehensible. They shamelessly lobby and campaign in elections, for example, and we have the phenomenon of thousands and thousands of students who are great Liberal or National supporters, or with some other party, who are effectively funding the activities of the Australian Labor Party and the Greens because they are compelled to contribute to an organisation of which they do not approve and of whose politics they do not wish to support. I know that the members opposite choose to characterise this debate as being about the Liberal Party and the coalition trying to prevent organisations that they politically oppose from having resources to run campaigns against them, that we do not understand or appreciate the work of student organisations and we are not in tune with those organisations. I have to put on record that, as a student many years ago, I was very active in my student organisation. Of course, I lived in the era when fees were compulsory and I felt that I would get involved on the basis that I had no choice in that matter. Indeed, I was elected President of the Students Association of the Australian National University and I made it my mission as president of the students association there to give students better value for money for what they wanted, even though I knew that the association would continue to get fees via the university’s funding mechanisms from the pockets of the students, irrespective of how well the organisation did. The fact is, however, that in the last few years students have had that choice to make, courtesy of legislation passed during the Howard government’s term. They had an election to make whether they wished to join those organisations, to pay those fees and to obtain those benefits. The fact of that voluntary student unionism has had a very salutary effect on the operation of student organisations. They have had to change, in a very substantial way, the way in which they worked in order to attract people to belong to them. Some of the nonsense that used to go on in student organisations has, I think, to a large extent dissipated. That pressure to provide value for money will disappear when this legislation passes because it will provide once again that the students will be burdened with a fee on which they have no say and which will fund services and activities which other students do not need or which they do not support. This is a very cynical step by a government which has constantly claimed to be on the side of greater choice for students and greater capacity to support students as they go through their years of study. It now decides that it would rather take money from their pockets to support its political allies on university campuses. The really astonishing thing about this legislation, though, is the extent to which it deprives students of any meaningful say in this process. At our universities we have people who will rise to positions of doctors, lawyers, scientists, accountants, dentists, nurses and, undoubtedly, senators one day. We have people at our universities who we expect to be leaders of our community in every sense in a generation or so. They are leaders in a sense of being political leaders, perhaps, but they are leaders in their various occupations and professions and they are leaders in the community. We expect them to be people who exercise a great deal of judgment and who will be able to make important decisions about what goes on in their communities. But we do not believe that these exceptional individuals, these talented people who make it through to our universities, are capable of deciding for themselves whether they could afford to put $250 a year, or whatever the fee might be, into an organisation on the basis that they know it is worth while. We are telling those students that, irrespective of what you think, you put your money into that organisation. We do not care whether you believe the services are good value for money. We know what is best for you. We, the Australian government, are telling you that these services are what you need. We do not care that you might live 200 kilometres from the university campus and cannot access the campus gym, or uni bar or pool. We do not care that you might make an educated decision not to belong to that organisation. We know it is best for you and we will oblige you to belong. I do not know of any other area in a free, democratic society today where we so blatantly require individuals to belong to organisations, in effect, by virtue of them being in a particular area of the community, particular occupation group or a particular place. That is, I think, insulting to those people who we trust enough to occupy rare and contested places at our universities. It is insulting to them and it is not necessary. I believe that the government has once again looked at the dollars, is keen to ensure that the dollars are put into places where, in effect, it obtains a benefit from them. I can understand the politics of that. I can see that the government would love to have access to those dollars, because the support that the community is giving the Australian Labor Party at the moment could be said to be at a pretty low ebb. Maybe the dollars that it would usually expect to be available to it through donations and so forth might be a little bit harder to come by at the next election, as has been the case in the past. So shoring up a source of funding from universities might appear to be a sensible bit of work on the part of the government before they face the next election. I remind senators that that money is coming out of the pockets of people least able to afford it. It is from people on already low incomes, who struggle to pay university fees and get through those usually fairly lean years of university. It is from smart people who are quite capable of deciding whether they need to belong to a union and get services from it or not. That money will flow to those student organisations and, sadly, the blatant misuse, which we have seen in the past, of those sorts of funds I think will resume. That is a matter of great regret. The government has decided to increase the burden on students for reasons which really are more to do with politics than to do with principle. At the heart of this is the principle that the government does not trust the judgment of the students to occupy those valuable places at our universities. It is important to acknowledge that student organisations have a right to exist on campuses. It is important to acknowledge that they can play a valuable role and that, particularly in recent years since voluntary student unionism was effectively introduced by the previous government, a great many changes have been made in the way that many of those organisations have worked. The extent to which they have been able to generate a much better range of services and demonstrate much better value for money is a question that I do not think any of us doubt. The reason that university student organisations are now able to look up and say, ‘We’ve done a better job at selling ourselves to our potential student membership base,’ is precisely because students can make an election about whether they belong to the union or not. When a student has to choose between buying textbooks, studying materials, a laptop, transport to and from the university, costs of living and so forth, they will make a very judicious and careful decision about whether belonging to the student organisation is value for money or not. At least they would have made it before this legislation came forward. They will no longer have that decision to make. As I mentioned, a large number of students are not in a position to even use the services of student unions. A large number of students for various reasons, because they study part time or they are external students, find themselves at great distance from universities. For them accessing those services is not a practical option. People need to ask themselves: why is it that those people in particular should be required to pay these fees? The assumption seems to be that, if they are external or if they are part time, they have the resources to pay them. I would have thought that the more important issue here is not whether they have the resources to pay but whether they have the need for those services. As a nation we do not require that people recognise the benefit of their local tennis club, golf club or football club and say, ‘You shall belong to these organisations because they are worth while and valuable and do some good things, and you might get some services from them one day.’ We say that you belong if you choose to belong. It keeps the organisations themselves honest in a way which is not going to be the case under this legislation. This is compulsory student unionism by stealth. There are some mechanisms in the legislation which operate as fig leaves, to make it look as though the organisations have to demonstrate certain things before they can receive these funds. None of those fig leaves alters the reality that this is in effect a return to the compulsory funding of student activities by students who may not have any need for the services provided or any interest in the activities of the student organisation. The fact that student organisations provide ‘representation’ on behalf of students to university bodies and so on is again beside the point. We do not require people to belong to organisations in order to obtain representative advocacy on their behalf. We let them choose whether they wish to subscribe to the views of organisations before they belong to them, but that does not appear to be the motivation behind this legislation. I note in an opinion poll commissioned by the Australian Democrats—and the Democrats would not usually have associated themselves very much with the concept of voluntary student unionism, as I recall—that 59 per cent of students voted against compulsory fees. That is not a surprising figure when you bear in mind that in most campus elections perhaps only five per cent of students cast a vote. Senator Hanson-Young: It is 25 per cent at Adelaide University. Senator HUMPHRIES: Well maybe, Senator Hanson-Young, they pull out an exceptionally large number, but what does that say about the other 75 per cent? If I think something is worth while, I will get involved with it. I think most students know enough about the way the world works to make— Senator Hanson-Young: It is the highest voluntary voting in the country at Adelaide University. Senator HUMPHRIES: I think people should not be forced to do these things. If people really believe that the student unions give them value for money they will make the decision to be involved and they will pay their money. I imagine you, Senator Hanson-Young, were active in student organisations when you were on campus and I imagine you got some benefits from your student union membership, as did I, but I did not ask people to fund my activities because I chose to get involved in those sorts of activities and I do not think the Australian government should do so today either. This legislation is quite repugnant to the concept of a free society where individuals make decisions about what they do, what they belong to, how they spend their money and how they lead their lives. We have moved away comprehensively from the kind of society which, a few generations back, used to demand compulsory membership of unions in certain occupation areas, from 100 per cent union membership requirements in certain work places, and we allow people to make decisions in respect of every other area of the workplace. To the extent that student unions are analogous to workplace organisations, we make an exception in the case of students and student organisations and there is no compelling case for that to be so. I urge the Senate to reconsider this dreadful piece of legislation.