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Legislative Council - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2008-10-15 Daily Xml
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SWIMMING AND AQUATICS INSTRUCTORS

The Hon. D.G.E. HOOD (15:43): I was contacted recently by a DECS swimming instructor regarding blocks to negotiations on employment conditions and unrealistic offers, as they saw it, made by the government negotiators in enterprise bargaining with the Australian Education Union.

Historically, employment conditions and salaries for swimming and aquatics instructors have been set by the Teacher's Salary Board based on a decision made in 1980. As progress on the development of an award was delayed, the conditions were laid out in a DECS departmental handbook in the 1990s. Unfortunately, the aquatics instructors complained that many of the conditions specified in the handbook were later changed administratively by DECS without the consent of the instructors themselves.

Aquatics instructors in this state are now understandably trying to achieve fair and equitable conditions at work, which is contained in an industrial instrument through the enterprise bargaining process. Many conditions that most take for granted, such as unpaid maternity leave, sick leave or bereavement leave, are denied to aquatics instructors.

One condition that is sought by instructors is payment for the training requirements of DECS. It seems draconian that an employer would request employees to do training and then refuse to pay for it.

This is especially so when one of those requirements is mandatory notification training, that is, the reporting of child abuse, which is something that DECS and the government should be supporting rather than pushing the cost of this training onto instructors themselves. Another is the cost of first-aid training, again, a requirement for all instructors. Apart from the moral responsibility of an employer to train its employees to meet required standards, it could be seen that refusing to do so is a breach of section 19 of the Occupational Health and Safety Act. Instructors are also trying to achieve permanency. The issue of ongoing employment was raised by the government when the continuing funding of the aquatics program was under question during the period of September 2006 to June 2007.

During this period, Family First, several other members of parliament and, indeed, the general public supported the continued funding of this much-loved and respected program—and now, indeed, accepted by the government as a required program. A number of instructors are employed on a casual basis in addition, but many are core instructors, of course, with core service histories. Some of these people have more than 30 years' experience of service with the department and work regular hours year after year. However, even these so-called 'core instructors' have also been reviewed as casual or itinerant workers with no guarantee of ongoing employment, and this is something to which Family First certainly objects.

Someone with a long service history and employed on a regular basis of three or more days a week is not a casual employee. I understand that recently 15 instructors in charge—or ICs as they are called—accepted a deal from DECS guaranteeing them ongoing employment. However, the government's negotiating team has only been prepared to make offers inferior to the deal given to the ICs in the first place. The government undertook a thorough review process of swimming and aquatics in 2007, and subsequently committed to the future of these programs. It should match this commitment with an offer to its employees of ongoing employment. This will remove the uncertainty and insecurity that instructors face and ensure the future of the program by retaining the staff necessary.

Now that the AEU and the government have entered into mediation, I call on the government to remove the blocks on negotiation and make acceptable offers on employment conditions for swimming and aquatics instructors. I have only a brief time left, but to add to that I can say that I have had personal conversations with a number of these individuals. They are essentially well-meaning people who have been doing the same job in many cases for a number of years. They love teaching kids. They are doing a very important job. I am sure that, over the years, they have prevented many potential drownings of young kids, and the like.

I think that everyone in the community would recognise that they deserve a fair go. We are talking here about people who range in age from the very young (in some cases instructors can be very young adults), right up to quite senior people in their 60s and even beyond, as I understand it. They are providing a service which is necessary in our community. They believe they are getting a raw deal. I think that anyone who looks at the situation would accept that, in the circumstances, they are getting a raw deal, particularly, as I say, in the case of people who have been doing this for many years.

I believe that some people have been doing essentially the same thing, week in and week out, for 30-odd years, and to be faced with the sorts of conditions being offered to them is, I think, unacceptable to anyone and everyone concerned. Again, I call on the government to intervene in this situation and to provide a fair and reasonable outcome for people who are committed to helping our kids and basically making sure that a tragedy does not befall families.

Time expired.

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