Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-11-30 Daily Xml

Contents

Bills

Holidays (Christmas Day) Amendment Bill

Final Stages

The House of Assembly insisted on its amendment to which the Legislative Council had disagreed.

Consideration in committee.

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS: I move:

That the disagreement to the amendment be not insisted on.

From the advice I have had from the Clerk—this is a complicated process—my understanding is that you will put that the disagreement to the amendment be insisted on. My advice is that those who are on the losing side, which is the government in terms of the Legislative Council's position, will vote no and those who are on the winning side will be voting yes.

The advice will be that the actual vote that the Chair will put is that the disagreement to the amendment be insisted on. Those on the majority side in the Legislative Council, which is Labor and the crossbenchers, will be voting yes, and the government will be voting no to that. We are just sending a message down to the House of Assembly; they then have to do their bit and they will come back to us with a suggested time. We will not meet tonight but some time tomorrow, I would suggest.

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS: As the mover of this bill that makes Christmas Day a public holiday, I do stay firm in my resolve that we not trade off the Christmas Eve public holiday to ensure that those workers who will be working on Christmas Day this year, simply because it is a Saturday, are not robbed of their Christmas Day holiday penalty rates, regardless of whether they work for the government or not. It will be the ones the government cannot take care of, with workaround and sticky-taped together solutions, who will be worse off under this.

Again, I reiterate: for example, the NDIS workers, whose work the federal NDIS scheme would dearly love to ensure was rewarded with appropriate penalty rates on Christmas Day, will be some of those who suffer the most because of the inaction of this government. I look forward to the deadlock conference. I hope that we can come out with a resolution some four weeks before Christmas Day this year that is something in the Christmas spirit, rather than what we have seen to date from this government.

The CHAIR: I will put the question in the positive form, as the Leader of the Government indicated, and that is the disagreement to the amendment be insisted on.

Question agreed to.

Conference

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (Treasurer) (17:49): I move:

That a message be sent to the House of Assembly requesting that a conference be granted to the council in respect of an amendment in the Holidays (Christmas Day) Amendment Bill and that the House of Assembly be informed that, in the event of a conference being agreed to, the council will be represented at such conference by five managers, and that the Hon. Ms Franks, the Hon. Mr Maher, the Hon. Ms Bourke, the Hon. Mr Stephens and the mover be managers of the conference on the part of the Legislative Council.

Motion carried.