Time to sort out PS pay dispute

It is a welcome development that we are suddenly much closer to a resolution in the public sector wages dispute that has dragged on for far too long.

Treasurer Peter Gutwein and Premier Will Hodgman. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

IT is a very welcome development that we are suddenly much closer to a resolution in the public sector wages dispute that has dragged on for far too long already.

The Government should be commended for having dropped its long-held commitment to a 2 per cent annual wages cap. The unions should be commended for forcing it to, through what has so far been a reasonably sensible industrial campaign.

The next step must be for the unions to accept that the Government’s offer (of 2 per cent this year, 2.25 per cent in the second year, and 2.5 per cent in the third year) is fair and reasonable in an economy where many private sector enterprise bargaining agreements remain locked into 2 percentage point increases over three years.

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The fact is that the Government is now offering 6.75 per cent to a 9 per cent claim. That’s far from a bad deal.

Now, there might still be some devil in the detail — and so the unions are right to take a little bit of time to give the offer due consideration before making a recommendation to their members.

But here’s what we know on the face of it: Treasurer Peter Gutwein says he is determined to be a good steward of taxpayer cash and so the larger wage increases he has offered (above the 2 per cent budgeted for) must be offset by “efficiencies and improvements”. And the truth is that most of these appear fair enough.

The removal of waiting time payments — where you are paid compensation for manual payroll errors — seems very much a relic of the past, for example.

The practice within the public sector of paying part-time workers overtime rates when they work additional hours would seem to most in the private sector an exceedingly generous provision.

Ensuring that annual salary progression is based on performance rather than just time served also passes the commonsense test.

And aligning public sector holidays with other states just seems fair (and Easter Tuesday would be a good place to start, as nowhere else in Australia has that as a day off for public servants).

The unions therefore should not be dismissing all these requests out of hand. They must be flexible and accept that it’s fair enough that in exchange for the better cash offer that they give some ground — particularly where what is being asked for is that they agree their members should be bound by similar workplace arrangements to their peers on the mainland. The unions must also now work quickly to put the offer before their executive and get it out to the members for a vote.

But the Government should also ensure now that it takes a much more active role in the negotiations from here. It also must be focused on pushing this dispute to a resolution sooner rather than later. And it must stop playing unnecessary games with the process. That just undermines any goodwill by suggesting — as the unions pointed out yesterday — that it is not taking the process seriously. It’s time to get this done.