The federal government’s Department of Employment and Workplace Relations has refused to approve a proposed agency agreement for the Australian Taxation Office, despite the fact that both the ATO and the Community and Public Sector Union had been prepared to sign.

DEWR checks all workplace agreements to ensure they conform to government policy. The ATO agreement had already been redrafted to take account of DEWR's objections to an earlier draft. For example, a non-binding statement of the ATO's intention to allow most workers to remain covered by the collective agreement was removed, because it might have been seen as limiting the ATO's ability to push workers onto individual contracts.

But DEWR was not satisfied. DEWR reportedly wants to remove a lot of conditions from the agreement and put them in ATO management policy documents that can be changed at will. The CPSU has asked the ATO to go directly to the workplace relations minister Kevin Andrews for approval of the agreement, bypassing DEWR.

Chris Slee

From Green Left Weekly, June 7, 2006.
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