WA unionists call for minister's resignation

Barry Healy, Perth

Prominent Western Australian union leaders have called for the resignation of WA police minister John D'Orazio following revelations that he had not paid superannuation entitlements for 15 workers at his former pharmacy business and had tried to prevent them from joining a union.

The March 16 Western Australian reported that Premier "Alan Carpenter came under intense pressure from within Labor ranks yesterday to dump the embattled police minister when Unions WA boss Dave Robinson said John D'Orazio had nobbled the campaign against the Howard Government's industrial relations reforms".

The paper quoted Robinson as saying: "It makes it very difficult now for a WA Labor government to condemn Howard's laws in the face of having a minister who clearly flouted the law in respect to superannuation payments.

"It makes it very difficult for me to go to an employer who's not doing the right thing and say, you better do the right thing, because we've got a minister who clearly hasn't done the right thing and that will be thrown back in our face."

Former employees at D'Orazio's pharmacy claim they approached him about missing superannuation payments as early as last May and shortly after lodged complaints with the Australian Taxation Office.

D'Orazio claims that he was kept in the dark about the problem until just before he sold the pharmacy business in November, however on March 16 his former shop manager backed up the workers' claims, telling the Western Australian that he told he told D'Orazio "ages ago" that staff were upset about their superannuation payments. .

Joe Bullock, WA secretary of the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, told the Western Australian that D'Orazio had fended off SDA attempts to unionise the shop in the late 1990s.

Calls for D'Orazio to resign have come from Transport Workers Union state secretary Jim McGiveron and Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union state secretary Les McLachlan.

From Green Left Weekly, March 22, 2006.

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From GLW issue 661