The Federal Executive is pleased to present the Operating and Financial Report for 2016.  The Federal Office assisted our Branches with national bargaining endeavours, particularly for entities created by COAG such as AHPRA (Health Professionals Registration), which necessitated a complex process of bringing all the separate jurisdictions of state regulation into the federal sphere, standardising the conditions to be Fair Work compliant and to then develop on single enterprise agreement.

Development continued for 3 branches on the new upgraded membership data base due to go live in late November 2016.

Rule change cases were also undertaken for a number of Branches who sought to follow their members after a decision by a state Government to privatise parts of that states public service.

Assistance was also provided with a myriad of obligations, case work and advice ranging from liaising with the FWC on Right of Entry permit obligations, through to finalising the investigation being undertaken by FWC in the Queensland Branch.

Similarly the federal union has been involved in the ACTU committee that was established to oversee the roll out and impact of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and its commensurate impact on the state based employees who had been delivering disability services across Australia.

A number of presentations have been made during the year to respective branch membership forums across Australia.

The Federal Office also worked with the PSI and other public sector unions to finalise and launch a People’s Inquiry into Privatisation which will consult with communities about the impact of privatisation on public services. A significant amount of planning work for the inquiry has taken place during the year, including appointing an independent Chair, Mr. David Hetherington, in preparation for the launch of the inquiry in August 2016.

This complimented the work of the project sponsored by the union in conjunction with Centre for Policy Development (CPD) entitled ‘Grand Alibis: how declining public sector capability affects services for the disadvantaged’ which examined the case of outsourced employment services in Australia, and found that outsourcing has led to poorer outcomes for disadvantaged job seekers and has eroded public sector capacity to deliver services to this vulnerable group.

CPSU also supported Associate Professor Jane Andrew and Dr Max Baker at the University of Sydney to conduct a research project into prison privatisation in Australia. In June 2016 they released the first report as part of this project: ‘Prison Privatisation in Australia: The State of the Nation’. The report examined Australian private prisons against four key categories: accountability, costs, performance, and efficiency.