Where is the loyalty to employees who have worked in and opened up remote areas for both government royalty benefits and employers’ profitability?

It really amounts to bastardry where some people have spent many years in remote areas, that in early days were poorly accessible by road, where the country was harsh to establish the back-bone of the industry.

Now the employers want to cap the redundancy payments to save them dollars. It appears obvious that they’ll dump the established long term employee and re-establish that role under a revamped title in a casualised workforce with a cheaper rate of pay - more than likely from the contractor base at half the cost.

I do understand the diminutive cheapscape logic from some corporate person who has early morning cafe lattes on the mall before work who has no respect for the workforce out in the field.

I don’t think they really understand how harsh it was in some townships, where trips to city for general shopping may have only been monthly or less, to give their children educational opportunities chose to split the family up and send the children to boarding schools - without government assistance.

Those that have been there and done the hard yards to establish these areas, deserve everything they are entitled to and should remain so.

If redundancy payments are to be capped it should not be retrospective and the tax on redundancy should be zero including all extras.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Shephard