Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

While not opposing the Safe Work Australia Bill 2008 and the consequential provisions, there are a number of matters I wish to raise, for, adding to the succession of Labor’s botched policies since it came to government, this House is now to consider the establishment of Safe Work Australia—a body that will be dominated by state representatives making decisions about occupational health and safety policy for employers and employees who have little or no voice or influence in this process and who most certainly will have far less influence in terms of representation than they currently have on these issues. The government is seeking to replace the Australian Safety and Compensation Council established by the coalition whilst in government to facilitate the tripartite coordination and harmonisation of workplace safety and workers compensation laws. Under the coalition, the Australian Safety and Compensation Council was designed to facilitate a national approach to workplace safety and workers compensation, utilising a tripartite, consultative method to draw on and include employer and employee knowledge and experience in the move towards a national occupational health and safety workers compensation system.

While the coalition is broadly supportive of a harmonised national occupational health and safety system, it would be difficult to imagine a body better designed to fail in achieving this objective than the body proposed under this bill. Unlike the Australian Safety and Compensation Council, Safe Work Australia reduces the number of social partners—that is, the industry and union representatives—from three to two for each partner. That is, there will be a total of four, not six, industry and union representatives. This is a reduction by one-third of representatives for each social partner. Compare that with the representation on the Australian Safety and Compensation Council, which is essentially being rebranded, albeit in a way that compromises the tripartite approach traditionally required for occupational health and safety regulation to effectively operate in workplaces.

The government’s proposed structure for Safe Work Australia will create an imbalance whereby workplaces directly impacted by the development and formulation of occupational health and safety will be denied the opportunity to genuinely participate in the decision-making process underpinning the formulation of such policy. Labor talks—often—about its commitment to occupational health and safety, yet Labor does not appear to understand that a process that does not seek to actively engage employers and workers in a meaningful way will not produce the improvements in workplace health and safety that are necessary for Australian workers. When it comes to effective safety in the workplace there can be no contest that improving and sustaining OH&S performance in the workplace from both an employer and an employee perspective is achieved by doing ‘with’ people, not by doing ‘to’ people.

This is particularly the case where achieving outcomes involves significant changes, costly changes or changes to culture. Once again, Labor has failed Australian workers and workplaces with the proposed establishment of Safe Work Australia. The current composition of Safe Work Australia fails to have proper regard for the views of industry and employees, which will undermine its credibility and the outcome it seeks to achieve prior to the bill even being passed. For many years, Australian workplaces, particularly those operating across state boundaries, have been forced to endure seven separate jurisdictions with seven sets of occupational health and safety laws and workers compensation requirements. The costs to business are prohibitive. Funds that could have been better spent by business on training, employee development or additional safety mechanisms are required to be spent understanding, complying with and implementing numerous OH&S and workers compensation systems across every state and territory. In contrast, those companies fortunate enough to secure self-insurance under the coalition government have saved literally millions of dollars and yet have still delivered safe and healthy workplaces for their employees. In the case of Safe Work Australia, we are now witnessing a common Labor trait, where they cross their fingers behind their backs and tell Australian workers and business that they are doing one thing but, instead, make decisions and create ineffective regulations that actually create more problems than they solve.

Labor is limiting the involvement of social partners, and this is just inconceivable. Why would Labor want to limit the number of representatives from employers and employees? This is no doubt going to lead to a situation where government representatives will be able to repeatedly override legitimate concerns raised by the social partners during OH&S harmonisation discussions, including concerns relating to increased costs, or to impractical safety proposals for workplaces. You have the bureaucrats outnumbering those who are actually working in the workplaces across Australia. With limited capacity to oppose various proposals there is no doubt Safe Work Australia will be used by the government to develop other codes, policies and regulations under the guise of safety to achieve certain industrial outcomes on behalf of minority interests that would otherwise need to be discussed with stakeholders at a state level.

Clearly, the government has borrowed this approach from its Labor counterparts at a state level, where workplaces are already in many cases overwhelmed with impractical and unworkable occupational health and safety laws. Now federal Labor wants to introduce a body to achieve harmonisation which will be dominated by those same Labor governments, their bureaucrats and their advisers who have already failed to establish in many cases workable occupational health and safety and workers compensation systems in their own states. Remarkably, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations is determined not to listen to stakeholders, not to listen to the representatives of employers, and of employees—the unions—with significant involvement in workplaces. Instead, the minister has chosen to reduce their representation and rely on state governments, who have already failed in their own backyards.

The foundation upon which Safe Work Australia has been established is fundamentally flawed, with the direction and success of Safe Work Australia also being contingent on the cooperation and participation of the ministerial council to which it is required to directly report. Members of the ministerial council have repeatedly failed to attend and/or cooperate with the Commonwealth in these meetings, which raises legitimate concerns about just how effective Safe Work Australia will be in an environment where state Labor governments have not been willing to cooperate and genuinely contribute to discussions about the harmonisation of occupational health and safety laws across Australia—particularly the New South Wales state Labor government, which has been reported by many as having the least effective and most costly OH&S system in this country.

Where the ministerial council fails to meet or refuses to cooperate and to consider the Safe Work Australia issues, the work of Safe Work Australia comes to a halt—that is it. Just last year we witnessed the New South Wales Minister for Industrial Relations refusing to cooperate in a national discussion on occupational health and safety. He refused to cooperate! If anything, this Safe Work Australia Bill, in its current form, will make it easier for uncooperative state Labor governments to undermine the harmonisation process for their own political gain. Further, the proposed structure creates an unjustifiable imbalance. Improving OH&S performance is critically dependent on a collaborative effort and the buy-in of all stakeholders. A process that does not seek to engage workers and employers in a meaningful way does not lead to improvements in workplace health and safety.

Labor’s duplicity is further highlighted by its unwillingness to report back to the parliament on the progress of Safe Work Australia. This is extraordinary. The bill currently proposes a process for reporting back to parliament on the progress of Safe Work Australia every six years. Every six years! It is incomprehensible that Labor wants to introduce a state dominated independent authority that has no requirement to report back to the federal parliament for six years. I would have thought that annual reporting on an issue as important as occupational health and safety and workers compensation would be appropriate. But every six years? Beyond the term of a government? This is a nonsense.

Safe Work Australia is just another botched policy—when it would have been so easy to get it right—on top of the failed Fuelwatch, the failed GroceryWatch, the proposed abolition of the Office of the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner and, in the past week, the failure of the award modernisation process, which industry says could potentially lead to significant job losses and inflationary outcomes. There is one common thread running through all of these botched Labor policies: the Labor government does not have a plan and is incapable of listening to Australians and delivering credible and acceptable policy solutions.

An example of this is the Office of the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner. It is under threat from the Labor government. Last year the construction industry contributed 6.7 per cent to Australia’s GDP and employed approximately 940,000 workers, or nine per cent of the Australian workforce. The coalition’s reforms and hard stance on lawlessness and corruption within the building and construction industry from 2002 onwards directly contributed to a significant reduction in the number and cost of strikes, increasing output and productivity. In comparison to the $76 million being spent by the Rudd Labor government to maybe, just maybe, achieve a 0.8 per cent increase in GDP, the Office of the ABCC, for a fraction of that cost—an average of $30 million a year—has already achieved a 1.5 per cent increase in GDP—

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