Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children's Services) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise this evening to strongly support the Safe Work Australia Bill 2008 and the Safe Work Australia (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2008. The purpose of the Safe Work Australia Bill 2008 is to establish Safe Work Australia as an independent Commonwealth statutory body to improve occupational health and safety outcomes and workers compensation arrangements in Australia on an ongoing basis. The bill is looking to simplify the current system and make it nationally consistent. It does not make sense to have multiple schemes. Why should different jurisdictions have lesser or greater safety standards than others?

The Safe Work Australia authority will be an inclusive, tripartite body representing the interests of the Commonwealth, the states and territories as well as employees and employers in Australia. The bill will play a pivotal role in realising the government’s commitment to working cooperatively with state and territory governments to improve OH&S outcomes and workers compensation arrangements in Australia. Safe Work Australia will be a reform focused body with the power to make recommendations directly to the Workplace Relations Ministers Council.

Occupational health and safety is a prime candidate for this sort of reform. The statistics are damning. Each year, more than 300 Australians are killed at work and many more die as a result of work related disease. Each year well over 100,000 Australians are seriously injured at work. These reforms are not just looking at death and serious injury; they are also looking at what people may see as minor injuries. These can have massive repercussions for individuals and their businesses.

In my old job as the National Secretary of the Australian Workers Union, I came across deaths, injury and disease in the workplace. As a union rep, my role was to ensure that workplaces were safe and to protect working Australians, to protect the rights of workers who had been injured previously and to seek equitable outcomes, as much as one can, for the families of those who were injured or worse. Trade unions have always led the way when it comes to improving occupational health and safety standards in Australia. Whether it is burns in the foundry, crushes in mines or falls at a construction site, these are all too often described as ‘accidents’. But it is not an accident, I contend, if it is preventable. Tragically, it is a fact that most people lose their lives in preventable circumstances.

In support of this bill I would like to draw the House’s attention to four arguments which I think underline the importance of this legislation. First of all, it is the basics which are killing people in Australia. In this I am heavily influenced by Dr Yossi Berger, the National Occupational Health and Safety Unit Director of the Australian Workers Union, a considered thinker and a person of great action in saving people’s lives people. Fitting guards on machinery still does not occur in Australian workplaces. The absence of lights and reverse beepers on mobile plant still kills people. Sixty years ago, not taking basic measures, like having first-aid kits stocked and accessible and ensuring that the hazards which lead to falls were well marked and guarded against, was causing 80 per cent of all the deaths in the workplace. Sixty years later, the killers and the causes are the same, and the culprits are still not caught.

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