Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Childcare and Early Childhood Learning) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to respond on behalf of the coalition to the minister's statement. There is much that is contained in that statement that we would completely concur with. Every workplace fatality is a true tragedy. Every death in the workplace is a shocking, needless and awful waste of life. Too often it is a young life cut short. We as members and senators in the parliament of Australia should be informed of these incidents, fatalities and tragedies. And we should be obliged to consider what policy responses we might make in the face of the findings of investigative bodies.

I agree with the suggestion from the minister that parliament receive regular reports. The reports that he mentioned and that he has released should be on the reading list of members of parliament. It is just so important, with the subject matter we are dealing with, which is death in the workplace, that we do not get political and that we do not score political points. However, I do need to draw the attention of members to what I believe are some of the flaws underpinning some of what the minister said when he talked about moving towards a safer culture in the workplace.

Underpinning much of what he said are the model OH&S laws which recently passed through the federal parliament. In listening to the minister discuss the workplace, he certainly did paint a picture of what I might call traditional workplaces—farms, factories, shops and mines—where there is an employer and an employee, a boss and a worker. A reasonable listener would think that of course we should have measures to keep rogue employers in check and measures that protect vulnerable workers who might not have received proper training and who might be placed under stressful situations and be pressured to work in unsafe situations, work excessive hours or work with poor equipment and feel unable to speak up. Of course we in Australia should be able to say that we have one of the safest workplaces, generally, in the world. And, yes, a reasonable person would certainly nod their head and say that these things should be taken care of. We do want to have the best workplace safety and we want to be continually improving our workplace safety; that is a good thing. But the reality of the model work health and safety legislation—which the minister mentioned in his speech, talking about its relevance to the subject matter—is actually quite different. For a start, Victoria and WA are out. They have decided it is not for them. The Victorians have said that their system is quite good and that if everybody would like to adopt it then that is fine. South Australia is on hold and Tasmania is delayed.

With the legislation as it stands—and obviously it has not been adopted by every state—there are new obligations that managers are coming to terms with. These include extensive consultations with workers and the election of new health and safety representatives from the shop floor. No-one is saying that the new laws are bad in principle, but their application, which members on this side spoke about in great detail when they went through this parliament, is quite badly flawed. Instead of being how the minister has presented it, in relation to an employer and an employee or worker, in the OH&S laws the employer is a PCBU—a person conducting a business or undertaking. That is so that other people will be picked up by the legislation. That particularly includes independent contractors or people who may just be doing a once-only job for somebody, as well as volunteers.

The volunteer issue created a great deal of angst, because we could see that it was going to sound the death knell for some of our really good volunteer organisations. The United Church pointed to a small group of women baking Christmas puddings to raise funds for good work. They would be PCBUs under the OH&S laws, as would Meals on Wheels. Scouts Australia has expressed alarm that their employees, so to speak, have gone from 40 to 700 workers under the new OH&S legislation.

The PCBU is a totally new legal concept. It will require 15 years of judicial testing. Prosecutions under these OH&S laws are criminal in nature. The right to silence is waived. Quite honestly, I think these laws have created a monster. And I think it is important to mention them in the context of this debate, because confrontational workplaces do not generate a good safety culture. The minister's approach and the allowing of the union representation to the extent that it is now being ramped up in workplaces is going to generate some further confrontation. But confrontation does not make for a good safety culture. Confrontational unions do not make for happy workplaces. With a background in aviation I can say that there are safety management systems—there is actually a body of work that talks about safety culture. That has nothing to do with the union movement but is about changing the culture in the workplace. Much could be drawn from this to help us in applying the safety management systems that work well in flying organisations to a lot of other businesses in our community.

I would just caution the minister: please do not tie the very sensitive and very emotional issue of deaths in our workplaces to differences on both sides of the chamber. Nobody would disagree, as I said, with a substantial amount of what the minister said; it all makes perfect sense. I, as members know, am a representative of a rural and regional seat, and I know all too well the types of workplace accidents that happen on farms and in small businesses. They happen when people, particularly the owners of those businesses, are under stress. Often the people who suffer the accidents are members of the family, so it is not an issue between employer and employee as such.

So I am only too aware that the agricultural, forestry and fishing industries are over-represented in the tragic statistics of workplace fatalities. As a mother of an electrical apprentice at the time, I was most concerned when he was just starting his apprenticeship that whoever was looking after him did the job properly and that I did not hear that he had been electrocuted in a roof. I wanted to know that the fact that he might not know everything he was supposed to know would not count against him. As I have said this in this place before, I have been a member of three unions; it is not about being anti-union. I recognise the role unions have played in our history in generating safe workplaces. The shearing industry is a good example. That was a very unsafe workplace at the turn of the century and the unions contributed greatly to making it a safer place for people who worked very long hours doing manual labour in very stressful conditions. But these are the arguments of the past. I believe that the union movement today is trying to insert itself too much into the negotiations between employers and employees. I believe this government is using its occupational health and safety legislation as a platform for union interference.

Earlier I mentioned the importance of training. Training is absolutely vital. It is one of the ingredients in making a safe workplace. The Prime Minister claimed that her occupational health and safety harmonisation was a proud achievement. We pointed out at the time that it actually had not happened at all, and it still has not happened, with not all the states signing up to it. But union fingerprints were all over that legislation at the time. I did speak about the concerns we had around training when that legislation went through the federal parliament. To my mind, the more people who have access to training the better. In 2010 the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Commission introduced restrictive changes, resulting in a reduction in accredited courses of training of 26 per cent. These new guidelines apparently stemmed from health and safety representatives who, given the power that many hold in the workplace, may well have a vested interest in restricting access. So there you have a bill designed for safety that gives power to representatives in the workplace who have a vested interest in training bodies and that restricts and therefore reduces the availability of high-quality training. I cannot leave this debate without touching on the construction industry. The Royal Commission into the Building and Construction Industry created the Office of the Australian Building and Construction Commission. It goes without saying that the coalition believed having a firm cop on the beat undertaking compliance visits helped support a safe workplace and reduced workplace injuries and fatalities. Again, this is a body that the Gillard government is desperate to abolish. Examples of the threats that may confront this industry once more, when we remove the ABCC, were given to the Cole royal commission and they are all on the record.

I would like to conclude by saying I support the bringing to parliament of the reports and investigations into workplace fatalities. We in the coalition wholeheartedly agree, because every death in the workplace is a real tragedy, that if we can do something about it in terms of policy responses then we should. We make that commitment in good faith. However, we also need to point out to the government that the underpinnings of their occupational health and safety harmonised laws are not generating a good safety culture in the workplace. The ability of unions to be involved to the extent that they are is not about safety at all. We stand ready to make Australian workplaces safer places and to protect every worker from accidents and harm.

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