Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

Good. I appreciate that. The next point that needs to be made is: what will this do in relation to the state schemes? Workers compensation schemes are a form of insurance. They have a whole lot of actuarial research and assumptions underpinning them. They are based on the full spectrum of companies within a particular state or territory participating within those schemes. If we are now giving larger employers which have the capacity to self-insure the option of leaving state schemes and going into Comcare, this has the potential to have a devastating effect on the financial viability of the schemes within each of the states and territories. The only way in which those schemes will be able to deal with the challenge to their financial viability is to increase premiums. That is the only way they can do it. That is going to hit small and medium business. Small and medium enterprises will pay for the decision to allow large national employers to exit the state schemes and to enter the Comcare scheme on a self-insured basis. That is inevitable consequence of what will happen here. None of that has been thought through by this government, which is why so many of the state and territory jurisdictions oppose this measure. It is because they know what this is going to do to their schemes. Small and medium enterprises, I assure you, will also be very clear in the position they take in respect of this, because this means added cost for them.

The final point—and it seems to me that this is the most significant issue about taking this step—is that with state workers compensation schemes we have inspectorates which have hundreds of people in them. There are hundreds of people going out there and looking at whether or not companies are behaving in a safe way. There are strong police on the beat, if I can put it that way, to make sure that our companies and workplaces are operating in a safe manner.

Comcare have 44 inspectors nationally. If we are going to see these national companies go into this scheme, we are essentially going to see companies go into a scheme where there is no cop on the beat. There will effectively be no cop on the beat. The idea that 44 inspectors are going to be responsible for overseeing significant national companies in the Comcare scheme as envisaged by this amendment is politically ridiculous. This is absolutely retrograde in the steps that it is taking. This will mean that we have people entering a scheme which is essentially not policed or, at the very least, it is not set up to police the kind of national companies with the thousands of employers that they will bring coming into this scheme. None of that has been thought about it either. This is simply picking a policy out of the Work Choices Howard era and putting it into the here and now without thinking about any of the repercussions or consequences associated with it.

What concerns me about this in a bigger sense is that it shows such scant regard, in my view, for the critical issue of safety at work. That is ultimately what we are talking about here. Last year, 187 Australians went to work in the morning and did not return home. They lost their lives in a traumatic accident at work. That is 187 too many. That is in itself a human tragedy. But if you look at the other forms of the way in which work impacts upon people's lives and the other ways in which people can contract injury and disease from work, such as muscular skeletal disorders, mental disorders, infectious diseases, respiratory diseases—and I am going to come back to that in a moment—and cardiovascular diseases, when you look at all of that and the way in which work interacts with our lives, the number of people who are injured and lose their lives as a result of work actually measures in the thousands of people each year. They are the statistics that are not recorded. They are the people who are not seen in this debate.

Perhaps the most vivid example of that is those people who have contracted mesothelioma as a result of their work. It is estimated, when it is all said and done, that 60,000 Australians will lose their lives as a result of work related exposure to asbestos. It is the same number of Australians who lost their lives in the First World War. This is tragedy on a gargantuan stale. It is something that we need to be vigilant about and to address each and every day. There is nothing more unfair than a person being harmed at work.

All of us expect that, when we and our loved ones—children, brothers and sisters—go to work each day, we and they will return at the end of that day. That is a fundamental expectation of our working lives. My concern with this piece of legislation is that this will not assist that. In fact, it will take a massive step backwards in seeing that expectation met.

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