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

I'm sorry. Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker; I apologise. I am speaking in opposition to the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Legislation Amendment Bill 2014. Under the Howard government, reforms were introduced which allowed private national employers to opt into the Comcare scheme, a scheme which has its origins in providing workers compensation to employees of federal government agencies and bodies that have been privatised from the federal government. This was a reform which would allow national employers which had no history with the federal government to become a part of the Comcare scheme by virtue of self-insurance, by doing which they took themselves out of the various states schemes that those companies were a part of. It was a controversial step at the time and there were many concerns with it. As a result, when Labor was elected in 2007 a moratorium was put almost immediately on the practice of issuing licences to national employers seeking to self-insure under the Comcare scheme.

This bill seeks in effect to lift that moratorium so that national employers will be able to self-insure in the Comcare scheme. There is a superficial attraction in such a measure, in the idea of a company being able to be part of one workers compensation scheme rather than many, but there are many aspects of this which, beyond that superficial observation, make it clear that this is a deeply retrograde step.

The first point to make is that there is in place a national employer test for companies to pass which would enable them to become a self-insurer under the Comcare scheme. It is at best a minimal test. All you need to do to satisfy the test is operate in more than one state. There is no requirement about a minimum number of employees but there is a requirement that you self-insure. What you see with self-insurance in any of the state schemes is that it is, by and large, confined to those very large companies which have the capacity to engage in self-insurance, but this on the face of it will be open to any company which simply operate in more than one state. That is a minimal test and it is a real deficiency within this bill.

The second point to make is that there are a number of deficiencies within the Comcare scheme itself. To be fair, the workers compensation schemes that you see around Australia vary and are a reflection, I suppose, of the injury profile of those economies as they have developed over decades. The injury profile of the Comcare scheme has largely been about white-collar work—not entirely but largely—so the scheme is around that kind of work. It is good in that context. But Comcare just was not designed for large national employers which have significant amounts of blue-collar work, which may have entirely different kinds of injuries. As a result, there are significant deficiencies within the Comcare scheme which might apply to those people—for example, access to common law and the provisions within the Comcare scheme which provide for the facilitation of people returning to work. Comcare was designed principally as a scheme for the Australian Public Service. What we are now talking about, if this bill is allowed to pass, is this scheme becoming one which would apply potentially across the board with all the diversity that you see within our economy and all the diversity of injury profiles. That has not been thought about. It was not thought about by Howard's government. It is not being thought about by Tony Abbott. The next point—

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