Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

What this government does not realise is that one person's red tape is another person's protection. For people who have to earn a living by going to work to bring home an income, that protection can literally be the difference between life and death. That protection can be the difference between whether you come home safe and sound or whether you come home with an injury. And so to say that we can just look at this bill simply in the context as part of a reduction in red tape is to miss a fundamental point. What we should be debating here in this place is how can we make Australian workplaces safer. What we should be debating is how can we make sure that everyone who goes to work at the start of the day or the start of their shift comes home safe and sound. That should be the guiding principle.

Instead, we have this bill. What will this bill mean in practice? This bill will mean that when someone in an affected workplace fronts up for work there will be fewer requirements that their workplace is safe. It means that if someone who fronts up for work gets injured, they will have fewer rights, and their family will have fewer rights, and less compensation. How will this bill do that? This bill will make it easier for employers to slip out of at times rigorous safety standards in state-based schemes and move into a federal scheme that was not designed to look after people's safety in the same way that state schemes were. The federal scheme has in many significant respects some lower standards. It has less enforcement, so fewer inspectors who go around and make sure the scheme gets enforced, and it provides fewer rights if a worker is injured.

To understand why this is the case it is important to understand how these schemes developed and why there is a difference in our federated country between the Commonwealth scheme and the state schemes. The state schemes have traditionally had primary responsibility for looking after most of the workers in this country—looking after their rights when it comes to safety and looking after their rights when it comes to compensation. Regulation for most of the more dangerous work we have in this country, including in areas like construction and mining, has been developed in the state systems. That is just the fact—it is a reality of our federation and of our Constitution.

It is also a fact that these industries are much more dangerous than other occupations. Safe Work Australia tells us that over the last five years almost one worker dies a week in the construction industry—211 over the five years from 2008 to 2012. That is nearly twice the national rate for other industries. They also tell us that the rate of getting serious injuries in the construction industry is nearly 50 per cent higher than the national average. You only have to look across to New Zealand and see the disaster of the Pike River mine, you only have to look at Beaconsfield in Tasmania and you only have to look at the serious diseases, such as black lung, that mineworkers get elsewhere around the world to understand the dangerous nature of working in the mining sector. There are many other dangerous industries. Over time, in the state-based systems we have developed good systems of safety for those industries. They could always be better but the systems that have been developed in many respects are world leading. After the Pike River collapse, New Zealand looked at the check inspector system of regulating mineworkers that we have here, and they picked up a lot of what the Australian states are currently doing. In mining, for example, people whose job it is to look after the health and safety of workers have a seat at the table and have the ability to ensure that laws are enforced. No-one is going to look out for a person's safety at work quite like someone who is working in the workplace themselves, or who comes from it. They have the strongest interest in making sure that the workplace is safe and they deserve a seat at the table and to have a role in determining whether or not health and safety requirements are being complied with.

Separately from all that, we have had developing over time the Commonwealth system. Because, again, of the division of powers between the state and federal parliaments, the Commonwealth system has been largely developed around white-collar workers who work in Commonwealth agencies or, over time, with privatisation and the like, in competitors to those Commonwealth agencies. When you compare the two, you find that the standards are quite different, the level of rigor is quite different, the level of involvement of people at work in enforcing their own safety at work is quite different and the capacity of the various agencies to enforce safety at work is different. Comcare has 44 inspectors. Queensland has 216—that is just in Queensland, let alone the rest of the country. They are the people who are responsible for doing the jobs you see in the ads that the state agencies run regularly on television, where an employer fears the knock at the door from the workplace inspector, who is able to come in and check that health and safety regulations are being complied with. So there are 216 in Queensland and 44 for the whole of the Commonwealth in Comcare.

There is not only much less regulation and enforcement going on at the federal level; there is a massive difference in what happens if that regulation is breached and a worker gets injured. Under the Commonwealth scheme you cannot sue for damages at common law in the same way that you can in the states. You cannot go and get the payment that you are entitled to if the employer has been guilty of negligence. Instead, you get the equivalent of a pension-style payment under the Comcare scheme. Under the existing federal scheme, and under this bill, you will not be covered when you are on your breaks. It may come as news to those in the government, but most people when they are on their breaks are not necessarily on free time at the place they would choose to be if they did not have to be at work. Most people do not voluntarily on their day off come into the office and sit in the lunch room. Most people on their day off do not voluntarily go out at 10.30 and sit somewhere in the city to have a 10-minute break. You are having a break, because you are having a break from work. That is why you are covered in the state schemes. But under this bill you will not be covered, if people move you into this new federal scheme.

If you move into this new federal scheme, you also will not be covered in cases of misconduct. This is important. This bill says that if someone dies on the job, for example, and their family is then seeking compensation for them, the employer or the insurer can say, 'Hang on—they weren't doing the job properly. I think they were committing misconduct. I'm going to challenge this.' Then, when the person dies, the family is now going to have to be put through a court case to prove whether their mum or dad, who has just been killed at work, was committing misconduct at the time. And their payments will be held up while all of that is happening, because the employer or the insurer will be appealing it.

We will move away from the no-fault scheme that we have at the moment to one that is based on exactly that kind of litigation. As the previous speaker alluded to, you are not going to see, on the other side, the Commonwealth government saying, 'Oh well, it's time to reintroduce Commonwealth industrial manslaughter laws to make sure that employers are held to account and sent to prison if they do the wrong thing.' You are not going to see a lifting of standards. Instead, you are going to be putting families and people who rely on compensation for someone who has been injured through double the pain: the pain of losing someone who has been injured or killed at work and then the pain of having to go through a court case to determine whether they committed misconduct. That is how this government thinks that people who die or get injured at work should be treated. Of course, the dispute settlement procedures under the federal scheme are much more difficult to access than for people in the state system.

On that misconduct point: the government refers to the various reviews all the time during their speeches and in the explanatory memorandum, including the Hanks review. The Hanks review said there was no problem with that clause and did not recommend any change, but that does not stop the government from saying, 'We're going to make life even tougher for people at work.'

What does this government want to do? Faced with those two different schemes and standards of work, the government is asking, 'How wide can we open the door for employers to move as quickly as possible from those state schemes that give workers better protection into the federal scheme, so they can save a bit of money? How quickly can we encourage people through so that standards of safety and compensation can be dropped?'

If you want to have a discussion about harmonising national safety and compensation laws, then the questions should be, 'How can we lift safety for people at work? How can we ensure that everyone has the best access to compensation, if they are unfortunate enough to get injured or someone in their family is getting injured?' Instead, the government is doing it the other way round: 'How can we race to the bottom as quickly as we possibly can?'

It is not a surprise to some of us who followed what this government has done when it comes to protecting people's rights at work for a number of years. It may well come as a surprise to people who voted for the government, because the government did not tell them before the election that this was on the books. The government did not tell them before the election, 'We're potentially going to make your workplaces less safe and give you less compensation if you get injured.' It is becoming clearer day by day that there is a reason this government did not tell people what they were doing or what they intended to do before the election: had they told them, they would have been completely unelectable. Had they told people, 'We're going to charge you more to go and see the doctor, we're going to take money out of public schools and hospitals and we're going to make your workplaces less safe,' no-one would have voted for them.

This is a bill that was not promised or put up in lights before the election. It is a bill that will reduce safety for people at work and will reduce the compensation for people who are injured. On that basis this bill should be opposed.

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