Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I was going to leave it there, but given the minister has said there will be no impact on state and territory schemes, if national employers join Comcare, it is very important that we drill down a bit on this matter.

If it is more efficient for national employers, because of the density of employees under their employ, the logical extension of that is if large employers leave a state or territory scheme to just small and medium enterprises it leaves those remaining enterprises worse off under that state or territory system. They do not have the economies to reduce costs.

That is why the Northern Territory government has raised concerns. That is why the Queensland government has raised concerns. That is why employers have raised concerns. Small and medium enterprises are concerned about the commercial impact on their businesses. For a government that likes to say they are the government for small business there are adverse impacts that will arise if this bill is enacted. I do not believe the minister on behalf of the government has adequately justified and explained the impact on the remaining enterprises that will not be eligible to shift from the state and territory jurisdictions to Comcare.

I invite the minister to add to his answer. If you take out of the state jurisdictions the more efficient, larger employers that have economies of scale and which are more efficient because of those economies of scale, you will leave the smaller and medium enterprises having to pay, per capita, greater amounts to sustain a compensation scheme.

Let's be honest here. We know that the biggest advocates for the changes to this bill are not conservative or Labor governments at the state and territory level and they are not small and medium enterprises. This is something that Coles and Woolworths and other large employers want, to escape the obligations of superior schemes in terms of entitlements for injured workers and in terms of more resources to prevent injury and death in workplaces. This is something that has been demanded of the government by larger businesses but it will leave small and medium sized enterprises having to pick up the slack, having to pay for the costs associated with those larger enterprises leaving the state and territory jurisdictions. Again, I invite the minister to explain. On the face of what he has said, it does not make sense that large employers will leave and the costs will not go up. Indeed, they will go up. The organisations affected will be small businesses, mum and dad businesses, enterprises that do not have the capacity to pay and, unlike larger enterprises, do not have the capacity to have more efficient means to resource compensation for workers in the event of injury or death.

See this speech in context