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

I rise to speak on the Comcare and Seacare Legislation Amendment (Pension Age and Catastrophic Injury) Bill 2017. Labor will support this bill. This bill amends the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act and the Seafarers Act to ensure that injured employees in receipt of weekly compensation payments for incapacity can continue to receive those payments until they reach pension age as defined in the Social Security Act 1991. The qualifying age for the age pension under the Social Security Act 1991 will begin to increase on 1 July this year. By linking compensation for incapacity with the pension age rather than age 65, these amendments will result in no gap between the cessation of compensation for incapacity and eligibility for receipt of the age pension.

This bill also amends the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act and the seafarers act to align these acts with minimum benchmarks for catastrophic workplace injuries in the National Injury Insurance Scheme. The bill removes the cap on weekly compensation payable for household services and attendant care services for employees with catastrophic injury. An employee with a catastrophic injury will also be eligible to receive compensation for household services from the day of the injury, without the current 28-day waiting period.

While we support the bill and the measures it takes to align the payments to the pension age, it is worth noting the Turnbull government's agenda to increase the pension age to 70. This signature unfair policy from the horror 2014 budget is still there. The policy to have the pension age increased to the age of 70 is still an objective of the Turnbull government. In effect, the Prime Minister of this country and of this government wants to give Australia the oldest pension age in the developed world. The Prime Minister wants to make construction workers, nurses, tradies, farmers, seafarers and other workers work until they are 70 before they are eligible for the age pension. It is something that underlines how out of touch this Prime Minister and this government are when it comes to the difficulties that confront workers in workplaces over this period.

The idea put forward, without any planning whatsoever, that people who have much of their work being of a physical nature could actually work until 70 says how little the government understands workplaces. We are not suggesting that people should not be able to voluntarily work beyond the age that is currently set down for the pension, but we know that there are many people who just cannot work up until that age. It is quite extraordinary that this country will be in a position to have the highest pension age of the developed world as a result of the objectives of the government.

I applaud the bill to fix up the current arrangements and increase the age so that there is no longer a gap insofar as insurance and compensation are concerned and their intersection with the pension age, but I think this bill is a reminder that we have a government which is in pursuit of lifting the pension age to 70 years of age. There are people now in their 40s and 50s who will have to work until they are 70. If people understood the nature of the work of construction workers or nurses or people who work in aged care, the difficulties they confront, the injuries that arise and the wear and tear on their body, then the idea that they would have to work until 70 would just not be tenable. What it would need, if we were to ever consider it at all, would be much greater involvement in the way in which people would undertake work in the period up until their retirement age. I do not think there has been sufficient work undertaken. But I do know this, though: before I was in this place, I represented working people and I saw too many unable to continue to undertake work because of injuries—hernias, carpal tunnel syndrome, back injuries or whatever it was—and the stress placed on their body. People think it is a problem that afflicts male occupations, but, as I have said and as everyone knows who has any understanding of these issues, this applies to nurses as much as it does to construction workers. It is extraordinary that the government has not contemplated this problem.

We do support this bill, because we are removing the gap that exists currently. We do accept that there are people who want to work beyond the current pension age—there is no problem with that—but we do not accept the idea that you cannot get a pension until you reach age 70. The pension age keeps increasing and people have to keep watching it move away from them when they have worked so many years of their life, particularly if they have been vulnerable physically in their workplace and are feeling the wear and tear of work over many, many decades. We feel that little consideration has been given to this initiative.

Indeed, it is extraordinary too that much of the 2014 budget has been revoked, rejected and repudiated by the current Prime Minister and the government, but not this policy and not the policy to lift the pension age to the highest level of any comparable country. I think the government has to rethink its position. The Prime Minister likes to say he believes in fairness, but he actually is trying to force millions of Australians to work until they are 70 before they can access the age pension. We will support this bill, but we will not support Malcolm Turnbull's cruel attempts to increase the pension age.

While I am on my feet, I would also like to say that it is worth reminding the parliament, and through it hardworking Australians, that the Turnbull government is still pursuing two other bills to amend the Comcare scheme. These are related; these are incidental to the bill before us. The Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment (Improving the Comcare Scheme) Bill 2015, with its Orwellian title, will exclude workers from the Comcare scheme and significantly reduce the compensation available for those who remain eligible. This bill attempts to reduce the liabilities of the Comcare scheme at the expense of people injured at work.

There is also the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Legislation Amendment Bill 2014 which, if enacted, will directly and indirectly risk the workplace health and safety of Australian workers. It will also remove the rights of Australian workers to fair and reasonable cover when they suffer the misfortune of a work-related injury or illness. This government will stop at nothing to attack workers. It is only because of the staunch opposition of the Labor Party that these bills have been stalled and have been prevented from being enacted, and we will hold that position because of the unfairness intrinsic in those two other bills.

To sum up, we do support this bill. This is fixing something that needs to be fixed, and for that reason we will support it. But we will never support the coalition's agenda to create coward workforces that are easy to hire, easy to fire and more open or more vulnerable to injury, where if you are injured they deprive you of the things you need to return to work or have a decent life in the event you cannot return to work. This bill, for the reasons I have outlined, is something we can support; but we are concerned that the government still has not given up on pursuing those other areas to change compensation and Comcare arrangements in this country.

We would ask the government to rethink its position on that and we would ask the government to rethink its position on the harsh policy to increase the pension age to 70 that it announced in 2014, which I believe has been ill thought out. It shows a callous disregard for workers and it shows no understanding of workplaces and the difficulties that workers confront, whether they be construction workers or nurses, in dealing with the wear and tear on their bodies and the difficulties each and every day when they do such magnificent work in this country.

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