Carina Garland (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would hope that everyone in this House cares about workplace health and safety. It's certainly been something that the labour movement and the Labor Party have prioritised for hundreds of years, and it is one of the very reasons that we came into existence as a political party. When we look back in our history, we think about the early issues that workers took industrial action on in my state of Victoria, which were around workplace health and safety—specifically the conditions in factories, which resulted in both the factory acts and the tailoresses strike of the late 19th century. More recently, we've seen action being taken on workplaces on construction sites around the use of asbestos. And, of course, very poignantly, this week we're taking action on bullying, harassment and discrimination by implementing a code of conduct in this place as part of the implementation of recommendations from the Set the standard inquiry and report. Not only has our government taken that step but we've also made sure that all key recommendations of the Respect@Work report were implemented, including, very importantly, the positive duty for employers to make sure that their workplaces are free of victimisation, bullying and harassment.

All of this work throughout history to make sure that people are safe at work requires ongoing efforts. We need to always be vigilant in making sure that everyone who goes to work comes home from work. This bill, the Work Health and Safety Amendment Bill 2022, is about us implementing recommendations from the Boland report, which was conducted a couple of years ago. In my previous workplaces, I fought for improvements in workplace health and safety, and I am genuinely pleased to be speaking in favour of a bill that will make sure that workers are safer, by ensuring that this is an issue that's taken even more seriously by everyone in a workplace, and also that there are more options for workplace health and safety representatives, who are absolutely vital, to choose training courses that are most appropriate and best suited to their needs.

Quite obviously—it goes without saying—workplace deaths are devastating. While this bill does not introduce industrial manslaughter, Labor is committed to this reform, which lines up with the work of states and territories such as my home state of Victoria. Injuries at work, whether physical or psychosocial, have the capacity to destroy lives, livelihoods and families, and the more can be done to prevent these sorts of injuries, and to foster more positive and safer and healthier workplace cultures, the better. I've worked and spoken with so many workers who have been injured on the job, and often these injuries cause other harms, such as the psychosocial consequences of a physical injury. It is really difficult and devastating to see what happens to workers' lives as a result of injuries sustained at work, so we all need to do more to make sure that everyone is safe and healthy.

This bill makes amendments to align the Commonwealth Work Health and Safety Act 2011, the WHS Act, with the recently amended model Work Health and Safety Act, published by Safe Work Australia in the model work health and safety laws. As noted earlier, these amendments are implementing the recommendations made in the Boland review by Ms Marie Boland, who took on the job in 2018. Amendments to the act include providing negligence as an alternative fault element for category 1 offences; prohibiting insurance for work health and safety fines; clarifying that health and safety representatives are entitled to choose a course of training; aligning various processes for issuing and serving notices; and some other technical and clarifying amendments.

The bill will also amend the Safe Work Australia Act 2008 to clarify that relevant information can be shared with Safe Work Australia from work health and safety regulators, workers compensation authorities and other persons. This part of the bill, while not implementing a Boland review recommendation, was included at the request of Safe Work Australia.

So this bill will strengthen our national approach to managing work health and safety by implementing key recommendations of the Boland review; promote a nationally consistent approach to work health and safety; and ensure that Safe Work Australia has the capacity to receive relevant information to perform its research and policy development functions, which are really critical, because, as I mentioned before, workplace health and safety and making sure that our workplaces are as good as they can be requires ongoing vigilance, research and reform. An extensive tripartite consultation process on these amendments has been undertaken with the community and business to make sure that we can get the alignment right. Comcare was consulted on the amendments to the Commonwealth work health and safety legislative framework and the implementation time frames. State and territory jurisdictions were consulted on the amendments to facilitate information sharing with Safe Work Australia, and amendments to the draft bill, as noted before, and to its explanatory memorandum were included to address their concerns.

This is a really important first tranche of legislative reforms from the Boland review, and these are minor and technical in nature. The model work health and safety laws were independently reviewed, and we are now implementing a number of the recommendations to come from that. For those who don't know, work health and safety in Australia is legislated and regulated separately by each of Australia's state, territory and Commonwealth jurisdictions. Despite that, they're largely harmonised across the jurisdictions through a set of uniform laws, the model work health safety laws. Adoption of these recommendations has been through a robust tripartite consultation process involving all jurisdictions, as well as employer and worker representatives.

Our government is committed, as all Labor governments through history have been, to ensuring Australian workers have safe and fair workplaces. This is just the first step of implementing our work health and safety reforms, and anything we can do to make workplaces healthier and safer is surely something this parliament can agree is a good thing. I'm very proud to stand as a member of the government in support of this bill.

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