Chris Hayes (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in continuation on the Safe Work Australia Bill 2008 and a related bill. As I was saying before the debate was adjourned last week, this is a critical first step in the direction of improving safety outcomes for workers and workers compensation arrangements across Australia. I have recently had the opportunity to talk to Geoff Fary from the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Tony Sheldon from the Transport Workers Union of Australia and Phil Hazelton from the Australian Miscellaneous Workers Union about their position on the Safe Work Australia Bill 2008. I have spoken to others but the people I have just mentioned came to talk to me about it. In speaking to them at length about this bill and about, more importantly, the statistics that underlie the concerns over safety in our workplaces, I noted they all raised significant concerns. They all support the notion of this bill as a step in the right direction. However, I should make it clear that what they said was not without some reservations. They did have some residual concerns about the bill’s administrative make-up, in particular the number of employee representatives to be on the board of the new Safe Work Australia.

The establishment of Safe Work Australia is only one part of the government’s strategy. We have taken this issue seriously and we have acted by moving quickly on it. Since coming to office in November, this government has undertaken a review of the Comcare scheme and has set up an independent panel of experts to conduct a national occupational health and safety review, which is currently well underway in examining public submissions on the optimal structure and content of an OH&S model. Notably, the first report of that group will be presented to the Workplace Relations Ministers Council on 31 October this year. A second report is due at the end of January next year. The group has developed a landmark intergovernmental agreement with our state and territory colleagues to harmonise occupational health and safety legislation across the nation. Together with the intergovernmental agreement for regulatory and operational reform of occupational health and safety, agreed by the Council of Australian Governments on 3 July this year, this ushers in a new partnership that I believe will advance the health and safety of workers across the nation and reduce the complexity of regulation for the many businesses affected.

Safe Work Australia will be an independent reform-focused national body with an inclusive tripartite membership that will operate under the Commonwealth government’s accountability and governance framework. It will consist of 15 members—nine members from government, an independent chair, two members representing employees, two members representing employers and a CEO. Safe Work Australia will replace the Australian Safety and Compensation Council, which was set up under the former Howard government as an advisory council with limited powers and limited functions and was effectively contained to coordinating, monitoring and promoting national efforts in respect of occupational health and safety issues.

In contrast, Safe Work Australia will develop national policy relating to OH&S and workers compensation; prepare, monitor and advise as to model OH&S legislation and model codes of conduct to apply throughout the nation; develop a compliance and enforcement policy to ensure that a nationally consistent regulatory approach across all jurisdictions is maintained; develop proposals relating to the harmonisation of workers compensation arrangements; collect, analyse and publish OH&S and workers compensation data; and collect and publish statistics. It will drive a national communications strategy to raise awareness of OH&S in the workplace. It will further develop the National Occupational Health and Safety Strategy 2002-2012 and advise the Workplace Relations Ministers Council on OH&S and workers compensation matters. These are very much the key functions of this new body which has now been established. They reaffirm the Rudd Labor government’s strong commitment to safe workplaces and the protection of workers.

The introduction of Safe Work Australia will play a pivotal role in realising the shared commitment of the Commonwealth and all states and territory governments to work together in advancing OH&S outcomes and achieving harmonisation of OH&S laws. It should not pass without noting that this is the first time in the history of the Federation that we have formally committed to OH&S taking on an intergovernmental agreement with a view to harmonising arrangements throughout the Commonwealth, states and territories. This is something very good for working Australians. It is something very good for the businesses of working Australians—businesses that need to have some regulatory relief. The complex regulations that currently exist and apply in individual states and territories can, as a result of this legislation, be brought under a harmonised model where there will be consistent arrangements which will apply across all workplaces in the country. (Time expired)

Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment Participation and Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Safe Work Australia Bill 2008 is to set up a new statutory authority with the aim of improving occupational health and safety outcomes and workers compensation arrangements in Australia. The area of occupational health and safety is not the subject of partisan debate. I believe all members of this House—all sides of politics—have a commitment to improving occupational health and safety. Having said that, there are three problems with this legislation, and the opposition urges the government to address these. These are not areas that should be difficult to fix. The first problem is that establishing a ‘tripartite’ body to look at the area of occupational health and safety really implies that you have three equal parties who all have a stake in and a commitment to improving occupational health and safety. They are government, employers and the unions. One of the problems with Safe Work Australia as it is conceived is that, of the 15 members on the board, nine of them will be representing government, two representing the unions and two representing employers. We say that it is an imbalance to have such heavy representation from government when it is actually the employers and the unions who will effect improvements in occupational health and safety.

The second problem with this legislation is that Safe Work Australia will report back to this House only every six years. The Olympics will come round more often than the report from Safe Work Australia will be seen in this House. We will go through two electoral cycles between reports. It defies belief why you would set up a governance arrangement like this. Why not have an annual report, as most statutory bodies do? The third problem with this is that the work of Safe Work Australia relies on reports to the Workplace Relations Ministers Council. What we have seen in the past is that, if there is not the will at the ministerial council to make this work, in effect Safe Work Australia will be sending their good work to a postbox. We have seen that the ministerial council in this area has been dysfunctional; it has sometimes failed to meet, and members of the ministerial council have failed to attend or to cooperate with the Commonwealth. If the ministerial council does not work, Safe Work Australia will not either. Those are the three problems with Safe Work Australia as it is conceived in this legislation. We urge the government to take up these suggestions in the spirit of constructive criticism in which they are raised.

The new body, which is one of many new bodies which have been created under Labor, will replace the Australian Safety and Compensation Council, which was established by the coalition when in government as an advisory body to occupational health and safety policies. Unlike the Australian Safety and Compensation Council, which was set up administratively under the framework of the Australian Workplace Safety Standards Act 2005, Safe Work Australia will be set up as a statutory authority with the power to make decisions in relation to national standards and codes of practice. This body will also have the power to develop national policy relating to OH&S and workers compensation. We are also told it will prepare and monitor implementation of OH&S legislation and advise the ministerial council on matters relating to OH&S and workers compensation.

While on the face of it all of those seem good—improving occupational health and safety regulations benefits everyone from workers and their families to business—there are these problems, as I have said, with the governance arrangements for this body in the legislation. The body will be dominated by state and territory representatives, the same people who have already failed in many cases to develop workable occupational health and safety systems in their own states. Many of them have major problems with their own workers compensation schemes. Out of the 15 nominated representatives who will form this body, eight will be state and territory representatives, one will be representing the Commonwealth, two from industry, two from the unions and a chair and CEO to make up the 15. So there will be only two members on this body who will specifically represent the interests of workers and there will be only two members who will represent the interests of employers. That is already a reduction from three from both sectors, as was the case under the Australian Safety and Compensation Council.

Both union and industry representatives are rightly concerned about the reduction of social partner representatives from three to two. It will create a situation where government representatives will be able to override concerns raised by employers and unions, including concerns related to increased costs or impractical safety proposals. This is an example of reducing industry and union representatives in favour of a ‘government knows best’ view. It is an unjustifiable balance. As I said, with a tripartite body there is an assumption and an implication that there are three equal partners and that it is not dominated by the government—the partner most removed from the workplace, where the practical improvements in occupational health and safety will occur. A process that does not seek to engage employers and employees in any meaningful way will struggle to improve safety standards; in fact, it may undermine them. With this limited capacity for employer and employee representatives to raise concerns, Safe Work Australia could also be used by the government to develop other codes and policies under the guise of safety.

There is a fundamental flaw in the foundations upon which this body has been established. The success of Safe Work Australia is contingent upon cooperation and participation of the ministerial council. If the ministerial council does not work, Safe Work Australia will not work either. Safe Work Australia is required to report directly to the ministerial council. Unfortunately, members of the ministerial council have notoriously failed to attend and/or cooperate with the Commonwealth on these issues. If the ministerial council fails to meet or refuses to cooperate and consider Safe Work Australia issues, the work of the body will come to a halt. There is inadequate employer and employee input; any work done by Safe Work Australia is contingent on cooperation from the ministerial council.

But there is a third problem—the failure to report back to parliament on the progress of Safe Work Australia. Under the current proposal, Safe Work Australia will only report back to parliament every six years. Last year there was a lot of talk about more open government. It has not been explained how reporting back every six years fits in with this framework. To introduce a state dominated independent statutory authority that only needs to report back to parliament every six years is incomprehensible and grossly inadequate. What is the problem with requiring this body to report to parliament annually? This new body is shaping up as just another botched policy from the government, like Fuelwatch and ‘grocery watch’. While Australians are fed up with these botched policies, we see jobs disappearing. Over the nine months till June next year, employment growth is expected to be one-third of what it was last year. The budget’s own predictions state that there will be 134,000 fewer jobs by June next year. Since this government came to office, over 15½ thousand workers have been made redundant. The new government is proposing to spend less on employment services and less on helping people back into work. They have wound back mutual obligation and Work for the Dole.

Despite this, we do not hear any talk of jobs from the government when, following on from the strongest labour market in a generation, we now have massive job insecurity. We never hear any member of the government talk about jobs. They will not mention jobs. Jobs are the great unmentionable in the corner. Instead, they are focused on watching fuel prices and grocery prices, to the benefit of no-one, and now we are considering a state dominated body to improve occupational health and safety regulations with less employer and employee involvement. It will not have to report back to parliament until 2014 and then it will report again in 2020. Good occupational health and safety standards require a safe working environment and they improve worker morale and productivity. It is important that we all work together to reduce workplace injuries, but I fear that this is just another Labor body that will do nothing of the sort.

Gary Gray (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to support the Safe Work Australia Bill 2008. It is a bill to create an independent national body that will improve occupational health and safety outcomes for Australian workers. This bill reiterates the Rudd government’s commitment to implementing safe work practices across Australia.

Statistics from the Australian Safety and Compensation Council show that, over the nine years from 1997-98 to 2005-06, an average of around 147,800 compensation claims were accepted. These claims are from workers who are temporarily incapacitated for one working week or more, or permanently incapacitated, and the figure also includes compensation claims that result from fatalities. Nationally, over those same nine years, approximately 300 deaths occurred each year—that is, 2,700 people died from a workplace related accident in the course of the gathering of those statistics. That in itself is a difficult statistic to stomach, but what does it mean? It means sadness for families, it means poverty and anger for families, it means families are broken, it means kids do not have mums or dads, it means husbands do not have wives, it means wives lose their husbands. The story of workplace injury and workplace deaths gets played out somewhere in this country just about every day, and it is a story that we as a parliament need to be doing more about.

According to the peak workers body in my home state of Western Australia, UnionsWA, 460 people died in the workplace between 1988-89 and 2008-09. Statistics cannot convey the tragedy that has befallen 460 families in Western Australia. According to UnionsWA, there has been a gradual decrease in fatalities—from a high point of 36 in 1988-89 to a low point of 12 in 2005-06. Unfortunately, the figure increased to 25 in 2006-07 and 27 in 2007-08. That largely tracks the massive construction that is currently underway in both the resources sector and the CBD of Perth. But 460 fatalities in Western Australia over this period is clearly unacceptable. There were 136 fatalities in the mining industry, 104 in the agriculture, forestry and fisheries industries, 70 in the construction industry and 31 in the manufacturing industry—and 104 of them were young Western Australian men and women aged between 25 and 34. That is almost one-third of the total fatalities.

For families who lose a loved one to a workplace injury this has a terrible emotional and mental cost, a cost that cannot be measured. For the nation it also has an economic cost. It is estimated that workplace accidents cost the economy $34 billion a year. It is not as though good employers and managers—and most of them are good—do not see safety as a matter of priority. But it is a fact that accidents take place. They take place for a multitude of reasons, not least of which is that people take safety for granted.

One of the more significant industrial accidents to take place in Australia over the last decade took place almost exactly 10 years ago this week—the story of the Esso plant at Longford. In Australia and around the world there are constant and tragic reminders of the human costs associated with workplace accidents. At Longford, in Victoria’s Gippsland Region, Esso Australia Resources operates three gas plants to process gas flowing from wells in the Bass Strait. It also operates a crude oil stabilisation plant to process oil flowing from other wells in the Bass Strait. On Friday, 25 September 1998, at around half past 12 in the afternoon, a vessel in Esso’s gas plant No. 1 fractured, releasing hydrocarbon vapours and liquid. Explosions and fire followed. Two Esso employees were killed and eight others were injured. Gas supplies to the state of Victoria were severely affected for two weeks. On 12 October 1998, the Victorian government announced a royal commission in order to determine the cause of the explosion and the subsequent loss of gas supply.

It is worth remembering that there was a federal election at the time of the accident. That election was closely fought and it concluded in the days immediately following the explosion at Longford. It is also worth putting on the record that at no time did the then government, or the opposition, seek to obtain political advantage from the tragedy at Longford. Everyone stood side by side to understand exactly what had happened, to support the process of the royal commission and to ask why it could be that in a modern, wealthy economy such an explosion could have taken place and deaths could have resulted.

The royal commissioner carried out his work over a period of several years. The plant was rebuilt at a cost of $500 million and it incorporated new safety measures and staffing increases. Esso also announced that it would invest $100 million in the development and expansion of the Longford plant over the following two years. Whilst it is commendable that Esso has looked to improve its safety standards, it is disappointing that it took two fatalities to make it happen. Sir Daryl Dawson, a former justice of the High Court and royal commissioner of the Longford royal commission into the Esso gas plant explosion, commented on the realities of workplace safety. He stated:

The elimination of risk comes at a cost and it is apparent that those responsible are not always prepared to bear the cost and so you have, either implicitly or explicitly, a cost benefit analysis in which the risk of death or injury is measured in money terms against the cost of elimination of the risk.

That is an exercise which seems insensitive to say the least, and yet it is an exercise that must be carried out, consciously or unconsciously, all the time.

That is why employers are encouraged to make their workplaces safer, not safe.

That is an insightful comment that points to the disappointing reality of operating in a market based economy. It also points out that there are risks and they need to be appropriately mitigated but that risks will never go away. That is why a safety culture and enforcing safe behaviours is extremely important in a workplace context.

An overseas accident that had tragic ramifications occurred in 2005 in Texas City in the United States. Texas City is BP’s largest refinery worldwide and the third-largest refinery in the United States, with a crude capacity of about 460,000 barrels of petroleum per day. The facility is capable of producing about 10 million gallons per day of premium and unleaded regular fuel. Located just south of Houston, the plant includes 29 oil-refining units and four chemical units, spread over a 1,200-acre site.

The Texas City refinery produces about 2½ per cent of all fuel sold in the United States—enough to fill the tank of every car every seven seconds. Fifteen workers died and more than 500 were injured in the explosion which occurred at Texas City in 2005, just three years ago. It was one of the most serious industrial incidents of the past two decades. BP’s investigation report, entitled The cause of the explosion, has been discussed in detail. It stated:

Actions taken or not taken led to overfilling the raffinate splitter with liquid, overheating of the liquid and the subsequent overpressurisation and pressure relief. Hydrocarbon flow to the blowdown drum and stack overwhelmed it, resulting in liquids carrying over out of the top of the stack, flowing down the stack, accumulating on the ground, causing a vapor cloud, which was ignited by an abandoned white pickup truck with the ignition on.

No-one could have begun to understand the implications of an abandoned car with merely the ignition left on, but the consequence of a massive cloud of hydrocarbons drifting across that dumped vehicle was an explosion that killed 15 people and injured 500. The hydrocarbons industry is advanced and scientific and it understands the value of life and the value of profits. The work done by BP to understand the explosion has been transparent and has been transmitted around the world. In the company for which I worked previously, Woodside Energy, there was completely transparent access to the investigation and its conclusions. Furthermore, BP sent teams around the world to explain to other hydrocarbons companies how such a horrific explosion could have taken place and the measures that were being taken to ensure that it could not happen again.

Good governance requires that a whole range of metrics be measured, considered and placed on the table at board meetings. It is the case that good companies make safety a priority matter for boards to consider. It is not uncommon for board meetings to start with a safety report. It is not uncommon that analysts judgements about companies are based on their capacity to do a good job in looking after their workers. In industries that have danger and risk, it is known and understood that if you are going to attract the best workers then you must create the best safety environment. Although there are people killed every month in Australia’s resource sector, there is no doubt that our outstanding resource companies work very hard on their safety protocols and on ensuring that the triple bottom line—not only profitability and doing good business but also looking after the workers—is met in all contexts.

Even in the best-managed companies, accidents happen. In March this year a crane owned by New York Crane and Equipment collapsed at 303 East 51st Street in Manhattan. Seven people were killed and 24 others were injured. It was a tower crane, manufactured by the Australian company Favco, and it was 200 feet tall at the time of the collapse. I take an interest in this collapse not because an Australian company manufactured the crane but because the one thing that is apparent to supporters of the resource and construction industries is the need for safety. I have spent a lot of time in Western Australia looking at safety training at the CFMEU’s site, which carries out one of the most significant training operations in Western Australia. Their training operation was supported by the previous government, and one can see no good reason why the outstanding training done by the centre should not continue.

One of the areas that the construction industry pays particular attention to is the erection of cranes and crane safety. I visited that CFMEU training centre in Western Australia earlier this year, within days of the collapse of that crane in New York. The workers there were already being trained in understanding what had happened to that crane—how it had pulled away from the wall to which it was supposed to have been attached, how it folded back in on itself and how, when it fell, seven people, including several inside it and several working around it, were killed and 24 others were injured.

A construction worker on the 15th floor said he saw something fall and strike one or more of the girder ties, weakening or breaking the connections. ‘Out of the corner of my eye,’ he said, ‘I saw a piece falling, and then the crane pulled away.’ The collapse occurred as workers attempted to jack up the crane, raising its height to enable work to continue above on the 19th floor of a planned 43-storey building. The builders had city permission to raise the crane. The crane had been inspected a few days earlier, with no violations found. Accidents occur even though inspections happen. Accidents are prevented by a safety culture.

In Western Australia, UnionsWA keeps a record of the personal stories of people who have been affected by workplace injuries. Just down the street from where I live, no more than a kilometre away, construction commenced in 2002 on an office and warehouse facility which was of a tilt-up design. Tilt-up design involves large prefabricated concrete slabs being tilted into position to form the walls of a structure. It is a low-cost construction methodology, ideally suited to Western Australia, in which safety is paramount. The story I relate here is of a wall many metres tall, many metres long and weighing tens of tonnes, which collapsed because it was inappropriately suspended. A worker, Des Kelsh, was crushed beneath the falling wall. He is survived by his wife, Trish, and their children, Lucy-Ann and Cormac. He was working on a tilt-up wall that came down. When it came down he bled to death before anyone could even lift the wall to get in to help him. His wife says:

Every day I think about him. Every day I miss him.

Des Kelsh’s death caused a significant reconsideration of how tilt-up construction occurs in Western Australia and has had the positive effect of making a change in construction methodology. His death also reinforced what had been said previously by the CFMEU about the safety of such construction methodologies.

In 2007, Luke Murrie died on a construction site in the northern Perth suburb of Malaga. The CFMEU said:

Luke was a warm, happy young man whose boundless energy was infectious. He will be sadly missed but never forgotten by all those who were fortunate enough to journey with him along life’s path. The loss of a tremendous person like Luke at such a young age is made even more tragic because of the loss of opportunity. The opportunity to be a father. The opportunity to grow old. The opportunity to be a workmate to many more people. The opportunity to be a great construction worker and rigger and to be a positive influence within an industry which sorely needs that type of influence.

We all know of the accident at the Cloudbreak mine of Fortescue Metals Group Ltd earlier in 2008, where Nigel Taylor, 26, died. He had been married for just two months to his wife, Lisa. She said:

Nigel was an amazing man, we were married for only two months but the love that we had for each other will last an eternity. Nigel never got to experience many things in his life, moving into our family home or becoming a father. But one thing I am thankful of is that he died as my husband, that we had a chance to say our vows and express our love for each other.

In July of 2007, a 43-year-old delivery driver died when the Dingo minidigger he was using to move a shed on a construction site toppled and the raised arms of the minidigger landed on his neck. On 30 August 2007, a 21-year-old loader operator died when the bogger that he was using to backfill a stope rolled over, crushing him. On 10 September 2007, a 68-year-old farmer was killed when he was struck by the limb of a tree that he was felling on his farm.

We should remember that one of the most significant categories of workplace injury and death is the agricultural sector on farms. They are often workers who are working alone with equipment on unstable ground and often working to a deadline—perhaps in the daytime with the light disappearing, perhaps because the seeding has to be done or perhaps just because they have had enough of the job and they want to get it done. Accidents happen and people get killed. On farms, of course, sometimes it can take days, or even weeks, before a death is discovered.

This bill does many things about process and design but, most importantly, it brings to the attention of our parliament and brings into focus for industry the importance that we, as a parliament, place on workplace safety and the right of every worker to turn up to work, carry out their work and go home healthy, fit and in the same condition as when they arrived. I commend the bill to the House.

Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to discuss the Safe Work Australia Bill 2008. Before going into the substance of the bill, I would like to make some general remarks about workplace relations and employment. We all, rightly, bring our own perspectives and our own experiences to the issues we face in this parliament. They form part of the equation when we form our views about issues. It is perfectly reasonable, when we as parliamentarians are faced with a large number of decisions, that we do rely on our experiences to guide us in forming judgements. In my own case, I am guided in my views on workplace relations by my own experiences, and in this field they have been many. I have been an employee, I have been an employer, I have worked casually, I have worked full time and I have worked part time. I have worked in different parts of Australia and I have also worked overseas. I have done many and varied jobs since I commenced my working life. I delivered milk when I was 14, I have flipped hamburgers, I have poured beers, I have waited tables, I have been an usher at the cinema, I have been a data entry clerk and I have done all types of administration. I have had many more occupations than I would care to list. Most of these jobs have been great but, occasionally, I have come across employers who have not lived up to their obligations. I must say that these times have been relatively few and far between in what has been a long and varied career.

The times that I actually remember with most trepidation are the times when I have been unable to find work. Members of the House will probably be familiar with that intense and unwavering feeling of insecurity that can pervade all aspects of your life. A loss of confidence can accompany this. The failure to be able to find work, in my view, is one of the worst fates that can befall any individual Australian. This parliament must always bear that in mind when considering the appropriate structure for our workplace relations system, including in this case occupational health and safety laws. The more complex and complicated we make that system, the more people will be subjected to the insecurity of being unable to find work.

I have heard suggestions in this debate, and at other times, that members of the coalition are not concerned about safety in Australian workplaces. I consider this suggestion offensive and silly. To seriously suggest that any member of this House would condone an unsafe workplace is ludicrous. It is just as ludicrous as the suggestion that any member of this House would somehow welcome deterioration in the working conditions of any Australian worker. Debates in this area are about finding balance in our workplace relations system, and are a vitally important business for this parliament. But let us conduct them in an atmosphere where members are not subjected to nonsensical allegations that have no basis in reality. The debates in this portfolio are vitally important to the wellbeing of my constituents in Stirling and to the constituents of every single member of this House. If we get the system wrong, we bring the progress Australia has made over the last several decades to a complete halt. I think that all members of this House should treat these debates with the seriousness they deserve, and I would invite all members to do so when we are debating this bill.

The bill’s purpose is to establish Safe Work Australia. The coalition does not oppose this bill or the consequential provisions, although we do have some concerns about significant flaws within the bill. Safety in the workplace should be a core priority for both employers and employees. Every employee should be able to undertake their tasks in a safe environment. The coalition broadly supports the idea of a national occupational health and safety system and is committed to ensuring that every Australian workplace is a safe one. There are significant benefits to be gained from a national system, both for employees and employers. However, we are concerned that this bill will not achieve this.

There are significant costs for employers in managing seven different sets of occupational health and safety laws and workers compensation requirements. These are wasted funds that could be better spent. These funds could be used to provide skills training for employees, education in occupational health and safety policies and employee development. Instead these funds are spent on complying with the seven different occupational health and safety regimes and workers compensation systems.

Yet this bill, strangely, reduces the level of influence that employees and employers currently have in developing occupational health and safety policy. It does so by reducing the number of union and industry representatives and allowing state government representatives to dominate occupational health and safety policy decisions. This bill will allow state Labor ministers to continue to hijack the national discussion on occupational health and safety, just as we saw with the New South Wales Minister for Industrial Relations last year. This is an ill-considered measure that is a backward step from the current situation.

Every workplace is different. I believe it is crucial that employers and employees work together to achieve workplace health and safety. But surely we would be best off doing that through getting those who know their workplaces best involved in developing occupational health and safety policy. Removing the influence of employees and employers from this process is irresponsible government. The influence of employees and employers and their union and industry representatives should be encouraged. Their participation should be increased, not lessened. Occupational health and safety policy outcomes that require changes to culture and other significant changes depend on employers and employees. Removing them from, or lessening their influence on, the policy development process is a very retrograde step.

I want to turn now to the other significant flaw in this bill, and that is that it proposes that parliament receive a report on the progress of Safe Work Australia every six years. I encourage the government to consider shortening this period of reporting. There is no logical element to a six-year time frame. It is totally out of line with the parliamentary term and it will not provide future governments with the information they will require to develop a national system. It is not responsible for the government to propose a bill that provides for an independent authority that will be dominated by state representatives and will remove employee and employer representation to only require that a report be provided to parliament every six years.

This bill is another example of a Labor policy that has been introduced with little consultation. Safe Work Australia is in some aspects a regressive step. Australia cannot afford ill-considered policies that increase the influence of incompetent state Labor governments at the expense of employers and employees and their representatives in union and industry bodies. I hope that the Senate will look at these matters in an inquiry into this bill. If they do, I encourage the government to work with the coalition to provide the best possible environment for developing a national occupational health and safety system in the best interests of all Australian workers and businesses.

Craig Thomson (Dobell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Safe Work Australia Bill 2008 and the associated Safe Work Australia (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2008. The purpose of the Safe Work Australia Bill is to establish Safe Work Australia as an independent Commonwealth statutory body to improve occupational health and safety outcomes and workers compensation arrangements in Australia. The announcement of the new body follows the historic signing on 3 July 2008, by the Council of Australian Governments, of an intergovernmental agreement for regulatory and operational reform in occupational health and safety. The intergovernmental agreement commits all jurisdictions to a process for the adoption of model OH&S laws and will enable the development of uniform, equitable and effective safety standards and protections for all Australians. The purpose of the Safe Work Australia (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Bill is to repeal the Australian Workplace Safety Standards Act 2005 and to deal with the consequential and transitional matters arising from that repeal and from the enactment of the Safe Work Australia Act 2008.

Historically it has been trade unions which have driven the campaign to secure not just safe and healthy workplaces but also just compensation for workers killed and injured at work. Unfortunately, in its desire to rid workplaces of union influence, the former government made it more difficult for workers’ representatives to report and investigate breaches of workplace safety laws. In fact, the whole Work Choices legislation made it very difficult for workers to raise issues of concern with safety. If you are working on a factory floor under an individual contract and you can be dismissed without any recourse to unfair dismissal legislation, and there is something that may cost the employer money to fix but is affecting safety, which employee is going to go and raise that with the employer, when there is the threat of losing their job? Which employee would be brave enough to put their job on the line in relation to these issues, because Work Choices meant that they could be terminated without any reason? So Work Choices fundamentally was attacking the safety of all workers at workplaces around Australia.

This, coupled with individual contracts, put workers in Australia in the incredible position of not only having no bargaining power in relation to the conditions in which they worked, and being dealt with on an individual basis, but also having no unfair dismissal rights. So, if they wished to raise any opposition, any issues—be they more generally about their workplace conditions or more specifically about OH&S issues—they did so at their own peril. This was the fundamental evil of Work Choices—the fundamental evil that the Australian people on 24 November rejected outright and said had to change.

There can never be too much priority placed on safety in the workplace. When people go to work in the morning, they expect to come home at the end of the day. Anything that can assist in making the workplace safer, anything that can be changed to take away those sorts of risks, needs to be supported. More than 300 Australians are killed each year at work. Many more die as a result of work related disease. Each year over 140,000 Australians are seriously injured at work. The cost to our economy has been estimated at $34 billion per year. The cost to those injured and to their families, workmates and friends is inestimable.

In my electorate of Dobell, on the New South Wales Central Coast, there are still vivid memories in the community of the young mother left widowed when her husband was electrocuted on the job at a shopping centre refit, leaving her six-year-old son and nine-month-old daughter without a father. The young mother, Andrea Veigas, later said:

Every Australian worker deserves to work in a safe workplace. I don’t want Glen to just be a statistic. I want his death to be a wake up call to all employers, employees, governments and the whole of Australia.

That is a sentiment that one cannot argue against. More recently I was able to attend the memorial of a bricklayer in my electorate who was crushed by a wall at a new residential-golf estate, leaving behind a large family who are also now without their husband, father and grandfather. These are just two of hundreds of similar tragic stories heard across the country, a constant reminder that unsafe work environments are unacceptable. I also think of the 228 truck drivers killed last year on our roads and the efforts that we need to make to ensure that this tragic road toll is reduced and that those truck drivers can go to work every day in a safer environment.

Safe Work Australia Week will be marked throughout Australia from 19 to 25 October. In reality, we should be thinking about the safest possible workplaces 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Occupational health and safety is an important consideration for all Australian workers, their families and loved ones, and of course business. Good OH&S practices not only provide a safer working environment but improve worker morale and productivity. By pursuing good OH&S practices, businesses face fewer workplace injuries and benefit from higher employee retention rates and enhanced corporate image. This reduces the costs associated with production delays, recruiting new staff and replacing equipment, and avoids the resulting uncertainty and workload pressures placed on co-workers. Businesses who strive to improve their OH&S performance create safer workplaces which benefit not only employers and employees but their families, their communities and the Australian economy. Commitment to better practice OH&S is best sustained through a focus on performance outcomes which can be reported on and monitored over time. Measurement of OH&S performance demonstrates a commitment to improving the safety of workers.

Achieving uniform standards across Australia will always present challenges. Before I came to this place, I was the National Secretary of the Health Services Union, and I can fully understand the difficulties of dealing with seven different workplace safety jurisdictions. Health organisations like Ramsay Health Care, which has hospitals in most states and jurisdictions around Australia, need to have specialists in each state to deal with the separate legislation that operated in each of those areas. The changes that these bills foreshadow will make that a thing of the past. They will make it easier for businesses to deal with these issues and to put greater resources onto the shop floor to make sure that workers are safer at their workplace. Coupled with these changes are other changes constantly occurring in this country’s work environment: an increasingly mobile workforce across state boundaries, a growing trend towards short-term work contracts and a workforce where increasingly English is not the first language, as I have seen in my experience in the health services area. All these factors present hurdles for us as a society to offer safer workplaces. But our goals are attainable.

The establishment of Safe Work Australia is an essential part of the government’s strategy to improve safety outcomes and workers compensation arrangements across Australia. In order to achieve this it is vital that we have a central organisation that can collaborate with the Commonwealth, states and territories. The Safe Work Australia Bill establishes the operational arrangements to support this new statutory body, including provisions relating to the nomination, appointment and terms and conditions of members. The bill covers conflict-of-interest issues, procedures relating to the conduct of meetings and to decision-making processes, and the development of plans and requirements for reporting to the Workplace Relations Ministers Council. It enables the chair to constitute committees to draw upon a wide range of expertise for the performance of its functions.

Safe Work Australia will be a reform focused body with the power to make recommendations directly to the Workplace Relations Ministers Council. Safe Work Australia will replace the Australian Safety and Compensation Council. Safe Work Australia will be funded by both the Commonwealth, at 50 per cent, and the states and territories, at 50 per cent. Safe Work Australia will be a tripartite body comprising 15 members, including an independent chair, nine members representing the Commonwealth and each state and territory, two members representing the interests of workers, and two representing the interests of employers and the CEO. The minister will make all appointments to Safe Work Australia based on nominations from each body.

What a change it makes to hear discussion in this chamber about tripartite organisations, given the last 12 years. Very rarely in the last 12 years have members opposite mentioned in this chamber that unions and representatives of employees should actually be included as voices on these bodies. It is a great thing that this government is setting up this tripartite organisation to help assist in making sure that our workplaces are safer.

Safe Work Australia will develop national policy relating to OH&S and workers compensation; prepare, monitor and revise model OH&S legislation; develop a compliance and enforcement policy to ensure nationally consistent regulatory approaches across all jurisdictions; develop proposals relating to the harmonisation of workers compensation arrangements; importantly, collect, analyse and publish OH&S and workers compensation data and undertake research; drive national communications strategies to raise awareness of health and safety at work; further develop the National OHS Strategy 2002-2012; and advise the Workplace Relations Ministers Council on OH&S and workers compensation matters.

The development of the National OHS Strategy 2002-2012, which I just mentioned, will be an important facet of the new Safe Work Australia body. This strategy already contains important targets for making Australian workplaces safer. These are to sustain a significant, continual reduction in work-related fatalities with a reduction of at least 20 per cent by 30 June 2012, and to reduce the incidence of workplace injury by at least 40 per cent by 30 June 2012. The five priorities identified by the national strategy to achieve short- and long-term OH&S improvement and to nurture long-term cultural change are: to reduce the impact of risks at work; to improve the capacity of business operators and workers to manage OH&S effectively; to prevent occupational disease more effectively; to eliminate hazards at the design stage; and to strengthen the capacity of government to influence OH&S outcomes.

The national strategy focuses on particular OH&S risks and industry sectors to maximise the impact of the initiatives. The risks targeted are musculoskeletal disorders, falls from heights and hitting or being hit by objects. These three risks account for more than half of the workers compensation claims across Australia. The four priority industry sectors originally targeted were building and construction, transport and storage, manufacturing, and health and community services. More recently, agriculture, forestry and fisheries were added as priority sectors. These sectors were chosen because they were identified through data analysis as having the highest incidence rates and/or a high number of workers compensation claims compared with other industries. By working with these sectors, not only are lives being saved but these industries will set examples of OH&S best practice for other employers to follow.

The bill will also create and maintain mechanisms for the review and revision of the effectiveness of Safe Work Australia in performing its functions. This will ensure that the new body is active and operating efficiently and responsively in meeting its strategic and operational goals. The minister will make all appointments to Safe Work Australia: the independent chair—and for this appointment the minister must consult the Workplace Relations Ministers Council; a Commonwealth representative; one representative nominated by each state and territory; and two representatives nominated by worker and employer groups authorised by the minister—this will enable the minister to identify bodies that represent workers and employers and seek nominations from them.

Safe Work Australia will be assisted by a non-voting CEO and staff. Safe Work Australia’s voting rules were agreed in the context of the intergovernmental agreement. For decisions other than decisions on the model OH&S legislation, 50 per cent of the voting members are required to constitute a quorum, with a two-thirds majority of those present required to agree to the decision. For decisions on the model OH&S legislation, there is an additional requirement that a majority of the Commonwealth, state and territory representatives must agree. Safe Work Australia will be jointly funded by the Commonwealth and the states and territories. Funding is estimated at $17 million in the first full year, with the Commonwealth contributing half of that—some $8.5 million.

The government has set itself the task of creating a seamless national economy unhampered by unnecessary state duplications, overlaps and differences. Occupational health and safety is a prime candidate for this sort of reform. Since coming to office we have undertaken a review of the Comcare scheme, set up an independent panel of experts to conduct a national OH&S review and developed a landmark intergovernmental agreement with our state and territory counterparts to harmonise occupational health and safety legislation nationally.

This bill, together with the intergovernmental agreement, ushers in a new era of cooperation and collaboration between the Commonwealth and the states and territories in this important area—a collaboration which will improve the health and safety of workers across Australia and reduce the complexity of regulation for businesses. Again, what a difference it is to hear in this chamber the government talking about cooperating with the states and territories rather than trying to railroad them and run straight over the top of them as the previous government did with Work Choices.

Safe Work Australia will replace the Australian Safety and Compensation Council established by the Howard government as an advisory council whose functions were confined to coordinating, monitoring and promoting national efforts on health and safety and workers compensation. Occupational health and safety and workers compensation are too important to be neglected any longer. Workers’ lives and health are at stake, and so too is the efficiency of our economy. Occupational health and safety and workers compensation reform will increase profitability and productivity and better protect the lives and health of Australians. Safe Work Australia will play a pivotal role in this reform. I commend the bills to the House.

Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My city of Ipswich prospered under the woollen mills, meatworks, railway workshops and coalmines. But I recall, as a young boy, the events of 31 July 1972 at 2.47 am. I remember waking up to a loud bang and thinking, ‘I wonder why my house is rocking.’ Many people who lived in Ipswich originally mistook the explosion that night at Box Flat mine for an earthquake. The previous evening, a fire that started in the mine had grown to the stage where it could not be extinguished. A final team of 14 men entered the mine via number 7 tunnel to investigate and explore options to contain the fire, while three more men were stationed and working at the entrance to number 5 conveyor belt tunnel. A short time later a huge explosion was to claim the lives of all 17 men, while others were injured. Rescue and recovery efforts were proposed but not undertaken due to the danger of further explosions and the reality that no-one could possibly have survived underground. The mine was then sealed, entombing those who remained. There were injuries sustained by others in the explosion.

The Box Flat tragedy left an indelible mark on the city of Ipswich. A permanent memorial has been erected on Swanbank Road near the original Box Flat mine shaft to honour the men and to ensure the disaster will never be forgotten. The strong mining community of Ipswich was even stronger in 1972. Many people were related to the lost miners and knew them as comrades, friends or just acquaintances. They all felt the tragedy. The city of Ipswich was saddened and the tragedy left a legacy that the people of Ipswich will never forget.

I had the privilege of growing up opposite Digger Murphy, who was the head of the coalminers federation in Queensland, and reading, on many occasions, Common Cause, which was the coalminers federation’s newsletter. Just around the corner from me, former Ipswich Mayor Des Freeman lived with his wife, Colleen. Des was an organiser with what is now known as the CFMEU. He told me many stories, as did Digger, of the troubles and travails of the coalminers federation and of the occupational health and safety issues which they confronted every day.

I am pleased to speak in relation to the Safe Work Australia Bill 2008 because it affects the many men and women who work in difficult vocations in my community. Last Saturday I met with some meatworkers in my electorate office who told me about the difficulties in the meat industry, the hard yakka that they undertake and the challenges to occupational health and safety that they face every day.

The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Julia Gillard, released the comparative performance monitoring report on Australia’s occupational health and safety and workers compensation outcomes in 2006-07. It was subsequently endorsed in Sydney by the state and territory workplace relations ministers. The key findings of that report are startling. In 2006-07 there were 236 fatalities recorded in Australia, of which 177 were from injuries of musculoskeletal disorders and 57 were from other diseases in the workplace. Body stressing continues to be the mechanism of injury and disease that accounts for the greatest proportion of claims: 42 per cent. The manufacturing industry recorded the highest incidence of claims per 1,000 employees—27.5; followed by transport and storage—25.9; agriculture, forestry and fishery—25.3; and construction—22.1. Over three-quarters of injured workers successfully return to work within eight to 10 months of sustaining their injury.

The truth is that we need to harmonise Australia’s OHS laws. That was an election commitment by the Rudd Labor opposition, and it is a priority for COAG, for the Productivity Commission and for the states. Historically, the 19th century saw the rise of safety legislation in the old factories and shops type legislation, going back to 1878 and 1901. By 1970, each of the six states had their own OHS statute based on the traditional British model. The weaknesses of this traditional approach were well known to most people. There was a mass of detail, there were technical rules which were difficult to understand and not kept up to date, and standards were ad hoc and mainly based on factory based physical hazards. There was uneven coverage across workplaces. It really did not give much incentive to innovate to look for better arrangements for workers and it did not give much incentive for employers to do likewise.

Before the 1990s most of the OHS regulations in the Australian jurisdiction were in separate instruments. It was not uncommon for each jurisdiction to have dozens of sets of regulations, each covering a specific hazard. So we were left with a great legacy of problems of overregulation and trouble in terms of working out which particular regulation, instrument or law applied to which workplace. The sad thing about the previous coalition government was their desire to drive trade unions from the workplaces of Australia. That had an impact not just on wages and conditions but also on OHS. In fact, I just could not understand why they put in prohibited content the idea that workers could be paid leave to attend meetings conducted by and made up of trade union members, which would include OHS training. It goes to show the extent to which they opposed OHS training in the workplace. The idea of averaging out your work over a maximum 12-month period, effectively overriding the 38-hour week, had the impact of increasing the likelihood of an overworked labour force and, therefore, more injuries in the workplace, not to mention restrictions on right of entry in the circumstances.

The 2007 Queensland inquiry into the impact of Work Choices on Queensland workplaces found that employers and employees were extremely apprehensive about job security, leading many employees to refrain from raising occupational health and safety issues. That is no surprise because trade unions have been critical in raising the awareness of OHS and forcing greater commitment by management to prevent accidents. There has been a great deal of struggle by the unions to improve the laws in this regard. They have demanded so much more on behalf of their members who have suffered disease, injury and illness as a result of failures in the workplace.

The University of New South Wales study in 2005 reviewed 106 cases published between 1966 and 2005, measuring OHS effects on job security and workplace changes, which included a number of indices such as injury, disease, hazard exposure, stress and compliance with OHS laws and management systems. The results were compelling. Of 61 studies of job insecurity and downsizing, 53—87 per cent—found adverse OHS effects. Among 23 studies of outsourcing, subcontracting and home-based work, all 23—100 per cent—found an adverse effect on OHS. Of 22 studies of casual work labour hire, 15—68 per cent—found worse OHS comparable to permanent employees. That goes to show that the casualisation of the workforce and the driving out of trade unions from the workplace resulted in greater hazards to workers.

The James Hardie situation is probably the starkest example of a company’s failure to care for its workers’ occupational health and safety. It is expected that 30,000 to 40,000 Australians will have contracted an asbestos related cancer by 2020. This compares to the 40,500 military deaths suffered by Australians in World War II. The mining and manufacturing of asbestos products took place in Australia for most of the last century. It was widespread until the 1980s. From the 1950s until the 1970s, Australia was the highest per capita user of asbestos in the world. Every third domestic dwelling built before 1982 was thought to contain asbestos. It was used in cement sheeting or fibro—I grew up in a fibro house—until the mid-1980s. Asbestos was finally banned in Australian workplaces only in January 2004.

The Productivity Commission inquiry in 2004 on national workers compensation and occupational health and safety frameworks pointed to the compliance burdens, costs and inefficiencies of multistate employers having 10 principal workers compensation schemes and OH&S regimes. The Howard government did little in this regard. They seemed to want to federalise OH&S in some respects, but it seemed to have the effect of reducing protection for workers. For example, the Occupational Health and Safety (Commonwealth Employment) Amendment Act 2005 reduced the need for employers to consult with unions over the appointment of health and safety representatives. The Occupational Health and Safety (Commonwealth Employment) Amendment (Promoting Safer Workplaces) Bill 2005 invalidated industrial manslaughter provisions of the ACT Occupational Health and Safety Act and of similar industrial manslaughter laws enacted by the states and territories. They are just two examples of where the previous government failed in terms of OH&S.

The Rudd government is committed to safer workplaces. As I said, the former Howard government failed to address significant issues in the area of workplace health and safety because of its blinkered ideological obsession with Work Choices. We must rid ourselves of the legislative and regulatory contradictions, distinctions and double-ups. Workplace health and safety will not be forgotten under the Rudd government as it was under the Howard government. We believe that inaction in the area of workplace health and safety is bad for business and bad for employees. I am happy to speak on this bill because it affects my local community, where so much industrial activity goes on. We have in Ipswich 43 per cent of the industrial land in South-East Queensland, so it is a very important issue for my local community. At its core, this bill ends unnecessary duplication and overlap. It will harmonise occupational health and safety regulations, uphold existing safety standards, streamline the different state systems and reduce complexity for all concerned. It delivers on our pre-election promise to commit to safer workplace reform and to introduce legislation to establish a national body tasked with adopting a uniform state and territory approach to occupational health and safety and workers compensation.

The announcement of the new body, Safe Work Australia, follows agreement between the Commonwealth, states and territories to harmonise laws and systems. This intergovernmental agreement, reached at the Workplace Relations Ministers Council on 3 July 2008, commits all jurisdictions to a process for the adoption of model occupational health and safety laws that will enable the development of uniform, equitable and effective safety standards and protections for all Australian workers. Governments on both sides have done this on numerous occasions in the past in the areas of corporation law and defamation law, and the current government is doing it in the area of family law.

Safe Work Australia will replace the Australian Safety and Compensation Council established by the Howard government, which was simply an advisory body. What we are doing today is a huge departure from that body. Unlike the Australian Safety and Compensation Council, Safe Work Australia will be an independent, reform focused body with the power to make recommendations directly to the Workplace Relations Ministers Council. It is certainly an advance on the previous government’s model. It is intended that Safe Work Australia will end complex and costly inconsistencies in occupational health and safety and workers compensation laws across Australia. As the minister promised, it is an inclusive, tripartite body.

It is a disturbing reality that more than 250 Australians were killed and about 140,000 seriously injured last year. The cost to the Australian taxpayer is upwards of $34 billion a year. That is an extraordinary cost to the Australian taxpayer. And, for those people who experienced the Box Flat mining disaster, the cost to them was horrendous. As the Deputy Prime Minister aptly stated:

Our health, safety and compensation systems are in a sorry state—unnecessarily complex and costly.

It is a sad reality that inconsistencies between the jurisdictions expose workers to a greater risk of working in workplaces with poorer safety standards. It is simply unacceptable in the 21st century that we have such complexity, paperwork and costs for the 39,000 Australian businesses that operate across state boundaries.

Safe Work Australia will be a nationally independent statutory authority established to lead and improve occupational health and safety and workers compensation. Its membership comprises the Commonwealth, states and territories, workers, employers and the CEO. It is great that we have workers’ representatives on this body, because they are the ones, along with employers, who experience this day in and day out. This is a significant departure from the attitude of the previous government with respect to the involvement of workers’ representatives. I am not fazed or worried about the review, which will be conducted every six years. There seems to be some consternation opposite in relation to this issue. It does not concern me at all, because I think that this process needs time to work its way through.

With an initial budget of $17 million and an independent chair, this statutory body will be a prescribed agency under the Financial Management and Accountability Act. One of the first tasks it will undertake will be to develop the model occupational health and safety legislation for all jurisdictions. The Inter-Governmental Agreement for Regulatory and Operational Reform in Occupational Health and Safety, which was signed by the leaders of the eight jurisdictions, is a landmark agreement. It is the first time in the history of our Federation that governments from each state and territory have formally embarked on harmonising our occupational health and safety. The intergovernmental agreement underpins the Council of Australian Governments agenda to harmonise occupational health and safety across Australia by 2011. The Workplace Relations Ministers Council will be responsible for undertaking this process, with details delegated to the new national occupational health and safety body. The objective of the reform covered by the agreement is to produce the optimal model for a national approach, as I said.

I am pleased to speak on this bill because it will have a big impact on the meatworks where I had my first job, which employs 2,300 people in the local area; the coalmines, which still operate in the wider Ipswich area; the gas stations; the railway workshops in the Ipswich area; the butter factory, where my father worked; and so many other businesses which make up the Ipswich area, including the booming aerospace industry. Safety in the workplace for white-collar workers and safety in the workplace for blue-collar workers is essential, and we cannot ignore those challenges.

It is terrific that the Rudd government is undertaking this task. It is appropriate. And it is a sad indictment that, after nearly 12 years, the Howard government failed, and failed miserably, in this regard, blinkered by their obsession with Work Choices and their attack upon the working men and women of this country. It is a shame that they failed in this regard and it is left to us, on this side of the House, to undertake the task to protect the rights and interests of workers not just in terms of their wages and conditions but in terms of their occupational health and safety. I commend the bill to the House.

Mike Symon (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in support of the Safe Work Australia Bill 2008 and the Safe Work Australia (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2008. As promised during the 2007 election campaign, Labor is committed to introducing a new national and independent authority to both lead and improve occupational health and safety and workers compensation arrangements in Australia. The Safe Work Australia Bill provides for Safe Work Australia to have representatives of unions, employer groups, state and territory governments and the Commonwealth government, along with an independent chair. The organisation’s budget will be 50 per cent funded by the Commonwealth, with the states and territories providing proportional funding for the remaining 50 per cent.

A key priority of Safe Work Australia will be to develop model OH&S legislation for adoption by all state and territory jurisdictions, model legislation that will be delivering on the Rudd government’s commitment to harmonise OH&S laws whilst working in cooperation with all state and territory governments. Along with the development of model OH&S codes of practice and other OH&S materials, Safe Work Australia will prepare a national compliance and enforcement policy. Safe Work Australia will also undertake research and collect, analyse and publish OH&S and workers compensation data.

This bill as presented follows on from the signing by all of the states and territories and the Commonwealth of the Inter-Governmental Agreement for Regulatory and Operational Reform in Occupational Health and Safety earlier this year. The intergovernmental agreement contains a process for the adoption of model OH&S laws by all Australian jurisdictions and will enable the development of effective, equitable and—just as importantly—uniform safety standards and protections for all Australians at work. Existing national standards and codes of practice developed by the Australian Safety and Compensation Council and its predecessor, the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission, will be preserved under the consequential and transitional provisions bill. Safe Work Australia will also have the power to declare national standards and codes of practice relating to OH&S matters until 1 January 2011. Over time, these standards and codes of practice will be replaced by model regulations and codes of practice approved by the Workplace Relations Ministers Council.

In April this year, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, the Hon. Julia Gillard, announced a national review into model OH&S laws. A three-person panel has been asked to review OH&S legislation in each state, territory and Commonwealth jurisdiction for the purpose of making recommendations on the optimal structure and content of a model OH&S act that is capable of being adopted in all jurisdictions. The review will examine the division of duties of care between employers and employees, including the identification of duty holders, along with the scope and limits of duties. This first stage of the review will also examine the nature and structure of safety offences, including defences to safety breaches. It will make recommendations to state and federal workplace relations ministers by 31 October.

A later report, due by 30 January 2009, will cover other areas. These will include scope and coverage, including definitions; workplace based consultation, participation and representation provisions, including the appointment, powers and functions of occupational health and safety representatives and OH&S committees; enforcement and compliance, including the role and powers of OH&S inspectors and the application of enforcement tools, including codes of practice; regulation-making powers and administrative processes, including mechanisms for improving cross-jurisdictional cooperation and dispute resolution; permits and licensing arrangements for those engaged in high-risk work and the use of certain plant and hazardous substances; and the role of OH&S regulatory agencies in providing education, advice and assistance to duty holders.

These reports will form the basis of the model workplace safety laws, which the Council of Australian Governments has agreed to produce within five years. When the reports are handed down, Safe Work Australia will be responsible for developing national policy relating to OH&S and workers compensation and preparing model OH&S legislation, model regulations and model codes of practice based on the findings and recommendations of the review reports.

Every year over 300 Australian workers are killed at work. The number who die from various occupational diseases has been estimated at 10 times that amount. Every year over 140,000 Australians are injured whilst at work. These figures, whilst appalling in human terms, also place a massive burden on Australia’s economy, estimated to be a cost of $34 billion per year. There is no excuse for ignoring the safety of workers in the workplace. There is nothing more important than a worker returning home, at the end of a working day or shift, in as good a shape as at the start of the day’s labour. And there certainly is no good reason why some workers should be afforded less protection at work just because they happen to work in a different state or territory than others. Each state and territory has different acts and regulations covering occupational health and safety. Some good acts and regulations and some not so good acts and regulations can be found in each jurisdiction. What might have been good practice 15 or 20 years ago is not necessarily up to date with that of other legislatures now.

It is very easy to forget that only 15 years ago the vast majority of the population had no access to, and in most cases had not even heard of, the internet, let alone used it as a means of information gathering or research outside of a university setting. Just being able to find a copy of another state’s act, regulation or code of practice took a great deal of time and money as various letters and heavy packages were sent across the country. Best-practice outcomes in one state could remain off the radar in other jurisdictions for years at a time due to the difficulty of accessing, especially on a work site, OH&S information for comparison. With internet access now available in most places, there is a much greater need for consistency in OH&S so that, when a solution is found for a problem in one jurisdiction, it can be analysed and, if relevant, applied elsewhere within a far shorter time frame than could previously have happened.

For many years I worked on site in the construction industry as an OH&S representative and at other times as a safety officer. Whichever side of the fence I happened to be working on, the task did not really change. On both sides it was about being proactive and keeping up to date with what was happening on other sites, not just in the city of Melbourne and in Victoria but in other states and across the world. There should never be any excuse for not undertaking a job safety analysis and risk assessment prior to work progressing. Shortcuts in safety do not mean that the job gets done more quickly; they mean that it gets done with a much greater risk of something going wrong. Education of both employers and employees is the key to good safety outcomes and it is vital that this area is never ignored. Far too many times I have seen the results on site when safety was ignored, usually at great physical cost to a worker or placing a worker under risk.

Having been an OH&S representative or an OH&S officer, I know that one very important aspect of the job is the collection and analysis of safety related data and statistics. The complexity of the job could be enormous at times. There were so many different approaches to OH&S solutions in Australia alone. Each state had its own approach and there were sometimes subtle or major differences between legislation, regulations and codes of practice. This has extended into areas of occupational licensing such that, even if a nationally recognised course is completed in one jurisdiction, it is not automatically recognised in another. As a licensed electrician by trade, I can speak from personal experience. Over the years I have held several different state licences to work as an electrician but all have been based on the same Victorian apprenticeship training and licensing exam dating back more than 20 years. Licensing is an essential public protection that ensures that electricians are appropriately trained and qualified. It is a longstanding and effective safety measure but has always been controlled by the separate state and territory authorities. In turn, each jurisdiction has developed its own special rules and requirements on top of the mandatory Standards Australia wiring rules. Mostly these differences were quite minor in nature, but a licence issued in one state would not be accepted in any other. Working around the country with three or more licences to perform the same job never made any sense. The equivalent would be having to hold another state’s driving licence every time you travel across the border.

The issue of recognition of interstate occupational trades licensing has been dealt with by COAG since the election of the Rudd Labor government last November. This is but one small example of how different jurisdictions can affect an individual worker. In each state and territory and under the Commonwealth, workers compensation systems are varied and provide different coverage and payments to injured workers and the dependants of those who tragically die or are injured whilst at work. And in recent years we have seen the former Howard government extend the Comcare system into private enterprise areas that the scheme was never designed for, such as mining, transport and construction. The Comcare scheme was primarily designed for white-collar jobs in the public sector, not blue-collar jobs in heavy industry. The OH&S compliance issues that arise from having competing schemes operating are still to be fully understood, but work site inspections, notices and prosecutions are much lower under Comcare than under the competing state schemes. As the member for Corio noted in his speech on this bill:

... if you were an employer in Victoria in that year—

2005-06—

you were 24 times more likely to be the subject of an inspection—

under WorkSafe Victoria—

than if you were an employer in the Commonwealth jurisdiction.

This figure does not indicate that work practices and safety outcomes improve just because an employer has managed to move from a state OH&S system into the federal Comcare system. It comes about because a woefully small number of inspectors are employed and work site inspections undertaken in comparison with WorkSafe Victoria. The Workplace Relations Ministers Council’s Comparative performance monitoring: seventh report: November 2005 found that Comcare undertook 245 ‘workplace interventions’—also known as site visits—compared to WorkSafe Victoria’s 43,719 site visits. In that period Comcare issued only 17 safety prohibition and improvement notices in Victoria whilst WorkSafe Victoria issued 12,492 notices. And in the report’s time frame, Comcare did not prosecute anyone in Victoria, whilst WorkSafe Victoria launched 110 prosecutions. The role of a workplace inspector for a safety authority is vital, but there must be a sufficient number of inspectors to cover the workforce and there must be an organisational will to be proactive where it counts—that is, on site.

Developing proposals to harmonise workers compensation arrangements across the Commonwealth, states and territories is an essential part of this bill. Just as important is the development of proposals for national workers compensation arrangements for employers with workers in more than one jurisdiction. Rather than forcing states and territories to toe the Howard line, as we have seen with the spectacular failure of Work Choices, where millions of workers were ripped off with wages and conditions with no recompense, the Rudd government is vitally aware of the impact that changes in the workplace can have on the lives of working people. Although Work Choices is still held dear to the hearts of all those opposite, without exception we see and hear day after day in this House the sheer arrogance and the out-of-touch views that in the Liberal Party also extend to working people’s safety on the job.

We do not need competing workers compensation and OH&S systems that provide different levels of safety and coverage. We need OH&S systems and workers compensation schemes that work proactively to reduce accidents and to improve safety outcomes, and this bill provides the framework for that outcome. I commend this bill to the House.

Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I, too, rise to speak in support of the Safe Work Australia Bill 2008 and the Safe Work Australia (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2008. In fact, I very much welcome the opportunity to speak about a matter which affects the wellbeing of almost 11 million working Australians. I begin by pointing out that the introduction of these bills is in fact quite timely; it comes just after the Seoul Declaration on Safety and Health at Work was agreed to on 29 June this year. The declaration comes after some 4,000 people, including industry leaders, policymakers and experts from over 100 countries, met in Seoul in the Republic of Korea from 29 June to 2 July for the 18th World Congress on Safety and Health at Work. I quote from parts of that declaration. I will not quote it all because it is too long, but I will quote in particular from the preamble, which says:

Recognizing the serious consequences of work-related accidents and diseases, which the International Labour Office estimates lead to 2.3 million fatalities per year world-wide and an economic loss of 4 percent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP),

Recognizing that improving safety and health at work has a positive impact on working conditions, productivity and economic and social development ...

That is in the preamble. The declaration itself, in part, goes on to say that governments should:

Ensure that the occupational safety and health of workers is protected through an adequate and appropriate system of enforcement of safety and health standards, including a strong and effective labour inspection system.

In part 5, where it refers to employers, it says:

Employers should ensure that

• Prevention is an integral part of their activities, as high safety and health standards at work go hand and hand with good business performance.
• It then goes on to say that employers should ensure:
• Affirming the workers’ right to a safe and healthy working environment, workers should be consulted on safety and health matters ...

Those are some of the comments made at an international meeting only two months ago where the importance of health and safety was debated and, interestingly, agreed to by people representing some 100 countries and a collection of 4,000 people, including government, industry organisations, labour organisations and so on. As I said earlier, I believe it is most appropriate that these bills are being debated in this House at this time.

The opportunity to have a meaningful job, earn an income and be self-reliant is probably the single most important objective for most Australians. Job creation underpins and drives much of our economic policy. One measure of success or failure of economic policy is unemployment rates or, conversely, employment numbers. There is no question that being employed is very important for the quality of life of a person and for the family members of that person; but, just as we go to great lengths to create jobs, we should likewise go to great lengths to ensure that those jobs are safe and that the workplaces where those jobs are created are safe workplaces—safe workplaces which ensure a worker’s safety both during the course of the work and in the years thereafter.

All too often the risks and injuries related to workplaces are not evident until many years later. That in turn makes claims for compensation or other forms of assistance extremely difficult and complicated. Only last Saturday week, whilst attending the 10th annual charter dinner of the Para districts sub-branch of the National Servicemen’s Association, I came across a typical example of a work injury which was only exposed several years after the person left the workplace where it appears the injury—or, in this case, the illness—was caused.

At that function I spoke to an acquaintance whom I had not seen for several years. He informed me that he had recently been diagnosed with asbestosis. Some years ago he had worked with asbestos products as a tradesman, and one can only conclude that the work had contributed to his now serious illness. Proving that many years later would be very difficult. Sadly, his case is similar to that of thousands of other Australians who over the years worked with asbestos products and in later years, sometimes years after their employer ceased to operate, were diagnosed with asbestosis—or mesothelioma, as it is medically known.

The plight of asbestos victims rose to national prominence in recent years as a result of the James Hardie case and the work of Bernie Banton and others associated with asbestos victims. My association with asbestos victims goes back some years. For several years I have been a patron of the Asbestos Victims Association of South Australia. I was able to assist them to establish in the city of Salisbury a memorial to the many asbestos victims who, in most cases, were victims of unsafe workplaces. I met Bernie Banton when he attended an annual memorial service for asbestos victims in Salisbury some three years ago. I also knew well Colin Arthur, the founder of the Asbestos Victims Association of South Australia. Like Bernie Banton, he too became a victim of asbestosis and a champion for sufferers of this terrible disease. Colin Arthur also lost his battle with asbestosis and passed away shortly before his friend and colleague Bernie Banton passed away.

What Colin Arthur and others were able to achieve, however, was to draw attention to the responsibilities and obligations of employers, particularly those in the asbestos industry, with respect to workplace safety. The work of Bernie Banton, Colin Arthur and others associated with asbestos disease is not over; it continues today. In South Australia, Terry Miller, who now heads the Asbestos Victims Association, and a small team of volunteers are continuing their fight for fair compensation for asbestos victims and for safety in the workplace—where asbestos products still exist—because asbestos products are still prevalent throughout communities. The handling of asbestos products poses a risk for workers, particularly workers in the building and demolition industries.

According to research carried out by Dr Mark Clements from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University, the peak in mesothelioma cases is likely to occur in about 10 years time. So we have not seen the worst of this deadly disease even though we stopped using asbestos products some years ago. What makes the issues associated with asbestos even more repugnant is the fact that asbestos producers knew 100 or more years ago that they were producing a deadly product. In fact, as far back as 1918 it was reported that life insurance companies refused to issue life insurance policies to people who worked in the asbestos industries. Yet companies like James Hardie and others knowingly put the lives of people at risk. That is unforgivable. They should have faced far more serious charges than they did.

I also want to raise the issue of workplace safety in the transport industry. It was interesting to hear many of the speakers debate the AusLink (National Land Transport) Amendment Bill 2008 only a few days ago. Many of them quite properly referred to the poor condition of many roads and to the risks faced by many drivers in the transport sector which often result in the death of drivers. What was not highlighted, however, in drawing attention to the risks and injuries caused in the transport sector is that these are not just road deaths but workplace injuries as well. When the issue of injuries or deaths resulting from transport accidents is raised, the fact that they are also workplace injuries is often overlooked or not considered. These are workplace injuries or deaths, and in no way should the safety obligations of the employers in the transport sector be transferred and the injuries dismissed as just road accidents. It is also the case that transport workers, more so than workers in many other industries, often work across state borders. They provide a good example of why we need national consistency in workplace laws and compensation laws, which is exactly what this bill aims to do.

Before being elected to this place I worked extensively with injured workers, assisting them with their physical rehabilitation so that they could return to work. Some of the injuries I saw were horrific. What I also noted was that the overwhelming number of people who suffered from workplace injuries were keen to return to work and resume a normal life. Just because they were on rehabilitation programs or being paid workers compensation did not mean they were rorting the system. They did not enjoy being out of work. Their self-esteem dropped, their standard of living declined and their general quality of life suffered not just because of the injury but just as much because they were unable to work and felt that they were dependent on others. What was just as demoralising for them was the stigma of being on compensation and the lack of compassion with which they were often treated by insurance companies, government officials, sometimes medical professionals and even some of their friends and colleagues.

Sadly, many of these people are never adequately compensated for the injuries they sustain because, out of frustration with the process they have to navigate and the length of time it often takes, they accept whatever is offered just so that they can try and resume a normal life. Just as disheartening for them is that, when they do want to re-enter the workforce, they may be discriminated against because of their history of having a work related injury. It is also of concern to me that those who are in the most unsafe workplaces and exposed to greater workplace risks are often young people, migrants and those who work in lower paid jobs. Those people are often not aware of their rights or they need the work too much to speak out, even when they know the workplace is unsafe.

The other matter I wish to raise in conjunction with this bill is the impact that the intensely competitive markets can have on workplace safety and the behaviour of employers. I note that the member for Deakin, in his address, made similar comments. I endorse the comments he made about the impact on workplace safety. In recent years I have noted a trend whereby employers, in order to remain competitive, are cutting costs to the point where employees are being placed at increased levels of risk. Employees are often asked to work longer hours or to do more work because of skill shortages or simply because it costs the employer less to pay employees overtime than to employ additional staff. The result is that, with tiredness, the risk of injuries rises. The truck drivers I referred to earlier are an obvious example of this, but they are certainly not the only group in this category. It happens in so many other workplaces in the manufacturing industry, where tiredness obviously increases the risk of machine operators getting hurt. Cutting back on staff or on maintenance has a similar effect.

I want to quote from a press release issued by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority on Monday, 1 September. It relates to Qantas. CASA’s operations officer, Mick Quinn, stated:

CASA has looked carefully at the Qantas maintenance systems and performance and uncovered signs of emerging problems.

The review found maintenance performance within Qantas is showing some adverse trends and is now below the airline’s own benchmarks.

By taking action now future safety problems will be avoided.

CASA was inquiring into some safety concerns in respect of the airline industry generally and into some incidents that had occurred. The comments in that media release highlight what is happening in industries across the board where, in order to save costs, maintenance regimes are not being implemented. Obviously, what then occurs is that safety standards deteriorate. In this case the emphasis is on the public who use the airlines. But what is not acknowledged in that media statement is that, apart from the passengers who are using those airlines, there are also the pilots and crew who are working for a living, and in their case it is an occupational, health and safety issue. Hopefully, this legislation will address many of those matters.

There is another safety matter that has been occurring in recent years which has often gone unrecognised. Because of cost cutting by the private sector in many service industries, we have seen an escalation in the number of office workers who are facing risks because their workplaces are unsafe as a result of the hostile clients of those companies. Recent media statements about that very matter have revealed that the safety of office workers is being put at risk because the service is deteriorating because staff simply cannot cope with the workload. Clients become upset, agitated and angry and take their frustrations out on the staff who are working in those offices. That is another occupational health and safety matter that has resulted from cost cutting.

The last matter that I wish to speak to is the introduction by the Howard government of its workplace laws and the impact that those laws have had on occupational health and safety. I commend the member for Dobell, who made some comments in respect of this matter. He highlighted some safety incidents and how safety standards are deteriorating as a result of the Howard government’s bill. Perhaps it was one of the unintended consequences but the fact is that health and safety has deteriorated as a result of the previous government’s workplace laws.

On that very matter I was contacted recently by workers in South Australia who were gravely concerned about unsafe work practices at their place of employment. These practices appear to have escalated since the rights of working Australians were eroded by the Howard government. There is no question that, in the case of the workers who approached me, the reason why workplace safety has deteriorated is the Howard government’s Work Choice laws and the prevention of safety officers from moving into those work areas and ensuring that workplace safety is up to the standards that we all would expect. There are many examples of where workers’ safety has been placed at risk and is still at risk. With the election of the Rudd Labor government not only are those laws being changed—and that in itself will make a lot of difference to the ability of workers to ensure that their workplaces are safe—but we now have this additional bill which takes the issue of workplace safety so much further. Since I was talking about cost cutting and the implications it has for workplace safety, I make this point as strongly as I possibly can: the safety of people at their workplace should never be jeopardised because of cost cutting by employers.

I want to make one point about the constant criticisms I have heard from members opposite that this new body will be ‘stacked’—to use their expression—by representatives of the state and federal governments. Given that the new body will be jointly funded by the Commonwealth and the states, it would seem to me quite reasonable to ensure that each state contributing funds has at least one representative on the new board. More importantly, members opposite are prejudging the competency and impartiality of the people who will be appointed to this board, without even knowing who those people will be. I am sure that those people will be appointed because of their merits and their understanding of safety in the workplace and for no other reason. There will be appointments that will serve not only the interests of their state but, I am sure, the interests of the 11 million workers in Australia when it comes to matters of health and safety.

I conclude on this note: when those members opposite criticise the states’ rights to appoint someone to this board, are they now also criticising the Western Australian government, which is no longer a Labor government, or are they saying that it is only the Labor governments which are incompetent when it comes to managing workplace safety laws? I suspect that, since the change of government, they will wholeheartedly welcome the appointment of a person to this body by the Western Australian government. Whoever that person may be, I am sure they will represent the best interests of the broader community. This bill goes to the heart of bringing consensus, uniformity and some fairness and safety into the workplaces of Australia’s 11 million workers. I commend the bill to the House.

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! It being 2 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 97. The debate may be resumed at a later hour.