Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Financial Services and Superannuation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—Every Australian who goes to work should return home safely. And in parliament, our workplace—this meeting ground of the national conversation—we are commanded by the annual death toll of people at work to get real on safety.

The latest research for the year 2009-10, compiled by Safe Work Australia and released by the government yesterday, shows that 216 Australians died at work over those 12 months and that the total cost of work related injury, illness and disease can now be assessed at more than $60 billion. The human cost, the emotional cost, is immeasurable. So I do believe it is time—it is time this parliament recognised the failings in workplace safety in our nation. It is time that we listened to more of the stories. It is time to own the statistics and do more about them. It is time to talk of the injured and the dead and of the grieving that follows each death that was needless. It is time we increased our efforts to improve our places of work and make them safer than ever before.

Each holiday season we warn ourselves about the road toll. And so we should. Each approaching Easter brings warnings about safe driving. And so we should be vigilant on our roads this Easter. But when Australians return to work from their holidays this Easter, there is another toll—one that does not get the same attention, even though it is just as important—the toll of work related deaths, injuries and disease. Already in 2012, in just 75 days, at least 25 Australian workers have been killed at work and another 20 have died as a result of someone else's work. The official confirmation of this figure will be the confirmation of human heartbreak.

Only yesterday a 22-year-old man was killed in a workplace explosion. And the day before yesterday a 42-year-old man was crushed by a metal hopper which fell off a forklift. Each year, on average, up to 300 Australians are killed at work and it is estimated conservatively that more than 2,000 will die from industrial diseases caused by exposures at work. In a recent survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics over 640,000 people reported suffering a work related injury or illness in the previous 12 months.

The personal cost to families and friends is something we only begin to understand when sitting down and listening to the grieving survivors. I have witnessed the terrible consequences of workplace deaths and serious injury—the grief and guilt, anger and despair felt by workmates, colleagues and bosses. The death of a worker in a small business can spell the end of that business. The effect on families and friends is almost indescribable. The average age of workers who are killed at work in Australia is 37. Thirty-seven years old: the age of John Christian Watson when he became our Prime Minister—our first Labor Prime Minister—in 1904. Thirty-seven: the age that Einstein discovered his theory of relativity. Thirty-seven: one year older than Cate Blanchett when she won her first Oscar. Imagine what our nation has lost through the premature deaths of our fellow Australians. Most Australians who are killed at work traumatically are men. Most 37-year-old men that I know are married and have a couple of children; they have a mum and a dad, they have brothers and sisters, they have friends and neighbours.

I remember the Beaconsfield mine tragedy and rescue. The whole of Australia willed Brant Webb and Todd Russell to be brought out of that goldmine alive. We got to know them in those two weeks—their enormous courage, their resourcefulness, but most of all their amazing good spirit and humour in the face of their terrible plight, trapped 925 metres underground beneath hundreds of tonnes of rock. We all exulted with joy and relief when they emerged smiling and waving. I witnessed the joy and relief of their families. But one miner did not make it out of that mine alive: Larry Knight. I attended his funeral. I saw how Larry's family felt; I can imagine how they are still feeling.

Every year nearly 300 workers like Larry, Brant and Todd go to work in the transport yard, the mine, the factory, the farm, the dock, the construction site or the rig and, like Larry, do not come out again. And while these traumatic fatalities—which occur mostly to men—do receive some attention, it is also timely to ask how many women at work suffer for decades under extremely poor health and safety standards—from endemic stress, fatigue or deliberate and debilitating bullying. How many of our women in the workforce are ground down by blatantly poor health and safety conditions at work? It isn't acceptable, and modern Australia should declare it unacceptable.

Yesterday we released the report Work-related traumatic injury fatalities, Australia 2009-10. This is the latest research report on the number of workers, commuters and bystanders killed each year from work-related injuries. The report is sobering and sad. The transport and agriculture industries are the highest-risk industries for workers and bystanders. Over the seven years to 2009-10, there were 450 fatalities in the transport sector, of which 345 were in road freight. Truck-related fatalities across all industries account for one in every three reported deaths. In the seven years of reporting, 567 workers have died in truck-related incidents. In 2009-10, 79 workers died while commuting to and from work and 42 bystanders died as a result of someone else's work-related activity. In fact, a total of 356 bystanders have been killed since 2003. Agriculture, forestry and fishing is another sector with an unacceptable number of fatalities—423 deaths over the seven years to 2009-10. We should never forget farms are workplaces as well as family homes, and 310 workers have died on agricultural properties since 2003-04. Nearly one-third of agricultural workers who died were over the age of 65. This is three times more than older workers killed in other industries. Not surprisingly, construction had the third highest number of fatalities with 281 in the past seven years.

We also need to consider broader measures of injury, primarily because of the lack of any rigorous statistics on the number of Australians dying from diseases caused by exposure at work, such as heart disease, respiratory disease and cancer. The number of deaths from mesothelioma alone is over 550 a year and this number is still rising. This is a nasty legacy of Australia's heavy use of asbestos. We have to ask: could the true number of work-related fatalities be much higher? I, for one, believe Australia underestimates its work toll.

Earlier this week, I also released another report entitled The cost of work-related illness and injury for Australian employers, workers and the community: 2008-09. The report provides an update of the real costs of work-related injury and illness to the Australian economy based on a range of assumptions. The highest costs result from those injuries resulting in the total or partial permanent incapacity of the worker. Costs related to these injuries are borne mainly by the worker and the community. These types of injuries make up a small proportion of the total injuries and illnesses but account for a substantial proportion of the costs. The total cost estimate includes work-related incidents like loss of earnings, loss of human capital, medical and welfare costs, costs of training and staff turnover costs. I also note work-related incidents where no human costs were incurred—near misses, property damage and loss of goodwill. These are not currently included in the total cost estimate.

A key point I want to emphasise today is that deaths and injuries are preventable. They are not accidents. It is the basics that are still killing people in Australia, things that we have known about for 60 years and more—the lack of guarding or proper guarding on machines, the absence of lights and reverse beepers on mobile plant equipment, the unsecured ladders, the faulty or absent scaffolds, or the use of toxic chemicals where there are safer substitutes.

Another important step in safety is proper communication and cooperation. This needs to include parliament regularly reporting the tragic toll. Parliament needs to join in the work of employer organisations and trade unions. The Australian trade union movement has at its core the belief that workers should be safe at work. Unions have had many wins that improve safety. But I still believe the best form of communication is to actually make improvements in the workplace and in the work process. Real changes are the most powerful form of communications.

Workers need to feel that they can raise safety issues on a daily basis without fear, discrimination or ridicule. They need the confidence to speak up. They must feel that health and safety issues will be addressed by management and that their concerns will be taken seriously and dealt with promptly. Workers' voices and their inside knowledge are all too often an untapped health and safety resource for employers: the manufacturing worker saying, 'The machine is making a different noise to the one I have heard every other day I have come here', or the underground miner saying, 'At the start of my shift, this shaft of the mine was popping rocks with a different noise to the one it has made every other day'.

The vast majority of employers are diligent and conscientious and are horrified at the prospect of their workers being injured or worse. I know a workplace death is devastating to the employer, but we need to replace silence with cooperation. We need employers who listen, who not only take the time to communicate to their workers but also listen to their workers. We need a culture in businesses that openly respects the delivery of bad news at work and employers who act on the bad news and work with their staff to find solutions.

One woman who has experienced the tragedy of a workplace death in her family is Rohan Maheno. About 10 years ago Rohan's husband, Rex, was killed when he was run over by a concrete truck at a Queensland workplace. The impact this terrible incident had on Rohan and her family's life was immeasurable as they sought to come to terms with the effects of losing a husband, father and friend.

Knowing first-hand the consequences that losing someone in a workplace incident has on loved ones, Rohan wanted to share her personal tragedy with others, in the hope that they could learn from her story. Rohan has also worked in the construction industry for another company, Baulderstone, where her story is used in a health and safety program which places the emphasis on a 'workers learning from workers' approach and encourages an open communication between workers and managers on health and safety. Rohan visits Baulderstone worksites to spread her safety message and talk openly about her experiences. The messages 'That could have been me and my family,' and 'Working safely is about caring for your family,' are powerful motivators, highlighting the importance of workplace safety. Rohan's tireless efforts in helping her colleagues understand that incidents and injuries are preventable have won a number of awards.

Importantly, after the 'Rohan's Story' program was rolled out across the organisation in 2009 the reporting of incidents and near misses increased. Every company should know about its near misses but, unless reluctance to hear bad news is replaced by cooperation and open communication, it will be too late. Baulderstone has reported that there has been a significant shift in company culture and in fact fewer disagreements about health and safety when a work process is challenged.

There are a number of systemic problems that face many workplaces, including a poor understanding of due diligence—in other words, insufficient understanding of what managers need to know. There are a number of elements to due diligence: (1) knowledge of work health and safety matters; (2) understanding the nature of the operations of the business and the hazards and risks associated with those operations; (3) ensuring appropriate resources and processes are available to address health and safety issues; (4) dealing with information regarding incidents, hazards and risks and responding in a timely way to that information; (5) the processes for legal compliance; and (6) the need to verify the provision and use of these resources and processes.

The kinds of cultural change needed to address these kinds of systemic problems are enshrined in the model work health and safety legislation which has now been adopted by the Commonwealth, New South Wales, Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory. Under the model legislation, workers must be given a reasonable opportunity to express their views and to raise work health and safety issues. Workers must be consulted when hazards are identified and risks are assessed and when decisions are made about eliminating or minimising those risks. This is not a regulatory burden; it is common sense and it happens in good workplaces all over Australia today.

And we should not forget the next generation, our future. Each year, tens of thousands of young people start work for the first time. They have their whole lives in front of them. Eager and inexperienced, they need careful training, coaching and helping. Young workers face a higher risk of injury than more experienced workers. None of our future generation should lose their lives before they have really started. In parliament we should echo the labour movement call that 'an injury to one is an injury to all'.

I ask leave of the House to move a motion to enable the member for Farrer to speak for 15 minutes.

Leave granted.

I move:

That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the member for Farrer speaking in reply to the ministerial statement for a period not exceeding 15 minutes.

Question agreed to.

Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Childcare and Early Childhood Learning) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to respond on behalf of the coalition to the minister's statement. There is much that is contained in that statement that we would completely concur with. Every workplace fatality is a true tragedy. Every death in the workplace is a shocking, needless and awful waste of life. Too often it is a young life cut short. We as members and senators in the parliament of Australia should be informed of these incidents, fatalities and tragedies. And we should be obliged to consider what policy responses we might make in the face of the findings of investigative bodies.

I agree with the suggestion from the minister that parliament receive regular reports. The reports that he mentioned and that he has released should be on the reading list of members of parliament. It is just so important, with the subject matter we are dealing with, which is death in the workplace, that we do not get political and that we do not score political points. However, I do need to draw the attention of members to what I believe are some of the flaws underpinning some of what the minister said when he talked about moving towards a safer culture in the workplace.

Underpinning much of what he said are the model OH&S laws which recently passed through the federal parliament. In listening to the minister discuss the workplace, he certainly did paint a picture of what I might call traditional workplaces—farms, factories, shops and mines—where there is an employer and an employee, a boss and a worker. A reasonable listener would think that of course we should have measures to keep rogue employers in check and measures that protect vulnerable workers who might not have received proper training and who might be placed under stressful situations and be pressured to work in unsafe situations, work excessive hours or work with poor equipment and feel unable to speak up. Of course we in Australia should be able to say that we have one of the safest workplaces, generally, in the world. And, yes, a reasonable person would certainly nod their head and say that these things should be taken care of. We do want to have the best workplace safety and we want to be continually improving our workplace safety; that is a good thing. But the reality of the model work health and safety legislation—which the minister mentioned in his speech, talking about its relevance to the subject matter—is actually quite different. For a start, Victoria and WA are out. They have decided it is not for them. The Victorians have said that their system is quite good and that if everybody would like to adopt it then that is fine. South Australia is on hold and Tasmania is delayed.

With the legislation as it stands—and obviously it has not been adopted by every state—there are new obligations that managers are coming to terms with. These include extensive consultations with workers and the election of new health and safety representatives from the shop floor. No-one is saying that the new laws are bad in principle, but their application, which members on this side spoke about in great detail when they went through this parliament, is quite badly flawed. Instead of being how the minister has presented it, in relation to an employer and an employee or worker, in the OH&S laws the employer is a PCBU—a person conducting a business or undertaking. That is so that other people will be picked up by the legislation. That particularly includes independent contractors or people who may just be doing a once-only job for somebody, as well as volunteers.

The volunteer issue created a great deal of angst, because we could see that it was going to sound the death knell for some of our really good volunteer organisations. The United Church pointed to a small group of women baking Christmas puddings to raise funds for good work. They would be PCBUs under the OH&S laws, as would Meals on Wheels. Scouts Australia has expressed alarm that their employees, so to speak, have gone from 40 to 700 workers under the new OH&S legislation.

The PCBU is a totally new legal concept. It will require 15 years of judicial testing. Prosecutions under these OH&S laws are criminal in nature. The right to silence is waived. Quite honestly, I think these laws have created a monster. And I think it is important to mention them in the context of this debate, because confrontational workplaces do not generate a good safety culture. The minister's approach and the allowing of the union representation to the extent that it is now being ramped up in workplaces is going to generate some further confrontation. But confrontation does not make for a good safety culture. Confrontational unions do not make for happy workplaces. With a background in aviation I can say that there are safety management systems—there is actually a body of work that talks about safety culture. That has nothing to do with the union movement but is about changing the culture in the workplace. Much could be drawn from this to help us in applying the safety management systems that work well in flying organisations to a lot of other businesses in our community.

I would just caution the minister: please do not tie the very sensitive and very emotional issue of deaths in our workplaces to differences on both sides of the chamber. Nobody would disagree, as I said, with a substantial amount of what the minister said; it all makes perfect sense. I, as members know, am a representative of a rural and regional seat, and I know all too well the types of workplace accidents that happen on farms and in small businesses. They happen when people, particularly the owners of those businesses, are under stress. Often the people who suffer the accidents are members of the family, so it is not an issue between employer and employee as such.

So I am only too aware that the agricultural, forestry and fishing industries are over-represented in the tragic statistics of workplace fatalities. As a mother of an electrical apprentice at the time, I was most concerned when he was just starting his apprenticeship that whoever was looking after him did the job properly and that I did not hear that he had been electrocuted in a roof. I wanted to know that the fact that he might not know everything he was supposed to know would not count against him. As I have said this in this place before, I have been a member of three unions; it is not about being anti-union. I recognise the role unions have played in our history in generating safe workplaces. The shearing industry is a good example. That was a very unsafe workplace at the turn of the century and the unions contributed greatly to making it a safer place for people who worked very long hours doing manual labour in very stressful conditions. But these are the arguments of the past. I believe that the union movement today is trying to insert itself too much into the negotiations between employers and employees. I believe this government is using its occupational health and safety legislation as a platform for union interference.

Earlier I mentioned the importance of training. Training is absolutely vital. It is one of the ingredients in making a safe workplace. The Prime Minister claimed that her occupational health and safety harmonisation was a proud achievement. We pointed out at the time that it actually had not happened at all, and it still has not happened, with not all the states signing up to it. But union fingerprints were all over that legislation at the time. I did speak about the concerns we had around training when that legislation went through the federal parliament. To my mind, the more people who have access to training the better. In 2010 the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Commission introduced restrictive changes, resulting in a reduction in accredited courses of training of 26 per cent. These new guidelines apparently stemmed from health and safety representatives who, given the power that many hold in the workplace, may well have a vested interest in restricting access. So there you have a bill designed for safety that gives power to representatives in the workplace who have a vested interest in training bodies and that restricts and therefore reduces the availability of high-quality training. I cannot leave this debate without touching on the construction industry. The Royal Commission into the Building and Construction Industry created the Office of the Australian Building and Construction Commission. It goes without saying that the coalition believed having a firm cop on the beat undertaking compliance visits helped support a safe workplace and reduced workplace injuries and fatalities. Again, this is a body that the Gillard government is desperate to abolish. Examples of the threats that may confront this industry once more, when we remove the ABCC, were given to the Cole royal commission and they are all on the record.

I would like to conclude by saying I support the bringing to parliament of the reports and investigations into workplace fatalities. We in the coalition wholeheartedly agree, because every death in the workplace is a real tragedy, that if we can do something about it in terms of policy responses then we should. We make that commitment in good faith. However, we also need to point out to the government that the underpinnings of their occupational health and safety harmonised laws are not generating a good safety culture in the workplace. The ability of unions to be involved to the extent that they are is not about safety at all. We stand ready to make Australian workplaces safer places and to protect every worker from accidents and harm.