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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My journey to this House was through a pathway of activism, and it was actually the pandemic that turned me into a medical activist due to the egregious breaches of work health and safety that I witnessed in hospitals in the early days of the pandemic. These were due to insufficient respiratory protection and PPE. From being an activist, I've now taken a career change, you could say, and I'm now in this House in order to drive change. So it gives me great pleasure today to speak in support of the Work Health and Safety Amendment Bill 2022, which makes amendments to the Work Health and Safety Act.

However, I'm not going to be speaking about COVID or a respiratory virus. I am going to be speaking about another respiratory condition which is affecting hundreds of thousands of Australians. It relates to engineered stone. Like millions of Australians, I chose the gleaming stone benchtop in my kitchen because it was hard-wearing and aesthetically pleasing and did not need the maintenance of marble. Many years later, it continues to withstand the pressures of a busy household where children have grown up into teenagers. What I did not know when I made this purchase was that it harbours a dirty little secret: engineered stone is killing workers in the stonemason industry, who are developing an irreversible fibrotic condition called silicosis. It has given engineered stone the moniker of being the asbestos of the 2020s.

Engineered stone is a man-made composite of different materials held together by polymer resin. Unlike natural stone, engineered stone contains a far higher content of crystalline silica at over 90 per cent compared with granite, which has 30 per cent, and marble, which has just 13 per cent. The cutting process makes silica airborne. It is then inhaled by workers and even bystanders who may not be directly involved in the cutting process.

One tragic case I met was that of a young mother, Sally, who had developed silicosis while working as a receptionist at a stonemasonry. She looked the picture of health from the outside—in fact, she looked glowing—but she experienced breathlessness when walking distances that should not affect a woman in her 30s. Apart from exertional breathlessness, she was weighed down by anxiety about her children's future, crushing uncertainty and mounting medical bills on a single household income. Sally was brought to my attention by a delegation from the ACTU and a colleague and friend, Dr Kate Cole, the President of the Australian Institute of Occupational Hygienists and a tireless campaigner for better worker protections, who collectively are demanding an outright ban on artificial stone.

Silicosis is no joke. When lung transplantation is the only option, then every lever must be pulled to prevent this disease because lung transplantation is no joke either. I worked for 13 years at the Alfred Hospital, Australia's leading lung transplant centre. There I worked closely with the first-class lung transplant multidisciplinary team where I helped manage one of the dual threats to patients with lung transplantation—infection. The other, of course, is rejection, and it usually catches up with patients provided that infection doesn't get them first.

Lung transplantation is a scarce intervention that is rationed, and, although it does not confer a normal life expectancy, it is lifesaving for those lucky few who are eligible for it. But it is no picnic. It's one of the most gruelling procedures to go through and requires a lifetime of constant medical monitoring.

Wet cutting of stone is not universal. Neither is good ventilation, nor well-fitting masks, called respirators, for workers—the same ones that I used to wear on the wards. Awareness of silicosis is poor. If knowledge is power, then these workers are disempowered. Poor working conditions are rife, overseen by unscrupulous operators who force workers to dry cut the stone.

Queensland was the first state to ban dry cutting of engineered stone in 2018. Victoria followed in 2019 and New South Wales in 2020. But, by then, the damage was done. Surveillance studies from 2021 in Queensland and Victoria have found that nearly one in five workers in the industry have developed silicosis, and they are in the prime of their lives—diagnosed at an average age of 41 years. Some are developing it as little as three years after exposure.

It is important to note that silica is ubiquitous; it is all throughout the earth's crust. Hence, workers in mines and quarries are also at risk. I know something about airborne threats. As I said, I fought for better respiratory protection for healthcare workers when COVID hit, and we were heard.

What is facing stonemasons is a pandemic of neglect. Our insatiable appetite for engineered stone has led to short cuts in working conditions in the quest to meet demand and profit. At least 600 stonemasons and workers in other trades like the tunnelling industry have been diagnosed with silicosis since 2018, of whom 175 are in Victoria. However, this is the tip of an iceberg, with Curtin University estimating that are at least 103,000 people with silicosis. It is a hidden, human tragedy. Some of these workers will be unaware of their diagnosis, but all will eventually develop symptoms—all of them.

Campaigners are demanding a ban on engineered stone, more stringent work health and safety laws and better enforcement with adequate staffing of compliance work. For example, the New South Wales government reported that there were 60 inspections of manufactured stone businesses in 2022, but with at least 250 facilities there is a really long time—a big gap—between these inspections for what are high-risk sites.

Given the scale of the problem, the challenges of compliance and its devastating health effects, which are much like getting a terminal diagnosis, campaigners believe that engineered stone should be banned, and so do I.

We have heeded the call, and this legislation is part of our overarching agenda to improve the wellbeing of workers. The Work Health and Safety Amendment Bill implements some of the 34 recommendations from the Boland review in 2018 by Marie Boland, a former executive director of SafeWork SA. It languished under the former government, but we have dusted it off and are starting the work of implementation to make Australian workplaces safer. This bill lowers the bar for conviction of shonky operators. It includes negligence as a threshold, which means that both reckless and grossly negligent employers who expose workers to serious risks will face penalties.

The bill prevents a person who is required to pay a penalty under the law from recovering that penalty under insurance. For example, a Victorian company in 2022 was fined $31,000 for failing to provide proper controls to reduce exposure to silica dust, a cost that could have been recovered from an insurance claim. We want to ensure that a serious work health and safety incident does not get reduced to the cost of doing business. A person's life, no matter the person's age but especially in the prime of their lives, is not a line item on a budget balance sheet. Prohibiting such insurance claims will help to concentrate the minds of businesses on taking their work health and safety obligations seriously. The bill also allows easier sharing of information with Safe Work Australia to maintain important datasets on traumatic injury and compensation claims, which will inform better policy made here. In 2021, 169 people lost their lives at work—169 lives too many. It is hoped that the future introduction of industrial manslaughter legislation will help to bolster the deterrent effect of this amendment.

Finally, being safe at work means physical safety as well as psychological safety, and that boils down to workplace culture. A workplace with a consultative non-combative culture is also a much safer one. Workers and managers need not to be in opposition but to be figuring out solutions together. An asymmetric power dynamic means that workers are automatically at a disadvantage, which is why we have work health and safety laws in the first place. These laws mandate consultation. They also ensure that people in the hot zone who have skin in the game, much as I did when I was on the wards, are empowered to speak up on matters relating to work health and safety. Had I known then what I know now, I would have stuck with steel or wood or some other safer alternative, like natural stone. Strengthening work health and safety laws is one side of the equation, with consumer activism the other.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank all members for their contributions to the debate on the Work Health and Safety Amendment Bill 2022. I particularly thank the member for Higgins for her comments that go to silicosis. I want to assure the member and assure the House that there are various actions that will be taken by the government this year with respect to making sure that we provide protections that should have been provided some time ago. I've called a meeting of my state counterparts to start planning the various actions that we'll take this year.

The bill in front of us implements some important recommendations from the review of the model work health and safety laws conducted by Marie Boland in 2018. I welcome the opposition's support for this bill. When the shadow minister spoke, he made reference to this all being the coalition's idea and the work started under them. It is true that in 2018 they made sure that the Boland review took place. The recommendations then sat there. I'm pleased that they want to take credit for the idea—that's fine. We'll all take credit for finally acting on it because we are some years later than we needed to be on implementing the Boland review. Safe Work Australia undertook extensive consultation seeking feedback on implementing key recommendations of the Boland review. In June 2022 the model work health and safety law was revised in line with this process.

This bill will bring the Commonwealth Work Health and Safety Act 2011 into line with those updates. There are two changes in particular I draw the chamber's attention to. The first area is the bill amends the fault element for the most serious work health and safety offences to include gross negligence, or negligence to the criminal standard, in addition to recklessness. The Boland review found there had been very few successful prosecutions, in part due to the difficulties associated with proving recklessness. The government is acting on genuine community concerns that employers who put their workers at risk of danger through grossly negligent conduct can escape punishment because the bar for conviction is set too high. Now, both recklessness and grossly negligent employers who expose workers to serious risk can face the most serious consequences and penalties.

The second area I would highlight is prohibiting insurance for work health and safety penalties. The bill prohibits a person from taking insurance to cover repayments made on penalties imposed under work health and safety laws. Having insurance means that you effectively end up with a situation where the penalty is no longer necessarily a disincentive for the employer. The penalty is removed because it's something that's been insured against anyway. We need to make sure that the penalties that are there have an impact on behaviour. Work health and safety offences must remain serious deterrents and can't become the cost of doing business. Those who owe a work health and safety duty should not be able to insulate themselves from the consequences of breaching their duty by putting the safety of their workers and the public at risk.

The government's committed to working closely with the states and territories to deliver safe workplaces for all Australians. This starts with implementing the recommendations in the Boland report. The bill takes the first step towards achieving safer and healthier workplaces in the Commonwealth jurisdiction. There's still a lot left to do. Australian workers deserve to be able to go to work and come home safely to their loved ones, and I commend the bill to the House.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Ordered that this bill be reported to the House without amendment.