Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the parliamentary secretary for clearing that up, because it means that there is a concurrent responsibility. The manager of the project clearly has a responsibility and will therefore have to incur the extra expense and time to ensure that they look at everything done by the subcontractor, who would actually have the control. We will have two different parties, one in management and one with the actual control. Let us say that you are a project developer and your first task is to dig the foundations. That has to be done in a safe manner. You get in a subcontractor to dig the foundations. The person doing the overall management of the project will therefore basically have to be there supervising the subcontractor, to ensure that they avoid liability under this legislation, in case the subcontractor digging the foundations, who actually has the physical control of the site, does something wrong. In those circumstances, they would have to be there and incur an extra cost. That was never the idea of harmonised legislation. The idea of harmonised legislation was to make it simpler and to increase the productivity of our workforces and our nation. This of course will clearly reduce productivity, because we will have to have supernumeraries double-checking each other to make sure that they escape liability. So this becomes a very bureaucratic and costly exercise.