Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for School Education and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I table two ministerial statements relating to:

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

by leave, I move:

That the Senate take note of the document relating to death in the workplace.

Workplace safety is an issue that unites us in this place, as it ought. With all human activity, be it a day-to-day tasks of travelling, on recreational pursuits and in our daily work, we face issues of risk and issues of safety.

One of the underpinnings of our Judeo-Christian society is the ethic and the belief that every human life is valuable and that we owe a duty of care to each other. So we have laws to help protect us from ourselves and each other. Workplace safety is built on the same ethic and principles. Employers need to be careful. Workers need to be careful. We all need to be careful to minimise harm. That is something that I am sure all of us can agree upon.

Regrettably, in recent times the issue of workplace safety has become a political football in relation to certain matters and, without reflecting on a vote of the Senate that has just occurred, the very issue of the so-called safe rates bill being referred to a Senate committee for detailed consideration and to see whether payment of higher rates might result in safer roads is not to be explored. Certain senators, especially in the Green-Labor alliance, have made up their minds that these things should be steamrolled through without proper analysis.

These days, regrettably, we are getting a number of issues dressed up as safety issues when they are in fact a demand for extra power for a trade union where it is a manipulation of the genuine community concern about workplace safety for the purposes of gaining industrial power by other people, especially trade union bosses. We will be seeing that again in relation to the textile, clothing and footwear legislation and we saw it with the harmonised occupational health and safety legislation, which saw preference given to certain courses on workplace safety on the basis that it was skewed in favour of those that actually provided the education as opposed to the outcomes. So we had courses which had been recognised by the Commonwealth Public Service and Commonwealth agencies as providing excellent outcomes being struck out and not able to continue because they did not fit a certain paradigm—a paradigm which was specifically designed and manipulated to ensure the trade union funded courses would be the favoured approach.

Regrettably, the list goes on. We have had criticism of the Australian Building and Construction Commission because it did not place enough emphasis on the issue of safety. What people forget is that at the time of introducing the Australian Building and Construction Commission we also established the Office of the Safety Commissioner, whose responsibility was the pursuit of safety in relation to building and construction sites.

What we have seen time and time again is the emotional issue of workplace safety, and of course it is an emotional issue and of course we should be doing everything to protect workers from avoidable injury and avoidable deaths. We should be do everything we can but we are now witnessing an exploitation of that genuine motivation, of that genuine concern, to try to build trade union empires for certain union bosses.

I know that in this space in the chamber my colleague Senator Cash would like to comment on the other ministerial statement. I will not delay the Senate for too long in relation to this matter other than to make the point that workplace safety is a vital issue and to acknowledge that in the past trade unions have played an important role in appropriately advocating for the safety of their members in workplaces, and a lot of legislation that is in place today is as a result of the good work of members of trade unions.

We are now starting to traverse into areas where the issue of safety is being used to leverage other industrial outcomes, and I would repeat the safe rates assertion—which is not backed up by evidence—that somehow, if you pay truck drivers more, they will all of a sudden become safer. In fact in relation to deaths on the roads with truck drivers, the situation is that overwhelmingly the majority—and I forget the exact statistic—of deaths that involve trucks are not as a result of the truck driver or the truck but of the other vehicle involved. It is good to highlight to the community the number of deaths on our roads that involve trucks—that is fair enough—but we also need to deal with the statistics in an honest and proper manner and ascertain where the fault lies. If we are concerned about the carnage on our roads involving trucks and we look at the statistics, we inform and advise ourselves that the difficulty is not so much with the truck drivers and the trucks but usually it is the other vehicle and the other driver that is in fact at fault. The coalition welcomes discussion on workplace safety. The coalition does have a very proud record in pursuing workplace safety. But we as a coalition are also cognisant of the fact that there has been some manipulation of this emotional and very serious issue for the purposes of enhancing the power of certain trade union bosses. And we as a coalition believe that we need to have a sensible balance in all these debates.

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to take note of the ministerial statement on workplace safety but primarily to respond to some of the comments that Senator Abetz has just made. I acknowledge that from his point of view he was very generous in acknowledging the fantastic work that trade unions have done over many decades to improve the health and safety of their members. That is one of the fundamental things that underpins trade unionism. Most of those benefits have only been achieved through the active involvement of workers, acting collectively through their trade unions to make those significant gains. Those gains ought to be held onto and they ought to be treated with enormous respect, because it is absolutely essential that every worker in this country has the opportunity to go home from work every day. They have a right to go home from work every day, not to be injured or killed at work.

Senator Abetz raises the issue because he sees a 'Red' under every bed or a trade union boss, as he calls them, lurking around every corner. He talked about occupational health and safety training and a particular case which he has raised at estimates time and time again as if it is some conspiracy of the trade union movement. I want to just set the record straight here. The Occupational Health and Safety Commission have determined that the appropriate delivery mode for occupational health and safety training is face-to-face training. That is a decision they came to. Even though people may have delivered it by other means in the past, it has been determined not by the trade unions and not by the government but by the Occupational Health and Safety Commission that face-to-face training, where people can engage with the trainer and workshop a whole range of issues, is the most appropriate and effective way to deliver occupational health and safety training. That is a decision that they have come to. Senator Abetz disagrees with that, and that is fine. He is allowed to disagree with that, and he disagrees with it regularly in the estimates process. But he should not dress that up as a conspiracy theory or say that trade unions hiding around every corner are responsible for somehow grabbing power as a result of decisions that were made, quite rightly in my view, by the Occupational Health and Safety Commission.

The other thing that Senator Abetz alluded to was using health and safety for actual industrial benefit. Again, I reject that and I know the government rejects it too. He talked about pending safe rates legislation. Let me read into Hansard the foreword to the committee report. The committee chair, the member for Hinkler Paul Neville, who last time I looked does not sit on the government side in the other chamber, said this:

Some times these vehicles are driven and maintained by people who have worked long hours, often through the night, and have had inadequate rest breaks. The longer they have worked, the more they have worked at night and the less they have rested, the greater the risk of fatigue. The more fatigue, the greater the risk of an accident occurring.

In the absence of measures to mitigate this risk, a lethal continuum is created. We frequently hear of accidents and incidents on roads, on railways, at sea and in the air where human fatigue is cited as a contributing factor.

The consequences of such accidents can be catastrophic and enduring. Individuals and families can be traumatised, communities scarred, environments damaged and businesses destroyed.

He has also said that there had been:

... a series of inquiries going back 10 or 11 years now, one of which I chaired, where we felt that the limits had already at that time being pushed to the point where drivers were not receiving fair reward ... Just to say that you do not think there has been any evidence and that there has been a small decrease in the number of heavy vehicle road fatalities—I do not think that establishes anything.

Mr Neville is exactly right. When drivers are not rested properly they are on the roads driving huge vehicles that weigh massive amounts, that cannot brake on a sixpence and that do not manoeuvre well. They are driving things that can kill people and themselves. We want people on the roads who are rested properly, who have the proper rest breaks and who are not forced into a position where they have to cut corners to make ends meet. Those issues then go to the way people are rewarded. To say that that undermines the ability of people with the motivation to make our roads safe is a misrepresentation of what the legislation is about. I know we are not debating that legislation here but I thought Senator Abetz's comments should not go unchallenged.

These things have at their core the health and safety of the workforce. So I will conclude with the point I made earlier: every worker in this country has an absolute right to go home from work. They have an absolute right to go home safely. They have an absolute right to go home healthy. They have an absolute right to be able to go home, to be alive and not to be killed at work.

Question agreed to.