Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, there you go. Does he want to be in Comcare? Does he want to be covered on his breaks, or not? It is a pretty important question. Some workers do not have a tea room. In my electorate, you see the workers for one company all sitting out on the footpath having a smoko and eating their lunch. These are the problems with the definition.

The other problem with the definitions is this idea that if someone has acted with wilful disregard or in a harmful way we can shunt them out of the scheme. It sounds good if you are on conservative talkback radio, or at the front bar. It sounds good if you just shoot your mouth off. But it is not actually that good, because what you are doing is moving away from a no-fault scheme to a scheme that does apply blame and fault. If you want that system, we will start having industrial manslaughter laws in this country, and we will start assigning blame not just to workers but to companies, to company directors and to managers who act in the same way—who act with wilful disregard for people's lives or for injuring people. That is what happens when you move away from a no-fault scheme, which is the basis of all of these health and safety schemes since they were first introduced in the United Kingdom in the 1970s. I forget the Lord who made the recommendations.

We know that this bill represents a vicious attack on workers. It is not a broken promise, because they just did not tell anybody they were going to do it. But it is, I think, symptomatic of what The Australian talks about: short-term tactical wins overcoming the basic narrative of the government. In this case, they try to tell us that they are for small government, they try to tell us that they want to make changes to our Federation, and then they walk into this parliament with a bill that centralises health and safety in this country without any cooperation or consideration or thinking or consultation with the states, with the unions, with companies or with anybody else. This is a bad idea. It is a bad bill. It is bad for workers, bad for the country, and bad for state governments.

See this speech in context